ABSTRACT: Introductory paper to the convention "The radicals' new challenge: is a transnational party possible? A question for the political culture", Milan 12 December.

(Radical News N. 302 of 31 December 1987)

Many times the Radical Party has been an "inventor of new things", capable of introducing elements of otherness and of fracture on the Italian political scene; hence what we might call its relation of constant discord with the Italian political system as a whole - all the more so in that the Radical Party has been capable of operating inside this system. Thus, also in the context of a fundamental loyalty and coherence with respect to its initial formulation, far-reaching innovations and changes have taken place over the years in the radical party's history and type of action, whose effects in several cases have greatly influenced the entire Italian political life.

Today we are confronted with one of such phases of transformation; or, at any rate, this is what the radicals are determined to achieve. The upcoming congress of the party means to be a crucial moment in the self-transformation which the radical party has set as its goal. This is why, in order to add elements of evaluation and meditatin to the precongress and congress debate, we are asking the addressees of these notes for a contribution in terms of analysis, objection and proposal.

The following wants to be a brief illustration of some of the themes which the radicals are confronted with today, obviously not with the aim of rigidly orienting the debate, but with that of offering a few starting points for the discussion.

There are two main axes of reflexion along which the radical party's debate abd choices have been focussing during the last stage: the conditions of democracy in Italy and the need for a dimension other than the national one for the political action.

1. We do not need to repeat here what the radical congresses have established with increasing accuracy regarding the presence in Italy of a system considered other than a system of democracy, characterized by the lack of every certainty as regards the "rules of the game" and generally as regards the certainty of the rule of law, characterized in particular by the non-safeguard of the right to be informed and to inform, failing which there is no possibility of a democratic choice.

On the basis of this evaluation of the Italian situation, the Radical Party had hypothesized the cessation of its activity, also in order to avoid fostering any deceptions and so as not to legitimate - through its basically impotent participation - the marginalization of the radical hopes as an effect of the foul play enacted by that which it defined as a corporative party power. The cessation was ultimately not enacted, as an effect of a strong and authoritative request coming from many sectors of the Italian society, with over ten thousand new members, urging the "party of rights and rules" to continue operating. The radical party's action in fact developed along a twofold axis; the activation, on the basis of an area comprising the lay-socialist parties, of a major coalition capable of becoming the protagonist of a democratic reform of the institutions, and the campaign for a transformation of the electoral system such as to challenge that which the radical party denounces as the parties' occupation of th

e public area.

A few questions regarding such issues:

1) to what extent was (is) the above analysis valid?

2) to what extent are the radical party's choices a consequence of it, or in any case adequate in consideration of the Italian situation?

3) a series of events have changed the pattern of the Italian situation as it was at the time of the last radical congress: the electoral result; the impoverishment and weakening of the hypothesis of the above mentioned lay coalition; the cancellation from the political agenda of the radical proposal for an electoral reform, whereas reform proposals aiming to consolidate the parties' control on the institutions seem to be gaining momentum; the referendum campaign (whose outcome is unknown at the time of writing these notes), which has marked a new, serious step toward the organized distortion of political information and therefore of the entire democratic process, whereas it has enabled the arisal - under the guide of Scalfari (1) - of a project aimed at a reorganization of power based on a use of the anti-party power protest and of the crisis of the parties induced by the degeneration of party power opposite to the one outlined by the radical party; lastly, the results of the referendums. Which consequences

does all this have for the radicals?

4) More generally, which prospects open up in the Italian context for a radical force which does not accept for itself a function consisting in the mere administration of a small minority space in the context of the equilibriums of the current material constitution, but which considers that it will not betray itself only if it succeeds in using the margins of "political feasibility" which it manages to acquire for itself to achieve significant and far-reaching steps toward the achievement of a democracy based on the rule of law? And which "party form" is the most adequate in view of this objective? The radical party contains in its history, in its traditional formulation and in its statute the characters of a political force which is programmatically non-national. It has always challenged national logics, the purely or prevalently national dimension of the political struggle, the very idea of a national sovereignty under the protection of which it could be legitimate to violate the fundamental rights of the

individual, asserting a principle of safeguard of those rights, anywhere and at all times, which is superior to that of national independence. It has never posed Italian citizenship as a condition to join the radical party; and it has already had a non-Italian secretary. But it is especially over the last years, with the "non-Italian campaign" against world hunger - carried out prevalently in Italy - that the radicals have experienced the growing awareness of the non-national dimensions of the great political choices, and thus of the dramatic inadequacy of a political activity restricted to national spheres and dimensions, such as the one which is necessarily achieved through national parties.

Thus - considering also the incapacity to meet these requirements on the part of the so-called Internationals, irrelevant meeting places among national parties - the radical party has decided to promite in facts, and not just in theory, its constitition into a real transnational party. At its last congress, it stated that the prosecution of the radical political action meant sense only in such dimension.

