Introduction

The nineties opened with a near-universal declaration of death of the Western European radical left. Scholars took note of the fall of the Soviet bloc and of the collapse of Western communist parties, declaring the experience of twentiethcentury communism concluded (Bell 1993; Bull and Heywood 1994; Wilson 1993). Formerly a living political tradition, the radical left suddenly became a merely historical object (Agosti 1999; Dreyfus et al. 2004; Kowalski 2006) or a somewhat anachronistic vestige of the past, squeezed between decline and adaptation (Botella and Ramiro 2003; Moreau et al. 1998).