ACROSS THE FRONTIERS AND THE NATIONAL STATES, A PARTY FOR A EUROPE OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AND NON-VIOLENCE

34TH CONGRESS OF THE RADICAL PARTY

BOLOGNA - JANUARY 2-6, 1988

ABSTRACT: Giovanni Negri, in recalling the Radical Party's 32 years of political struggle, proposes drawing up a political balance of Radical affairs from two points of view: the acquisition of positive law on the part of the PR and the party-form which it has taken on from time to time in order to achieve its purposes.

After re-examining the Radicals' major political battles in the light of these criteria, Negri affirms that the PR's conquest of rights are not only an extraordinary accomplishment on the civil level but also "a whole book that recounts works of good government". Despite this characteristic of a "party of government", the PR has always been rejected and kept far from any access to formal governing responsibilities. Nevertheless, the PR today must acquire the capacity to manage the great problems that agitate the world and which can find no solutions in national institutions. On these premises the Congress bases its political proposal: the re-founding of the PR on a trans-national level. This project cannot either precede or follow the campaign for a United States of Europe but is altogether one with it. And finally it indicates the other four points on which the trans-national party must be based: 1) non-violent action against totalitarian regimes; 2) the establishment of an international anti-prohibiti

on [drugs, ed.] league; 3) action for laws to protect life and for emergency aid in the world's South; proceeding with the battle for law and justice and the creation of a European juridical space which will act as a garrison for the defence of the principles of the constitutional state.

--------------------------------

Comrades,

It is January 2, 1988. I am not recalling this only in order to wish a happy new year to you, and in particular the new non-Italian members, all of our guests, and all those who have been following our work, but because dates matter. Time is decisive when you draw up a balance and make choices as the Radical Party has done at all of its congresses, and not rarely in a dramatic way.

We have behind us well over a decade of political struggle. Formally the party is 32 years old.

Within only twelve years the world will enter a new millennium, the second of the history of the new humanity, for the dominant culture and its way of dating time for mankind.

Twelve years. The prospect of the date 2000 seems so epoch-making, so futuristic, so precisely millennial, and yet there it is in the terrible concreteness of its twelve years - to the point of obliging each of us not only to take stock, but to imagine himself as he will be physically and humanly in twelve years time and to conjure up this world of 2000.

I already imagine I see waves of millenarian panic, the agitation of ancestral shadows in fearful consciences, or an equally dangerous, superficial optimism and futuristic enthusiasm.

Old and new fanaticisms charged with unheard-of violence may exercise great fascination, while all the ruling classes will have to self-magnify their destinies, greatness and power by means of enormous public works and technological advances.

Excuse me for these fears, ingenuous and possibly infantile, on the part of someone who sees little room for rationality in a world balancing on the edge of fear of itself and a hectic pursuit of danger, a Titanic nourished by millions and millions of people dead from starvation that navigates on an uncertain course in the sidereal night. Because everything leads us to believe that the world of 2000 will not "still " be, but will be "still more" the world of death from starvation, of the holocaust of hunger. Don't worry. I don't want to take my start from the Adam and Eve of the Terrestrial Paradise or of the year 2000. It is just that it seems useful to me at times to reflect on dates.

A useful thought for a reply to the question that a Congress of Radicals, and all the more a Congress of re-foundation, should put to itself: wherein lies the substance of the things we are experiencing; what do we intend to be, to show, to create; what, therefore, ought we to ask of ourselves while not forgetting that the reasons - sometimes intensely personal - that induced us to establish the Radical Party are very demanding and nail us to the ambition of being authentic reformers of our times rather than conservatives, revolutionaries or cautious improvers. And we should not forget that if this tension were to let up, for many if not for all of us the motivation would fail, the feeling of necessity to be the Radical Party.

This is the reason why I do not propose to give you a "political balance-sheet" in a strict chronicle style of the months that have connected this Congress to the last one. It would be inadequate. Certainly 1987 was the year in which the very existence of the party was put into question. Each of us can arrive at his own judgement by remembering that in twelve months we have been brought to asking for enrolment in the party for 1986, 1987 and 1988. This is an exceptional measure that now must become part of the routine membership scheme.

This has been the year of early elections and at the same time of the referendums - something which was quite unforeseen and unforeseeable - and in spite of this it was the year of an attempt to lay the foundations of the Radical Party's new dimension: that is the trans-national one, of the difficult experiments in recent months held in various Eastern and Western European countries which we decided nevertheless to begin at the Federal Council meeting last July along with the Treasurer despite much urging and advice which went, to say the least, in other directions.

1987 was a political year largely dictated and conditioned by Radical policies and their capacity for occupying a central place. The elections could be judged, and I have heard them judged, as a deleterious result or an amazing affirmation of Radical politics and the party's resistance considering the conditions in which they acted and the results obtained by the other parties (the Socialist advance, the birth which we sought of the Greens as a political and election factor, the confirmation of the DP [Proletarian Democrats, ed.], etc.

The referendums could be judged, and I have heard them judged, as a futile labour of Sisyphus, yet another confirmation of how it is possible to hide our identity and the strength of great politics; or else they were seen as a victory of enormous consequences, destined to leave deep marks in Italian society, the confirmation of great maturity on the part of the citizens, a startling repudiation of the gurus of the audio-visual and printed mass media, all of whom were busy expressing their idea of the presumed "civil society" which in reality is a great jumble of industrial bosses: FIAT, magistrates and De Benedetti [the president of Olivetti, ed.]; De Benedetti, magistrates and FIAT. The "civil society" of Giorgio Bocca (1) and nothing more: in their Turin and their Ivrea, with a garnishing of courthouses scattered around the peninsula. The results of the dense work of relations, exchange of information, and the membership campaign conducted in these months outside Italy, can be judged - and I have hear

d them judged - as the crucial test of the existence of the minimal prerequisites for the party to launch itself into the trans-national adventure, or, contrarily, as the definitive confirmation of their absence, in that way defining the trans-national choice as an inappropriate forcing of the issue, an error that would expose the party to greatest danger.

