ABSTRACT: An essay on the nature and historical roots of the new Radicalism and a debate on the Radical problem with contributions from: Contributions by Gianni Baget-Bozzo, Giorgio Galli; Francesco Ciafaloni; Domenico Tarizzo; Ernesto Galli della Loggia; Brice Lalonde; Ugoberto Alfassio Grimaldi; Giuseppe Are; Alberto Asor Rosa; Silverio Corvisieri; Ruggero Orfei; Sergio Cotta; Federico Stame; Paolo Ungari; Giuliano Amato; Fabio Mussi; Giulio Savelli

(SAVELLI Publishers, October 1978)

Introduction (1375)

PART ONE

I. Politics and Society

II. The Accusations Against the Radicals (1377)

III. The Radicals As A Two-Front Party (1378)

IV. Radicalism And Socialism (1379)

V. Radicalism Or Marxism, Co-existence Or Techno-Fascism (1380)

PART TWO

A Debate On The Radical Problem (1381 - 1397)

But Are The Radicals A Political Party?

By Paolo Ungari

("Argomenti radicali", no.7, April-May, 1978)

When I was a guest contributor to the pages of this publication's predecessor "La prova radicale" five years ago in spring, I indicated my reservations to the PR's campaigns which were questions of taste and the goals of their strategies. At the time the PR still had no representatives in Parliament and, on the contrary, had just participated in an abstention campaign against the preceding "fraudulent elections" (as they called them). That doesn't mean that I didn't take part in the public battle for divorce when so many of my fellow party members so wisely abstained, right from the start, just as I did and do support the right of the Radicals to obtain referendums legitimately requested (the ones, be it understood, that are constitutionally admissible). And I had the gratification of seeing the court confirm the points in this regard that I had worked out in the study conference held by the PR's Chamber of Deputies group for this purpose.

Today we have Radical deputies, and among jurists and democrats there exists a favourable attitude to certain aspects of their defense of the parliamentary regulations, as well as to their general criticism of the immediate conformist effects and authoritarian implications in the medium term of the historic compromise (1). This is the source of the audience and the attention, as well as a kind of ratification in the political system that Pannella-Radicalism has achieved. In fact, majorities of more than 90% are constituted with the duration of strong social tensions and oppositions - and even more with moral ones - and they cannot expect that increasingly strong winds will not blow into the sails of the minorities, strongest on the left where the Communists do not allow any political manifestations in those reserves of principle and method which nevertheless do exist in broad strata of the party and which are not all old-Stalinist or crypto-brigadiers (2). As a jurist and a democrat I share much of this

attitude without for that reason losing my original doubt: Is the PR a political party? And, to be precise, is it one of those parties that our Constitution calls "to determine in a democratic way the direction of the national policy" and, as such, are institutions of the Republic, essential factors of the state as order, that is to say, and channels for its lines of force and movement in the direction of the state as apparatus?

The circumstance that the PR "makes politics", as it likes to say, is both of a critical and an operative order, irrelevant as that may sometimes seem, but it is not decisive for this question. Leagues, associations, spontaneous movements, pressure groups, all of them "make politics" in that sense, without for that reason being the bearers of a global direction for the national life or of a platform the Italian State's domestic and international policies. A party is a party when, even from the opposition, it takes on the task of dealing with those problems which it would have to confront if it were in power. This is a duty that becomes imperative when, as in this case, one promotes an alternative government majority coalition which has been the constant aim of the "new Radicals" ever since the Pannella-Togliatti (3) dialogue of 1959 and by way of the long wanderings through abstensionism and participation, the successive election deals offered to or made with the PSIUP; the PSI, and the Manifesto, (4)

the agreement to recommend voting for the PRI (Republican Party) or the range from the PCI to the PRI, and, in short, the vast and various peregrinations within the left.

One talks from time to time of "a party of projects", in fact, or of a "party of services", a "street-rally party", a "referendum-strategy party", an "outsiders' party". One also speaks of a kind of great study group of the left and at the same time of a pressure group working on the left as a whole, or else of a transitory "detonator" of autonomistic and libertarian self-revelation dreamed of for the PSI; and finally of an independent party of the left. But a political party, I repeat, is recognisable by the total responsibility it assumes for a country's domestic and international issues, and here the situation is not clear for the PR despite the merits of the single campaigns it supports, or the solidarity it arouses for being persecuted. What diagnoses that are not moralistic make the Radical Party the heart of the latest phase of Italian life: the constitution of a new revolutionary and terrorist pole of the Italian Communist movement with its virtual mass audience (it took Boato of Lotta Continua

