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)

Where Pannella Errs

By Giuliano Amato

("Panorama", June 6, 1976)

The Radicals are a bit like the public deficit. At first only the conservatives worried about them and on the whole it was thought that a mature democracy could not do without them and in fact found them advantageous. Today, many of yesterday's enthusiasts would be quite happy to get rid of them but cannot find the way to do it.

The Radical movement that we have seen in recent years is the result of a metamorphosis favoured by the post '68 (1) atmosphere. Before that the Radicals had been a group of people with progressive opinions which had taken on the job of opposing building speculation, favouring the lay state and other battles of commendable civic commitment; but it had never issued from the bounds of the bourgeois intelligensia. After '68 its sensitivity to the libertarian issues and the ramparts to be constructed against the power-holders gave it a point of encounter with the youth rebellion, the emerging feminist movement and the self discovery that other social strata were beginning to make. The Radicals emerged from their elitist conferences into the streets and squares, the neighbourhoods and the schools in order to interpret the needs of the people. They became a grass-roots movement and adopted the referendum - the distinctive tool of direct democracy - as the principal, but not the only instrument of their politi

cal action.

Their vitality gave more than one shock to the traditional ways in which our institutions operated, and to many it appeared legitimate to include them in the framework furnished by the optimism of an open and articulated democracy. In a growing society the parties tend to become bureaucratic, to integrate with the system of government and to become less responsive to the needs of the country which they tend to put in second place after the needs of general political groupings and balances. Thus the need for a corrective that will allow the voice of the people to break into the system, to make room for the needs as such, for imposing the political deadlines that the country desires.

The Radicals have been and certainly have intended to be all this, but the society whose impulses they picked up coincided only in part with the one described in the manuals on articulated democracy. Ours was not only a mature and responsible society shaking off the bonds of an anachronistic authoritarianism and the encrustations of a party-power system more inclined to colonise than to understand and be guided by that society.

Besides this matrix, the rebellion that carried the Radicals on the crest of the wave possessed another one, profoundly different, but separated from the former by a boundary that was not always visible. It was the age-old diffidence towards the state, the spontaneous spirit, the anti-institutional rage that has always smouldered under the ashes of an Italy that has never been entirely consolidated. In the red-hot climate of recent years, the Radicals have found that they were functioning as a fuse and their original intentions had been entirely turned upside down.

Grass roots initiatives not only served to attack the mistaken solutions and the non-solutions offered by the public powers for the various problems of the people, but also to attack the power-holders as such. And together with the part of society which claimed, entirely justly, the right to re-shape the state, there was joined the part of society that wanted to engage in a frontal clash with it. As this gradually continued to grow the manuals became always less realistic. According to the manuals, politics ought to be corrected and enriched by grass roots movements, whereas with us the tendency formed among such movements to deprive it of one of its essential components, that of mediation, and to reduce it in its totality to a matter of yes or no.

Whether Pannella likes it or not, in a context of this kind his idea of shooting down with one referendum as many as eight wide-ranging laws was the most suited move for sending into retreat on primordial questions the yes or no answers that aggravate the conflicts and make mediation over them impossible.

Furthermore there has been no mediation between the Radicals as a party and the other parties present with them in Parliament. Treated arrogantly by their colleagues holed up in the strongest groups, the Radical deputies have only been projections of their referendum committees and have primarily aimed at furthering the fulfilment of their goals. Born with the purpose of combating the tendency of the power-holders to integrate everyone, they have on the one hand excited this tendency, and on the other hand they have used Parliament, the natural seat of mediation, to affirm their own viewpoints with a no less marked integrational attitude and one that is inexorably coherent with anti-institutional feelings that have penetrated their hinterland.

The vote expected on the Reale law (2) and on the [public] financing of political parties, in itself causes all the ambiguities and distortions of the entire affair. That is why it is a vote which leaves us ill at ease and makes us feel uncertain about the possible meaning of the yeses and the no's - something far different from what happened in the case of the fortunate and far-off referendum on divorce.

The cream of the Radicals no longer manages to be the cream of the hopes that they seemed to us to be at that time, because we see in them an inextricable confusion of the responsibilities of democratic participation and the irresponsibility of instinctive rebellion. It is due to this mixture too that we owe the question that everyone is asking about the Italy of today: whether it will emerge from the present historical phase with a richer democracy, or whether in order to hold it together it will be necessary to subject it to some more rigid authority. ----------------------------------------------------------------

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) 1968 was a year of great student and workers ferment in Italy.

2) A much-contested anti-terrorist law that severely limits normal individual rights.