Eurocommunism emerged as a political trend amongst Western Communist Parties in the mid-1970s. The Eurocommunists severed ties with the monolithic USSR, and argued that the specific conditions of Western Europe called for an overhaul of communist political orthodoxy. Instead of a revolutionary confrontation with the capitalist state, workers and their parties could walk a gradual, peaceful road to socialism through democratic parliaments. While many on the left saw the movement as a radical break with the ossified Stalinism of international communism, in reality it was in line with the political practice these parties had been carrying out for decades. Rather than a sharp turn to the left, the new theory was a rehashing of the reformist arguments that had divided the Second International sixty years earlier.