Very well, I do not think that a summing up of these months in the fashion of a mere description, either detaching or joining these facts, however important important they may be, is enough for making the analyses and the proper choices for the re-foundation of the party that we have been called upon to do. Nor do I think it necessary to include the incredible crush of other events which, if I close my eyes for a moment, pass through my mind like a film version of these last three years - a film that shows how the party lived through them without a moment's pause (from the law on hunger to the first conviction in the Naples trial, from the referendum on the cost-of-living wage scale to the invention of the Greens ticket in the regional elections, from the appeals trial to the arrest and acquittal of [Enzo] Tortora (2) up to the collapse of the Calogero (3) theorem and the acquittal of Emilio Vesce and the other April 7 comrades, (4) to the battle for Radical Radio, "radio curse words" with its open mic

rophones and its capacity of always being at the service of the public, to the myriad other battles, non-violent or in Parliament as they may have been, which involved us deeply, to the rallying around the party of the most authoritative Italian and non-Italian personalities - even up to recent days with the enrolment of Fernando Savater, editorial writer of Spain's biggest daily paper, up to the Cicciolina (5) affair). And allow me here to make an aside on a subject which I think has become a bore for all of you and thus also because it has been discussed and handled to the point of nausea.

You know how the party did not refuse this candidacy [i.e. Cicciolina's, ed.] because we thought it unjust to reject it on the basis of a moral judgement or prejudice, in that market place of hypocrisy, whited sepulchres and Pandora's boxes which are the parties of the party-power system and their tickets. You know how she was elected thanks to an orgy of the mass media, thanks to the decisive support of those who went beyond their legitimate journalistic interests and professionalism by devising a campaign that was the equivalent of spending tens of billions of lire. But in order to be entirely clear, comrades, I have no difficulty in recognising and assuming the responsibility in your presence for an error of ingenuousness, of underestimating a situation that has been damaging to the party on the political, electoral and financial levels.

It is a responsibility that I assume while clarifying that it is not a question of style: if there is to be speculation on this episode and on the party, I do not accept that it should be made by a press that in 40 years of national history (40 years in which the morality of the parties and their public funds has been tolerated to the point of its deteriorating into a latrine), and despite the existence of valid and honest journalists, has not exposed or brought to light even one of the many real scandals with which public life has been filled.

For the rest, it does not appear to me that Deputy Staller is behaving with any more or less dignity than many of her colleagues, with a few exceptions, certainly, and in particular with exceptions for all of her Radical colleagues, as I believe that the report of the Chamber's Parliamentary Group will show. I add only to dutifully inform the Congress that on December 19 I sent her the following letter:

Dear Ilona,

As you well know the Radical Party is holding its Congress in Bologna on next January 2 - 6. As you also well know it is a very delicate moment for us with regard to the political decisions we must make as well as with public opinion.

Not rarely when we have held Radical congresses, the press and the mass media have devised speculations aiming to strike at and contort our image: this is in some degree the destiny of a party that irritates many and has shown that it is capable of moving mountains and changing things. This year in particular, there will be present at the Congress hundreds of non-Italian members coming from various parts of the world. The risk that it seems to me we run is that of total silence, of censoring the Congress, on Italian and non-Italian Radicals, if you should decide to go along with a far too evident trick of the mass media, with a wager that has the party as its target (and the party, as we all know, can only defend itself non-violently).

For these reasons I feel I am justified in asking you to participate at the Congress as "discreetly" as possible, and above all not to go along with attempts to exploit the Congress and everything it represents for publicity. They tell me that you are moving in quite the opposite direction. For now I do not intend to credit this and I believe that you are perfectly aware of how seriously the party would be damaged by any exploitation or use of the Congress.

I said before that a descriptive summing up was not needed. The summing up I propose is much broader despite its conciseness. It is a necessary reconstruction of Radical business from two points of view: the conquest of positive law by the party with the ensuing, deep modifications of the Italian civil and political picture that they have brought about and the tools, the party-form, that we have given ourselves from time to time to reach our goals. The history of a "method", therefore (before any question of its contents), and the story of the means used for spreading "the word". The achievement of positive law, never acknowledged by any observer except very belatedly and partially, are the reality of a political force and a leader who mark and change in an extraordinary way the life of the country in which they are at work.

We can begin this Odyssey back in 1970 with the divorce law. In 1972 the law recognising conscientious objectors was introduced. In 1974: the referendums. In 1975: abortion. During the same period, before and after, there was the freedom of private radio and TV broadcasting (so often scarcely free and only private, but today they are a significant reality), family law, the vote for eighteen-year-olds, the drugs law. In 1976: their first running in the elections, and in 1977/78 the referendums, the Reale law (6) with a substantial popular minority that abjures that law (and today, as I notice, denounced on all sides as the archetype of a nefarious period) and public financing of political parties with a hair's breadth minority result that imposes politically the resignation of Leone (7) and the election of Pertini (8) to the Quirinal (and here we must ask - not regarding the past which may be more or less important, but for the future - friends Craxi (9) and Spadolini (10) what would have happened to the

lay alternation of the head of the government if it had not been for that President of the Republic). In 1979: new elections. In 1980/81 the manifesto/appeal of the Nobel Prize winners against extermination from hunger - an event that, together with the Secretary Jean Fabre, reminds us that the PR's sphere of battle was visibly always trans-national too. Derived from that manifesto were the resolutions of the European Parliament (which Mitterand called of historic import) - a parliament, however, which did and does not the power effectively to produce positive law, true laws - and the well-known Piccoli (11) bill as well as the laws approved by the Italian and Belgian Parliaments in this regard (justifiably called very bad but which at least literally meant the difference between life and death for several tens of thousands of human beings).

