One of my liberal friends delights in saying to me, "Communism has never failed - It hasn't been tried yet." He maintains that the whole world must be communist for the experiment to be properly conducted.
We must have One World Government - in which everyone is coddled cradle to grave - for communism to work. Europeans have to figure this out for themselves, I guess.
That kind of makes sense in its own perverted way. The communist ideal is a world where everyone has equal wealth--and if the whole world were communist, then everyone would indeed be equally poor.
As long as there are naughty capitalist countries like America--or as long as there exists even one tiny bastion of freedom anywhere in the world--the communist dream has not true, as there exists a nation that is wealthier than the rest of the world. But if the whole world is equal in its misery, then the Communists can be happy.