ABSTRACT: The creation of a transnational political dimension is required by the need to fill the European void, i.e. Community Europe's inability to influence the major issues that concern our planet.

(Notizie Radicali n. 302 of 31 December 1987)

I believe that many of the things I would like to say have already been appropriately expressed by the persons who preceded me. Therefore I would simply like to express a few considerations on the above mentioned issue of the opposition between what is local and what is global, between the reality of our surrounding environment (in a strict, almost physical sense) and larger and more articulated structures.

I believe the proposal contained in the document you have received (by L. Strik Lievers) and the very topic of our meeting seize upon a precise opportunity and fall at a particularly significant moment, a few days before the "summit" between the United States and the Soviet Union. Others before me have quite aptly seized the good opportunity to recall the position of the "European void" between the strategies of world management (both those of the United States and of the Soviet Union). A void that, almost by virtue of a physical law, risks being incorporated into one or the other structure. Augusto Del Noce recently denounced this in an article in an extremely courageous way, even though I do not share his conceptual framework. Others (for instance, Gilas, in a speech) have instead highlighted the degree of ambiguity which still exists even in these first groups of international agreements, especially when one of the two powers in the field plays on a double role: on the one hand as representatives of the w

orkers' movement (and therefore as the bearer of the values of the workers' movement) and on the other hand as protagonists of an imperialist policy of great power (which has certainly not subsided after Mikhail Gorbachev took office); it is a policy which these reorganization attempts have not done away with, because these attempts have always lacked the respect of political democracy.

I believe it is important to stress this point especially in a world that is gradually discovering (or acquiring) what I call "the experience of the non-linearity of growth"; in other words, the fact that many of the social, economic and scientific processes we deal with are non-linear processes; I mean to say processes in which small initial changes can have vast and uncontrollable consequences and, vice versa, certain mechanisms of intervention can, owing to small fluctuations, prove totally inadequate and therefore useless. Recently we have had several tangible examples of the meaning of the non-linearity of growth, the limits of the so-called "progress" and the negative effects of technological innovation. I am not just referring to Chernobyl, which was, obviously, a very evident example of this. Precisely these problems - the non-linearity of development, the difficulty of making rational forecasts, and the risks of the effective action itself (i.e,. the dangers inherent in the very success of an advanc

ed technology) have been authoritatively summarized by Karol Wojtyla, for example, in a speech delivered on March 1987, twenty years after the "Populorum Progressio", and therefore twenty years after a document that expressed, albeit in a completely different manner, a different conceptualization of modernity, of its mechanisms and interior and exterior conflicts. Interior and exterior conflicts because, if on the one hand all we need to do is look at the scientific enterprise and its strictly technological aspect (therefore the technical and social innovation) to realize the complexity of the processes - and in this sense complexity means uncontrollable processes because of their non-linear characteristics and their negative consequences - on the other hand there is the other axis which Manconi recalled above, the North-South axis. Today we are witnessing a series of reactions against modernization which are the reactions of vast majorities or of entire populations, and which create what was once referred

to - with an expression that is now obsolete - as very serious contradictions. I would talk instead about tensions that channel themselves according to lines of separation that open up processes that are once again hard to keep under control. I will make an example: the attempt to acquire the technologies of the West without acquiring that type of values that have interacted with the technological growth of the West. Often this attitude assumes the form - as in recent cases - of the purchase of war technology (the case of the war between Iran and Iraq is an eloquent example of this).

There are other cases of this kind which should make us reflect that the democracies of the West are, to some extent, an island in conflict, as I said above, or in tension, and where large majorities of people are excluded from the processes of modernization and from that very revision of modernization which sociology now labels with the term post-modernism or post-industrialism. Without taking into account the fact that, apart from the majorities of persons that are kept outside of these processes, there are also several minorities in the European countries themselves, in the highly industrialized countries; we realize - and here we have to contradict certain sociological, philosophical or philosophical-political interpretative patterns, i.e, the patterns of Weber or Marx - that elements of ethnic or linguistic fracture, for instance, of recovery of traditions, of reference to religious or other types of scenarios, generate, so to say, the effect of amplifying those minorities that have been sacrificed to t

he process of modernization. Strik Lievers mentioned above the case of these European national states (which it would be more appropriate to call "regional", if anything considering vaster aggregations and experiences such as, in some respects, the Soviet Union and the United States) that the formation of these "regional" and strongly centralized States has involved forms of marginalization which today resurface often in tragic forms: it's no use crying over the victims of the Irish liberation army or on the victims of the Eta or of other movements that use armed struggle or political violence to affirm their rights if we forget what the creation of these modern states meant for various populations and various minorities, and of which the European political thought was so proud of only decades ago. Everyone of use is imbued with the concept that the State is one of the highest moments of ethics.