Then there were the "scandals" of the candidacies of Toni Negri (12) and Enzo Tortora (13), the new law on preventive detention, the budget increases for the Justice Ministry, the explosion of these issues and the Chernobyl nuclear plant up until November 8 which block the nuclear question and eliminate a wall of "yes" votes on the justice budget. In between there are hundreds of bills coming from the loyal opposition which are not even examined by a Parliament where it is useless to talk of reforming regulations, because there have been no true regulations for some time. And dozens of referendum proposals (some of which are very far-seeing and topical, such as those on the Financial Police and hunting) which are torn up - contrary to the law, democracy, the constitution - by this Constitutional Court whose present president, I read, proposes a bicameralism with a second Chamber "of the categories and the corporations" (and then they want to make us believe that the true debate over Fascism is that of

De Felice (14) and on the residual post-Fascist heritage that is or is not present in the party of colleague Fini). But after having recalled all this, comrades, is it true or not that on the level of party history, not on that of the events that make news, the more we refined, sharpened, and perfected our craft of making politics, the more it was apparent that we made enormous conquests of positive law and the more the party's identity and image disappeared, and the more this regime perfected its antibodies, this capacity to re-absorb everything the way that a chameleon changes colour against a new background while remaining identically itself, protecting and immortalising itself?

This is not only the story of Marco Pannella who has to go on a hunger strike in 1974 during the divorce referendum because the LID [Italian League for Divorce] has been eliminated. Is it true or not that it is also the history of November 8, of these last referendums on justice which see the essence of the Radical identity broken apart? Is it true or not that the deputies led by Francesco and Mauro win up to 180-200 of their colleagues' votes for the Radical ammendments on the law for the civil responsibility judges (miraculous for a group of 12) and what's more - as the good Minister Vassalli is saying disconsolately and not even particularly in private, and as Marco Pannella said in the chamber - this law has been reduced to a La Malfa (15) style mess, to something which in its juridical specificity, of positive law, is drastically antithetical to the popular will as it expressed itself in the urns on this matter? We certainly are not going to give in: the law is now in the Senate. It can and must be

changed (we say this primarily to the Liberals and Socialists). Otherwise we will ask the Head of State not to sign it, who has in some cases the duty to interpret his very great responsibility as the supreme guarantor also in terms of conflict with respect to a Realpolitik that scandalously contradicts the will of the sovereign people. This is what strikes me as the moral of the fable.

The lucidity of the analysis that led Pannella to draft the Florence Resolution on the absence of the certainty of law, of sure and equal rules for all (for both collective subjects like the parties as well as for the individual citizen), of the effective right to information, to one's identity, to one's image (that is to say, the obligatory prerequisites of a political democracy); the same analysis that led us, that is, to consider the closure of the party rather than to be obliged to take the road of either the normalisation of the party (that is, to become like all the others), or that of a role as a pure witness (reducing us to poverty, to renouncing from the start the goal of winning laws, positive law) - this analysis seems to me entirely valid. Certainly, in the meantime there intervened that stupendous phenomenon which we call the "ten thousand members" which must still be further evaluated, researched and utilised, and which to my mind has made the PR the party of true civil society (containing

not only the good but also the bad, of course) and which has given us a different and richer identity. All of this is true, but the dangers we warned of in Florence, the reality surrounding us cannot be ignored. It would be irresponsible.

The regime, the political class, the sphere of information each day provide new proofs of an analysis which we make in cold blood and without the slightest tendency to act like victims. Just because we are not presumptuous we know that the negation of the Radical identity to the party and its leaders must correspond to the negation of those collective subjects (call them, for example, COBAS (16) or free associations) or of those citizens who "understand but do not keep in line", who are not a homogeneous part of the system and "the logic of the situation" and who will not buy being accepted and welcomed, a little like the prodigal son, if it means denying their nature and being absorbed by the norm. Allow me to give another example. They accuse us of lusting for ministerial posts, and someone who knows almost nothing about Radical history can even speak of being "anxious to obtain high positions". In reality, with our availability to take on even formal government posts, we have presented another side o

f the same question. In short: the achievements of positive law which I have listed not only represent an extraordinary showing on the civil level, but, I think, are like an entire book telling about works of good government page after page. And yet, not only is this party rejected, negated, kept away from formal governmental responsibilities, but in our country they continue to promote to ministries and make under-secretaries of the cream of those who control blocks of membership cards and of money whose sources are not always of the most limpid.

This is their only merit, because many other merits - on the level of laws, ideas, and values - are not known and not written in the annals of the nation's history and public life.

So it is true that this race of Radicals is a little like "foreigners in their own homeland", a talking cricket (17) who the wiser he is, the more he is chased away as irritating, or as the saying went "a populace of Lutherans in counter-reformation country". And look here: churches, palaces and salons would be very pleased to let one enter on the small condition that one were just a little less barbaric, a little less Lutheran and, in short, if one were to be "a little more sensible". It would even be very easy to make this choice, probably without being aware that it would mean the end of what the Radicals stand for.