(5) to make this point clear in the conference at the "Parco dei Principi") (6) and with its meaning strategic and security balances among the great powers? Is the call to non-violence enough then, or is one a "party" because one is capable of indicating a policy line to the Republic and a line of action to the state apparatusses, a diagnosis of the Italian national crisis which takes into account, for example, the main event of our domestic politics which is destined to reproduce itself with possibly disastrous consequences in the Jugoslavian federation when the question of the successor to Marshal Tito begins, that someone may work to bring about a succession to Titoism as well? And have they reflected, these Radicals, on the implications of the possible loss in that point in the great belt of neutral states, from Switzerland to Austria to the Straits of Kotor in the shelter of which the Italian political experience has been able to take place with the results that we so well know? (If they had reflect

ed, they would, among other things, have introduced other accents into their criticism of the painful but necessary Osimo Treaty (7)). Are they taking on the task, in some way or other, of the objective consequences of a possible common border, in the future, with the Warsaw Pact countries and of what such a possibility represents even today in the political programming and the cautious action of the Communist Party? And if they continue to denounce so forcefully, and not rarely justifiably, the Christian Democrats' arrogant wielding of power, do they have any idea of what could be some day the degree and kind of the Communist's arrogant abuse of power if they should be in a position to control the state's security services? And in the light of this possibility and their own experience as a party, is there not something adventuristic about their tenacious attempt to do away with the borders between the democratic and the Communist zones and to banish the polarity on the left between the pole of democratic se

curity and that of Communist hegemony?

And if not, on what political calculations, on what objective analyses do they base their certainty that the Communist Party, once it took power, would be something different from the party which today they themselves denounce daily? At least in La Malfa (8), although evidently at the price of some skepticism, there is the affirmation of the democratic status reached by the PCI together with the postulate of a Christian Democratic "counter-weight" - an unacceptable logic from the standpoint of the analyses of the "Republican opposition" but which at least is a line of reasoning based on calculations involving political size and an evaluation of international realities. But if the optimism of the Radicals on a great leftist coalition government, should turn out to be, as in another place the "Republican opposition" has tried to demonstrate, if not a kind of foolish optimism then at least one of those dreams which, in Heine's words, do more honour to the heart of youth than to its brains - then what consolatio

n would the country be able to find in the news that one or another Radical leader had ended up courageously in prison, or else took shelter in the search for freedom in some Paris side-walk café? Would the bitterness of a nation not then give rise to an inevitable accusation of fatuity, a tardy but severe judgement on the brilliant brain-storms of the Radicals? We are going towards times in which strong thoughts for strong actions will be required: a few justified denunciations by the Radicals do not absolve a party from its highest duty which is to represent itself and defend the total conditions of the Republic's domestic and international security.

An example of the fragility of their conception is, in my opinion, also to be found in the Radical Party's statute. It contains, certainly, a critical appeal against the bureaucratised, militarised, corporatised parties, or of those which the historic compromise would tend to make seem more like specialised propaganda agencies and tools of control over society rather than political representatives of society in the state. There is, furthermore, an error, and an old one, which equates totalitarianism with a single-party system. The RSI (9) contained the party of Mussolini and that of Ciano, but it was not for all that more "pluralistic" than is the German People's Republic when it exhibits, as soon as one passes through the Brandenburg Gate, the innumerable facades of the local Christian, Liberal, Social Democratic and German National parties. In both cases it is a matter of "state party (parties) regimes" in which (among other things) in every sector of social life there is recognised a single mass orga

nisation controlled by the dominant party so that the plurality of the parties on the parliamentary scene remains a mere theatrical facade. But is one not tending to that sort of thing in Italy when, for example, the hon. Cincari Rodano contests the Catholic lists in the election of school districts, affirming in the pages of "Rinascita" (10) that among those who want to save the schools, pluralism can be admitted, but (by previous "confrontation") must be explicated in "unitarian" lists.? Or when, with profuse assumptions, subsidies, and ruthless ways of acting, one pursues the goal of cutting the PRI's with the Association of Democratic Cooperatives in order to connect it up with the League of Cooperatives and with the intention of bringing in the entire movement? This is precisely that league which, in the Third World, so often assumes the role of peacefully smoothing the way for Russian or Cuban military "advisers" there where once Protestant missionaries were sent to reconnoitre before sending in the gu

n-boats of His Britannic Majesty. The Radicals, it is true, do not have this kind of problem in the fields of cooperatives, or labour unions, or industrial circles and the organising networks of so-called "free time": but they should at least ask themselves, if only by way of general reflection, of what use is pluralism at the top levels of the state, if in the end the social movement in toto is absorbed into unified organisations in which a party works with an army of specialised officials coordinated from the centre. ----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

* Qualunquisti/qualunquismo - a much-used term in Italian political parlance referring to an attitude of mistrust towards political parties and the party system in general.

1) The historic compromise is the name given to the policy devised by the Communist Party for collaborating with the Christian Democrats.

2) Referring to the Red Brigades terrorist group.

3) Palmiro Togliatti - (1893-1964) Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1927 until his death.

4) PSIUP and the Manifesto - The former is the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity; the latter a newspaper of the far left that developed into a political movement bearing the same name.

5) Lotta Continua - A far-left wing party.

6) Parco dei Principi - A hotel in Rome.

7) The treaty establishing disputed borders between Italy and Jugoslavia.

8) La Malfa, Ugo (1903 - 1975) Secretary of the Italian Republican Party (PRI) from 1965-1975.

9) The RSI (Repubblica Sociale Italiana) or Salň Republic was established by the Fascists in north Italian territory under German control to which it was essentially subservient.

10) A Communist party weekly.