We have to do with processes, which I called non-linear, that range from local conflicts, which can nonetheless have devastating consequences on the long term also on systems that are prevalently democratic systems, to the complexity of the challenges for the European countries that come from other countries (Manconi above recalled the tension between North and South as a significant element) and that should lead us to reflect on the fact that the ambition of treating men as bearers of values, and therefore of respecting other people as the bearers of values (if we want to continue the Kantian tradition Maffettone mentioned above) or trying to translate the indications of a public ethic into moves of institutional engineering - to be more concrete - it would be extremely difficult today to detach them from these interactions between local and global which I mentioned above. We could think of the problems I mentioned here, such as that of representation (or of the citizenships), that of solidarity (which was

one of the Radical party's most acutely felt problems, especially in its campaign against world hunger) or all the problems related to the environment and its conservation. If a problem pertaining, for instance, to the electoral reform can hardly be handled without addressing other European institutions, the same can be said in other terms for many problems of solidarity which bear upon material problems (for instance, what does an optimal taxation or a fair taxation mean?) or relative to the conservation and safeguard of the environment. Problems of this kind cannot be handled in a less than European environment, and even for futile considerations: if a nuclear power plant is built in France, for instance, and if the information on the power plants is managed in a different way by the French state and by the Italian state (if anything because in French politics the civil use of nuclear power is much less detached from the development of military technologies than it is in our country) it is fairly obvious t

hat we would in any case be involved by the fact because it is a well-known fact that atoms have a very faint notion of borders, and thus tend to migrate with a certain speed from one border to the other.

This is to say that the themes of control that have emerged in this first roundtable are themes that are necessarily transnational, precisely because of the inadequacy of remaining intellectually attached to one's borders, in a world in which technology and science are, by now, by definition constructions in which the multinational aspect, in its good and negative aspects, is more and more evident.

I would like to add a last considerations which refers to some of the things Strik Lievers said at the beginning on presenting the document. One first point (which I found extremely close to the same personal motivations that led me to join the radical party when it staged its campaign) is precisely the attention for the violation of the rights of of the individuals or of the groups or of the traditions which the Radical Party has always kept alive in its recent history in particular, and which I consider a very important element. Strik Livers said that there is not only totalitarianism or the countries with a prevalent or clear totalitarian structure. A long tradition of thought (from the Catholic Pascal to the American Jew Michael Walzer) proved that tyranny is far more widespread that totalitarian structures are strictly speaking, since it manifests itself each time an individual, a group or a tradition occupies positions that do not belong to them in a given field of activity, of assets, of resources, ex

ploiting its (legitimate) ability in another field. If this definition of tyranny is correct, is is fairly easy to recognize that party power in Italy is a specific and extremely suffocating form of tyranny. We can see this in the field of information, in the field of education in schools and in our daily lives. I believe that the proposal - or at any rate the spirit underlying the proposal of that document - of linking the safeguard of the individuals, of the traditions and of the respect of their diversity, with a greater flexibility of transnational (or at least European) structures is a very important element. It would be, in my opinion, also and precisely in the attempt of building defensive structures against the too many forms of tyranny we mentioned above. With a last and further advantage; the one of starting to fill - or at least making an effort to fill - the European void we mentioned above: if we fear that Europe is declining, in the epoch of the major systems, we should bear in mind that this i

s, above all, the responsibility of the Europeans themselves, who are asked, first of all, to revise their conceptual frameworks and their way of conceptualizing their role in the challenges which society is required to face today. One of these challenges has been touched upon by Maffettone when he talked about the opposition between interior juridical regulations of a national structure and the so-called international anarchy. Another challenge of no less importance is precisely that of our multifarious attitude vis-à-vis the "invasiveness" of the scientific field in many of our daily behaviours, and of the unexpected and harmful consequences of technological innovation itself, where the greatest difficulty seems to be precisely managing to dispose not of a solution or forecast (because we can be undecided between optimistic and pessimistic forecasts: think that we are heading towards the depletion of the resources, as the Club di Roma maintains, or, instead, return to forms of neo-optimism) but the real pr

oblem is that of succeeding in moving according to flexible strategies in which the relinquishment of every hypothesis allows to recover the investments made, taking into account the non-linear difficulties. Many other of these challenges should be kept in mind and, no doubt, part of these challenges are a type of ethics, not just vis-à-vis other human beings, but human beings in general; we should look with less respect and with less of an attitude of a sceptic and disenchanted population towards those tendencies which in other traditions and other countries are focusing the attention on the rights of the environment, of the vegetable forms of life, of the animals, i.e. on that which John Passmore calls our responsibility vis-à-vis nature.

Allow me to conclude (and it is not a provocation) by quoting a sentence regarding a great personality (and it is not a controversy against pacifism). Asked why Oliver Cromwell had always been victorious, the poet John Milton answered that Cromwell scored his first victory on himself. I think the first victory the Europeans should score is precisely on themselves, to increase their responsibilities and their capacity of self-control.