Another way of reading this Radical business is rather to examine the tools and the party-form which we have taken on from time to time in order to disseminate the word, our politics. It is, if you like, the method Braudel has applied to the history of the world and of civilisation, taking a new approach to the study of history so that, for example, the affairs of the great economic imperial capitals is no longer summed up by describing the battles, the king and court, the victories and defeats, nor by Marxist economic viewpoints, but rather by indicating the cardinal tool that gave them their power. (Thus for Venice the caravel, for Antwerp the printing shop, for Genoa the book-keeping system, for London the steam engine, for New York the automobile and electric motor.)

Thus the Radical Party, with what appeared to be a very ambitious statute for its size, started out with a mimeograph machine and a few Roman militants. It then chose to publish a daily bulletin which came to the notice of Vittorini, Sciascia, and Pasolini. The latter spoke of it at length.

Then too there was the daily »Liberazione sold at newsstands in order to form the first committees for collecting signatures for the referendums which were developed by the regional parties, a party-form that faded with the "party of the preamble", or more distinctly of "non-violence", the arm used to wage the battle against extermination from hunger. And there also grows a "party of the radio", the magnificent re-invention of an instrument that heals the apparent contradiction of a party that has need of making speaking coincide with speaking to each other, of making informing mean informing oneself: urbi et orbi, precisely that. Is it perhaps a coincidence that just now the trans-national party-form is proposed and one strives after its most suitable tool (from the magazine to the radio to the computer)? I certainly don't think so. I spoke in fact of a summing up, the summing up of two decades. And so it would be wrong and distorting to sum up the "Italian" party alone, as if we had really been up to

now a party whose range of vision and action were structurally restricted to the sphere of internal Italian politics.

This is not the case. The "new" Radical Party was born in 1963 on the basis of a political proposal that centres on a dimension which is anything but national, with a proposal made to the European left in its totality, which foresees and calls for a European "new left".

This occurs on the basis of an analysis which counterpoises democracy to militarism-authoritarianism in the world in those places where democracy is seen as "a threatened island under siege".

One of the first battles for which the new, tiny Radical Party qualifies is that of the Thirring Plan, a battle fought at the same time in Italy, Austria and Yugoslavia.

The Radical Party's privileged terrain of organisation, confrontation and action is the International Pacifist Movement which the Radicals tried to convince in vain to become an anti-militarist and pro-democratic force involving in this discourse the European question as well as that of the Third World and of practising Socialism (18) (the militarised Socialism against which the Radicals published leaflets saying "all armies are Fascist"). Corresponding to this was the conscious choice of the non-national statute. The truth, as Lorenzo Strik-Lievers reminds us, is that along this road the slenderness of our forces, the condition of politics and culture inside and outside Italy (along came '68 with its so very different orientations) did not permit us to create true, effective political action - that effective political action which instead we succeeded in establishing and leading to extraordinary successes on an entirely Italian domestic level in the battles for civil rights.

The party in this way, without repudiating anything of its own inspiration and heritage of ideals, has yet grown, has taken root, acquired strength and credibility on this latter terrain. And in fact for a long period it dealt only with Italian problems, measured itself against only them. But along this road in some way the PR once again "met up" with its original non-national dimension.

The European elections were the occasion that induced it in Radical terms to return to its old federalist, Spinellian (19) orientation. And more than that, the fight on abortion that we found ourselves leading along the road of civil rights struggles brought us up against the "ultimate" Radical issue in all its drama - that of the right to life which is the basis of all other rights. In the confrontation on this terrain we "discovered" this issue one might well say and found it to be fundamental to all political action inspired by the values of law in the modern age. Extermination by starvation, the rights of the individual, of all individuals, everywhere, without considerations of nationality...

And the encounter with the Nobel Prize winners: for the first time, still only in a dawning light, we became aware of the need for the "new party", non-national, that would have the mental outlook, feel the priority, have the political will to take on the true, the fundamental problems of our epoch.

The problems of the epoch, whose logical and moral priority over the ones with which national parties concern themselves is felt by everyone. But the national parties are structurally, by their very nature, incapable of dealing with them due to the very logic of the structures in which they are embedded and the other urgent priorities which therefore they cannot fail to feel and cultivate. And so as long as politics is entrusted to them - and to simple "foreign policy" - their relationship to the problems of the epoch will be programmatic, constant elusion.

The awareness that the problem of extermination is one that can be solved, and hence that it was inadmissible to accept its not being solved, made it the task of the PR to subordinate all other goals to this one. But it did so by making use of the tools, the experience, the power centres at its disposition. Thus the temptation to "use" the national states, and in particular the Italian national state, with the aim of forcing it to make a concrete gesture that would be a driving force for the "new international will". Thus the intention of beginning with a victory in one state to force that state to make the gesture that would provoke the concrete birth of that "great world governing party" that was the intentions of the Noble Prize winners' manifesto.

This battle scored a series of victories and successes. But it ended in general defeat due to what revealed themselves to be the limitations of this orientation.

Many of you will remember the Rimini Congress in which we were questioned seriously and rigorously about the nature of the defeat and the failure that had to be considered the outcome of the fight against extermination from hunger. One chose from among the facts a reflection on our country which was conducted with great obstinacy in the attempt to attribute it to political decisions and laws protecting life. But all of us know how the Piccoli law ended up and what it managed to achieve. Today one can see more clearly perhaps the high price that has been paid ever since then for the lack of the trans-national party-form which, if nothing else, would have allowed us to function in more than one direction.

It is important then to understand where to take up our positions, how to use our energies, what priorities and tools to have, what party-form to choose and on what level to re-found our new party.

Here then is our proposal, as narrow and difficult as it has been carefully considered, which we have worked out in recent weeks to give a sense to the re-foundation of the party and take decisively in hand again those two possible solutions that in recent months appeared to have been lost: the need of carrying the Radical challenge beyond the Italian frontiers and the need of proceeding with the reform of the political system in Italy, which is to say, first of all the reform of the parties even before that of the institutions, by creating those political and institutional facts that after forty years of Christian Democratic hegemony and then the party-power system, can deliver true political democracy to the country and a new phase of its history.

This is a proposal which together with the Treasurer I here formally present to you, asking you to take into account three considerations neither superfluous nor to be taken for granted.

1) To create a true trans-national political movement is not as arduous and difficult as it seems. Probably it will be much harder.

2) This is not an abstract and demagogic proposal. We are interested in Radical politics convincing and winning. We are not fleeting, nor overweeningly ambitious, nor cunning. We are not interested in bearing witness. We are not interested in the judgement of conscience which might always acquit us if it is detached from the court of history which ought always to condemn us.

A journalist once asked me if the trans-national party was not in reality a kind of escapism. This is a question which is making the rounds among ourselves too.

I answered that we were not running away from anything at all, unless - as always - from the danger of mediocrity. Thus, like last year, when we seriously and dramatically posed the question of closing down the party's activities, telling people that no party - even less of a party-power one - has to have eternal life as such, l think we were giving a lesson in how not to be mediocre.

Another journalist told me that the new Radical Party, as it is being painted, is a party created for young athletes who speak foreign languages. I replied that if this were so I would prefer a party created only for old arthritics who only speak Calabrian, also because the so-called young athletes often have arthritis of the brain.

Once an old comrade of mine told me how Pannella explained to him the right way for holding an assembly in a town in the deep South. "Look among the public for a little old lady who seems the least capable of understanding you and speak to her. If she understands, so will everybody else."

Very well: we must look out among us for the Radical who seems least capable of understanding the trans-national venture. If he doesn't finally manage to understand this policy and how to practise it, it would be better to put it aside entirely.

3) One last consideration. This is, precisely, a proposal. It is not closed box either to be accepted or rejected en bloc. The proposal is being made by the outgoing party organs, not by the Federal Council or by anybody else. It is a proposal which is not

only open to all discussion but regarding which we ask for opinions, advice and if necessary even radical corrections in all of its aspects.

We propose that the Radical Party found itself anew and on a trans-national level. We propose this for reasons of ideals, culture and politics. It is no coincidence that this already belongs to our history and tradition, nor that in their youth the Radical leaders were militant, deeply committed European federalists. Nor is it by chance to be sure that the motion of the Florence Congress (during which Altiero Spinelli left us a task and a message - that same Congress in which we considered the possibility of closing down the party's activities) in its first paragraph points out the historical necessity of building a United States of Europe. This same coherence led the Congress to decide to strike out on this road and make the difficult attempt to establish the Radical Party and its politics outside Italy as soon as the threshold of 10,000 members was passed and long before the elections and the referendum vote.

Those who have followed us most carefully all these years, as did for example (and most lucidly) Luigi Manconi, who defined the PR as a democratic-revolutionary lobby with a natural and necessary governing function, but he also called us the only ones "on our continent so far to have manifested, with the battle against extermination from hunger, a trans-national culture". Therefore observers such as he are not amazed that the Radicals now pose the problem of creating Europe as a political subject understood as a multi-ethnic Europe of tolerance; Europe as the centre of trans-national institutions, hence of positive law; the project of a democratic Europe and of individual rights against the projects - which are constantly taking on more shape - for a small Europe based on re-armament and big business deals, and against the failure of the Realpolitik that was betting on economic union to then reach political union and which today must take note that without political union the design for economic integra

tion also goes to pieces. That is the point.

Either the United States of Europe will be created by democrats and reformers by leading this battle, or another Europe is already created. That is why we say that the United States of Europe is neither an overweening ambition or a chimera, but a vital necessity for democracy here and now.

But to animate this battle a political force capable of renouncing its specifically national dimension is necessary: therefore a trans-national party. This means we must make a dramatic choice that - as I have already had cause to say - excludes half measures.

It is not a question of creating an electoral coterie good for one or two per cent for the European or national elections in this or that country (including Italy).

To succeed in the intent of the trans-national party means nothing other than to create the political antithesis to those great powers (economic, energy, military and information) which are already trans-national, and which are so in such an overbearing way as to create ever more trans-national markets and clients. Don't misunderstand me. I do not mean to say that there is a "Big Brother" or the SIM (imperialist system of multinationals) with their well-remembered strategic resolutions. I simply mean to affirm that there is already an Economic Europe and that the great economic and energy markets, the arms and famine markets already exist. We ourselves are already their customers or their victims, our lives themselves do not depend on national choices except in a very marginal way. But the wider the trans-national market spreads, the less desire there is for trans-national powers, elections, institutions and law which could lead the big choices back into the realm of politics.

I merely intend to state that if the contemporary alternative - as many authoritative observers who are anything but Radical affirm - is between a new slavery and a new democracy, the democracy of the year 2000 and of the "global village" can certainly not be based on national parties and institutions. And whoever can venture into a pioneer undertaking of this kind? Whoever can build not a traditional party but the prestigious and active antithesis, the European "Fabian Society" capable of imposing a turning point on the ruling classes with great civil campaigns of public opinion? Will the mastodonic and useless internationals of the parties do it, be they either Christian Democratic, Socialist, Communist or Liberal? Will it be done by a Green politics and culture which is already in crisis on the international level, with a pacifistic neutrality that is the product of missiles, a defeated anti-nuclear stance which is the product of the hundreds of nuclear plants, an approach to politics which is the pr

oduct of recycling the bankrupt movements from the end of the war until today?

I do not think so. And I think (not from presumption but because we are condemned to it by our history and our conscience) that this new frontier can only be opened by that party which is already "the salt of Europe". And who if not the party of all the refusniks and of the great civil rights victories, of the Manifesto of the Nobel Prize winners and of a porno star, of the referendums and of nuclear energy buried only where this party has been able to act, of the ministries of the Third World and the conscientious objectors without a country - who else today can turn itself into a trans-national party and convince people of the need "here and now" of founding the United States of Europe?

For this reason the campaign for the values and hopes of the Radicals in their trans-national guise can neither precede nor follow that for the European institutions but is altogether one with it.

Our European members of parliament have already begun, just in the last few days, the action for presenting motions in the parliaments of various countries and for launching popular petitions for European political unity and the figure of a "Speaker" for Europe which today appears to be necessary and possible.

Furthermore it will be necessary to evaluate, country by country, the possibility and the way of holding popular advisory referendums on the assigning of constituent powers to the next European Parliament which will be elected for the third time by direct popular vote in 1989 and which runs the risk of being manifestly superfluous if not endowed with effective powers, as all the recent polls taken in recent weeks in the countries of the Community tell us - unanimously - that European public opinion demands. This already strikes me as a practicable terrain for active initiatives by everyone, and I say this for all those who ever since finding themselves faced with the idea - which I consider an idea as force - of the trans-national party, have asked for the drafting of a project, a concrete itinerary for trans-national struggle. Perhaps we all have underestimated how much the decision to transfer the party to this dimension is already in itself a political project. It seems to me to be more or less the

same thing that happens with the idea of closing down the party's activities: from the referendums to the campaign for ten thousand members, the policies of the past two years has been nothing else in essence than the consequence of a clear choice, which yet seemed irresponsible to us at the time and instead obliged us to risk and to win.

No one then or now has the solution in his pocket or a magic wand. The challenge, on the contrary, is more difficult and that is why we invest the Congress, the members - in particular the many non-Italian ones who have come to Bologna - with the task of seeking this solution. But that can only happen if we make a basic decision to do so on the party's new operative and political level. Only subsequently can we go on to later more thorough undertakings, and apropos of this it seems to me that besides the simultaneous campaign for the United States of Europe there are at least four other points to which the trans-national party should commit itself with very concrete and non-dispersive initiatives, since that is where the risk obviously lies.

1) It is indispensible to determine a concrete range of non-violent initiatives, not of the ritualistic sort that are rapidly consumed, to strike at totalitarianism and affirm everywhere the rights of individuals, the right to free expression and circulation of ideas, thoughts and people.

Before the Congress, while imagining possible trans-national scenarios and political acts, I cited as examples both the Manifesto of teh Nobel Prize winners and the flight of Mathias Rust that landed on Red Square. Nothing more than examples, these, but it is necessary to think in terms of hard and risky direct actions or of public challenges to regimes that on their own territory do not tolerate people meeting and thinking, holding dialogue, acting and informing public opinion. I believe that Radical imagination has already demonstrated its high professionality in this field, but besides being a question of imagination it is also one of rigour: never have we conducted actions that were ends in themselves, never have we made movements for the sake of movements, but have always had our sights on solid results. It is the same rigour which makes it possible for us today to say that many of those refusniks are really "present" among us who with their slogan "this year in Jerusalem" were adopted by the Radic

als and around whom we constructed an international campaign. Nine symbolic cases, we should remember, were picked out. Well then, Dora Kostantinovskaya emigrated from the USSR in May. Shortly afterwards Cherna Goldort obtained a visa.

Grigory Lemberg was able to leave in September. Ida Nudel, perhaps the best known of them, has been in Israel since October 15, and the same is true of Josef Begun who was liberated in December.

Some are still being held in the Soviet Union although they are no longer imprisoned. They are the violoncellist Alexei Magarik, the electronic engineer Marat Osnis, the cybernetics expert and the architect Grigory and Natalia Rosenstein, waiting to emigrate ever since 1973. And meanwhile there have enrolled in the Radical Party the member of the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences Alexander Lerner, who may be able to leave Moscow in this month of January, and the Tufeld couple (Isolda and Vladimir, the former a physicist and the latter an engineer) who have not obtained a visa and whose son will participate at our Congress in February. As you see, a lot has been done with mobilisation and continuous pressure being put on Soviet political and diplomatic authorities. I believe that this type of battle must not only be corroborated but intensified.

2) I believe that 1988 should be the year for thoroughly testing the possibility and perhaps for already formally establishing an International Anti-Prohibition Drug League, another battle which, as much as it can be carried on by every individual in his home town, appears senseless within restricted national boundaries. A league, one or more European engagements for making a three level attack on the devastating effects of drugs and the criminality that prospers around them, on the recycling of the money they earn, and the reorganisation of those state structures which are conditioned by and are in pawn to this multinational of death (which prospers more and more from harvesting victims but which also corrupts more and more). Thus one should begin with the way the police police anti-drug squads are organised in the awareness that the power and profits of drugs are the true cause not only of disorder but even of coups d'etat and political upheaval in various nations.

3) Initiatives too for laws protecting life and emergency aid in the world's South should be carefully studied and developed. Although thanks to music and conferences public opinion is now more aware, in large part due to our efforts, the evocation and mechanical repetition of slogans and methods used in the past in this fight will certainly not be enough. In particular I would think along lines on the obligatory bonds between laws protecting life and agreements based on European-African interdependence which, if partly already an economic reality, must also begin to take on a distinct form in terms of institutional set-ups. These might seem to be abstract ideas, but they are instead directly connected with the lives and deaths of entire peoples, the ruling classes and the leaders of those countries themselves.

I think it would be the right way to honour his memory: I wonder if within a framework of interdependence between Burkina Faso and Europe Thomas Sankara would have perished and perished in the same way. I remember with what intransigence and passion he defended both the phrase with which he symbolised the new revolutionary state ("La patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons!") and what he called "the necessary recourse to armed force" and the impossibility of proceeding, in the contingency, even to the slightest degree, to the formation of political democracy in his country. Opposing this, Pannella showed him all the theoretical weakness of a battle founded on the concept of national independence and entrusted to the force of arms. Today I wonder, and think that I can ask the friends of Burkina Faso, if it was not primarily these two political errors that were fatal for him. I ask in that kind of friendship of someone who, in order to be the friend of Plate, demands of himself that he be even more the friend o

f truth.

The same parameter, I think, must be applied to the government of Israel, even if not with our friends and guests of the RAZ (the civil rights movement, many of whom are party members) with regard to the Palestinian question. In fact, there is no doubt that every day some Arab regimes inflict violence and torture on their subjects in the midst of a scandalous international silence. There is no doubt that those very Palestinians have suffered even more inhuman treatment under other regimes. There is no doubt that the many national choruses raising their voices against Israel these days are often tongue-tied and accomplices of anti-Jewish violence and of many other violations of human rights. But this is no excuse for justifying decisions and actions of the Israeli government which on the contrary we must condemn in this specific case as in the way the Vanunu trial was conducted, hoping that due attention will be given to our voices of fighters for the rights of the Jews everywhere in the world.

4) After the first experience of the Strasbourg Conference on justice in Italy, it seems to me that a time and place are necessary for drafting a "justice party" on the one hand which should become in a much broader sense "a party of law", and on the other hand a juridical area in Europe that will take on the task of defending the principles of the constitutional state.

These principles are being threatened on the "old continent" today, but which only a new Europe can return to splendour and make illuminate those shadowy areas of the world which otherwise will never know or practise them.

So then, as you see, here are five lines of action, five basic ideas that certainly need to be worked out and selected which we offer to the Congress in order to give an even more concrete start to the debate in the commissions and the assembly. But the presupposition, the criterion which we must confront is the choice that lies ahead of us. I will rapidly summarise the trans-national level of the party and its direct, natural metamorphosis into statutory, political and organisational terms, since the proposal was made public about a month ago and made known to all members through »Notizie Radicali .

In the preamble to the statute, the phrase "Christian and humanistic" has been taken out which was attributed to the commandment "Though shalt not kill", because in other cultures that would lend itself to ambiguity and historically inexact interpretations. The preamble otherwise remains as it was, in all its value and dramatic significance. But it has not been included in the main body of the statute because that would be tantamount to giving an ideological character to the basic laws of the party. The statute remains valid and sufficient in its fundamental structure. Nevertheless the parts have been taken out that refer to the regional parties and the election disciplines - that is to say, the way in which one participates in the elections and the relationship between the party and the elected - since that material is superfluous for political choices contained in the proposal.

The name remains that of the "Radical Party" which will be translated into the native languages of the countries in which we will operate.

With regard to the party's official languages (for the publication of the party's transactions and its organ) it is proposed that we adopt English, French and Italian as well as automatically adopting the native languages spoken by at least 500 members without consideration of where they reside. I know that there is a lot of grumbling regarding the official languages on the part of the Spanish as well as the supporters of Esperanto. I hope they will be understanding and the matter must be gone into more thoroughly during the course of the Congress.

Besides its own headquarters in Italy, the party will establish a co-ordinating centre for action in Brussels as well. In this regard my attention has been called to the importance of Paris as a residence and meeting place for all the principal figures of dissenting movements, and I believe this is a wise observation which ought to be considered.

With regard to the next congress, I think that we Italian comrades ought to make a few sacrifices, not only by giving up a little of our speaking time to allow the old and new non-Italian members to speak, but by assuring that the next congress is held outside our country, in a European city such as Brussels or Strasbourg. This latter strikes me as having all the credentials, logistical as well, for a congress of ours which should be prepared with particular organisational care.

The membership dues in each country are fixed in relation to the GNP according to an elementary criterion of equity, except for the subjects of countries under totalitarian regimes.

The party's political goals and those of its organs essentially consist in initiatives of trans-national import (the first place going to the creation of trans-national institutions and positive law) and never, in any case, in goals of an exclusively national character. The organs foreseen in the proposal are a first secretary, a treasurer, a federal secretariat varying between five and eleven members, and a federal council with a president. Both the secretariat and the federal council will have to represent adequately what are now the embryos of non-Italian Radical life.

Having established the non-electoral and non-territorial characteristics of the Radical associations - of the Radical associations as well - (something which would be a strong contradiction of the trans-national political project) we have nevertheless advanced a hypothesis that strikes me as being very innovative for the life of the party and its way of being and which, somewhat superficially, no one has gone into deeply and discussed up to now.

This would be: to form a Radical association in Italy 60 members would be enough, and 40 members in all other countries (a figure which seems to me, quite rightly, relatively low).

Each association elects automatically a representative to the Federal Council (FC). We realise that in this way that a rather vast deliberating body will be formed; but I think that there is an insurmountable need, all the more in a phase where the new party is being veritably invented, to open the doors of the FC and to allow full and effective participation in the life of the party to old and new comrades, Italian and possibly many non-Italians, who intend to nourish with their commitment and militant struggle an adventure which has great need of this and which can only be fully conceived and precisely defined through living and doing it.

It is just because I am convinced that, whenever this trans-national road should be taken, it will be indispensable to go through a phase of live experimentation concerning the concrete possibilities and feasibility of the project which are still to be invented and discovered, that I do not hesitate to say that there would be nothing wrong in allowing a year of testing to determine the results we can obtain. A year for trying to increase significantly the party's numerical strength (I mean the number of non-Italians, which certainly has its importance, together with the 10-15 thousand members in Italy who are indispensable among other things for giving a much more solid financial basis to the project and chances for realising it). A year for understanding in situations which we often do not know what subjects will arouse the most interest, attention and participation.

This proposal of ours, which we consider for now only to be an effective basis for discussion by all, if it were to be changed into a political motion would, I think, have to explicitly lay claim to and proclaim its provisional character in all respects if it is to be serious, rigorous, and contrary to all abstraction and overweening ambition. Because we have never proceeded by taking leaps into the dark, but rather have insisted on large doses of empiricism and pragmatism for the clarity of our itinerary and the fidelity to our hopes. Thus this is a proposal that wants to fix the organisation of a party that makes a basic choice but is aware of how difficult it will be to succeed and is worked up for a strenuous effort and task, a condition for saving all - and I mean all - its political possibilities.

In this sense we bring up in a problematic way the question of the party symbol. The effigy of Gandhi, emblem of non-violence, has been made ready. But many objections have arisen, legitimate and justified ones, concerning the difficulty for libertarians and a libertarian party to identify and sum itself up in any one person however representative of one of its principal points of departure. Two other symbols have been offered as alternatives, one of which represents a stylised letter R (the initial of the word "radical" as well as of "reform" in many languages) and the other being the single rose of our present symbol which is known in Europe as the symbol of the Socialist parties and so cannot be used. Instead this symbol of ours will be entrusted to the coming party organs, who will have care of it and defend it from improper and illegitimate use by third parties. We are certainly not the ones to hope that this symbol disappears or be put too long in moth balls: on the contrary we hope that it can so

on become the symbol no longer of the PR but, for example, a great new movement for democratic reform of the political system and perhaps the site of the unity - electoral as well - of all the lay forces or else of those who intend to represent a new and modern European left.

But the choice of the Radical Party is quite different which, as such, wants to become the first trans-national party without electoral characteristics since it is certainly not by gathering minimal or even more than minimal electoral percentages in this or that country that it will be possible to reach our goals - beginning with that of the United States of Europe which can only be achieved by strongly influencing in a militant fashion the ruling classes, the national parties, and perhaps the candidates of all the parties at the coming European elections in all the countries of our continent. To this end we need to win over more illustrious and not illustrious Europeans who must know from the start that they are able to join a party without ambitions for power or to compete in the elections - the first trans-national party, yes, but a kind of "second party" for all, beginning with all those in Europe who already are carrying another party card in their pockets and intend to enrich it with this "second

card of conscience".

I am aware, comrades, that what is being proposed to the party is on the whole a rather brusque "wrenching", a "shock re-founding", but our history and our strength also lies in this. Do not imagine that we have arrived at this idea uncritically and without travail, without asking ourselves if we are mature enough for taking an apparently courageous decision and, furthermore, without cultivating any myth or mystical illusion. If, in fact, you should reject a vision of the trans-national party as sweat and blood, tears and torment, one cannot even maintain that this choice would lead us to our Ithaca, a safe port where we could throw anchor. No one thinks of setting out to find beyond the horizon a non-existent promised land. To choose well, it is indispensable first to answer one question - and that is, if in our opinion, in your opinion, the minimal prerequisites exist for attempting this adventure, if the work we have done in all these months has created them, or if instead they do not exist at all. O

utside Italy the party has today 79 members in Belgium, 47 in Switzerland, 44 in Spain, 55 in Portugal, 41 in Turkey, 29 in France, 12 in West Germany, 18 in Poland, 8 in Yugoslavia, 5 in Greece, 7 in the Unites States of America, 3 in the Soviet Union, 6 in Israel, 4 in Great Britain, 5 in Luxembourg, as well as one member in Austria, Argentina, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Denmark, Benin, Japan, Jamaica, Kenya, Cameroon, Holland, Sweden, Venezuela, Tanzania, Malaysia, Norway, and since a few days ago, in Malta. Thank you, comrade Brincat, ex Minister of Justice, for your Radical Party card. A total of 400 names which we recommend that each one of you read in a moment of leisure. From a minister to an unemployed person, from a dissident to a journalist - once again it is a question of a sociological split of age, of race, of the reasons which have led to the Radical Party, highly interesting, original, curious. It is a matter of aggregations which are often entirely disorganised (there are small headquarters only

in Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Istanbul and Athens), but despite this it is my opinion that the minimum prerequisites exist for attempting the adventure and playing the card of the trans-national party, on the condition, however, that one is aware of a few things.

Personally, during this period of activity concerning the trans-national proposal, I have formed some notions, starting evidently from the conviction that the trial of these months cannot help but have a permanent character inasmuch as one cannot hope to have permanently at one's disposal such valid and generous Italian comrades (as in these last months we have had Camerini, Ottoni, Caterina Caravaggi, Andreani and Don Vito - and excuse me if I do not name them all) transferred elsewhere as permanent staff. