Trend among European communist parties toward independence from Soviet Communist Party doctrine in the 1970s and '80s.
The term, coined in the mid-1970s, received wide publicity after the publication of Santiago Carrillo's Eurocommunism and the State (1977). The Eurocommunist movement rejected the Soviet doctrine of one monolithic world communist movement and advocated instead that each country's communist party base its policies on the traditions and needs of its own country. With Mikhail Gorbachev 's encouragement, all communist parties took independent courses in the late 1980s. Most of the European communist parties declined after the breakup of the Soviet Union.