A relationship with the socialist countries-with revolutions "elsewhere"- has been part of the history of the European left, which has not had its revolution, for fifty years. A relationship composed of hopes and disappointments, alliances and recantations, inspiring utopias and depressing realisms. Almost always subordinate, it has become one aspect of the defeat of the left in the "developed capitalist countries". And as a love-hate, hope-disillusion relationship is always in some sense ridiculous and always turns into weakness, the European left has tried more than once to free itself of it by rejecting it as a problem: whatever the nature and the destiny of the "other" revolutions, they have nothing to do with me, mine will be "quite different". But this is no more than an exorcism. The "other" revolutions exist. They define the world in which we live. They define us, whether we like it or not. They cannot be avoided