Even more than the aspects relative to the Italian situation, this problem dominates the radicals' concerns in this preparatory stage of the congress, both for the objective difficulty of collecting adhesions on such a project outside of Italy - where the radical party's present and past are obviously scarcely known - and for the problems of all kinds which arise even simply to conceive such a radically new initiative.

The first fundamental question obviously concerns the existence of a consent on the need to create a transnational political force. There follow many other questions, which have been the object of a debate in the radical party these months. Among them:

1) Which effective spaces of political action, and therefore which effective possibilities of becoming a real political force can a transnational party have, which as such would have no defined institutional sphere in which to operate, a place in which to give a political outlet to the demands it is the bearer of through the mechanisms of democracy?

2) One possible answer to the previous question points to the European Parliament as the supranational institutional forum which can today represent the referent of the transnational party, whose first task would become that of struggling in order to gain effective constituent powers for the European Parliament, in the prospect outlined by Spinelli (2), which the radical party has always endorsed. Which paths can be taken in order to give political feasibility to this indication, in a global European context which at present seems very little encouraging from this point of view?

Is it feasible to promote the consultive referendums regarding the endowment of constituent powers to the European Parliament to be elected in 1989?

3) Also, to what degree does the European federalist demand correspond to or integrate that of a democracy based on supranational law? In the context of the current global equilibriums, would a possible European unity simply mean a space of democracy and supranational law, a new, true national State, adequate to meet the demands of a confrontation between "true" modern national States, the superpowers, overcoming the dimension of "regional" States, politically incapable of true independence, which the European States are reduced to? Can we endorse the hypothesis of depriving the creation of the European unity of this characteristic, turning it into the engine of a federation process open to all the States of political democracy, even outside of the European geographic area, and thus a means to enhance and stimulate areas of political democracy also in the Third World?

4) As far as the transnational party is concerned, which relation should exist between the political action at the transnational level and the one which its members carry out in the single national realities? For example, can (should) the transnational party participate as such in national elections, competing with the existing national parties, or should it rule out this possibility, privileging a transparty character, i.e. a meeting place on common transnational objectives also between militants of different parties? And in the latter case, which forms can the participation of its members in the national political life assume: the non-electoral presence, the presence in other parties' tickets, the presence with autonomous tickets without the symbol of the radical party? In particular, for a party such as the radical party, which exists and is rooted in a single country - Italy - the fact of becoming a transnational party implies a diminishment of its action on national themes, the only way to assign the ne

cessary priority to the transnational dimension, which is otherwise doomed to remain second-class; or does it require that nothing be dispersed of the force acquired on the national scene, and that there be on the contrary a growth, because only on the basis of this can we hope to create a party capable of effective transnational political action?

5) Which "transnational" issues can be tackled today with the hope of being politically effective and so as to really start creating a transnational party?

6) Can the current radical party be the "founding place" of the transnational party without mediations? Can it be the centre for an aggregation - through individual enrollments - outside of Italy of adequate energies, in terms of quality and quantity, managerial capacities, capacities of initiative, in view of the objective which the Radical party has set for itself? Or would it be better to operate by promoting the international federation of organisms which already exist? And in that case, which? And how could we avoid the danger of creating a new, impotent International of national parties, dominated by their national views and priorities? In the context of these problems, what could be the role and effect of Marco Pannella's leadership function, which in the past has had d such a great influence on the history and character of the radical party in Italy?

7) Does the fact of proposing itself as a party, rather than as a league or movement, on the transnational scale represent a moment of force and clarity, or on the contrary of weakness and confusion?

8) To what extent does the fact of combining tradition, praxis, thought and ethic of nonviolence with those of liberal democracy appear useful or necessary to create an effective transnational party based on democracy and the rights of the individual?

Translator's notes

(1) EUGENIO SCALFARI. Editor of "La Repubblica", Italian daily newspaper, established in 1976 in Rome.

(2) ALTIERO SPINELLI. ( Rome 1907 - 1982). Italian politician. During fascism, from 1929 to 1942, he was imprisoned as leader of the Italian Communist Youth. In 1942 co-author, with Ernesto Rossi, of the "Manifesto of Ventotene", which states that only a federal Europe can remove the return of fratricide wars in the European continent and give it back an international role. At the end of the war he founded, with Rossi, Eugenio Colorni and others, the European federalist Movement. After the crisis of the European Defence Community (1956), he became member of the European Commission, and followed the evolution of the Community structures. In 1979 he was elected member of the European Parliament on the ticket of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), becoming the directive mind in the realization of the draft treaty adopted by that parliament in 1984 and known as the "Spinelli Project".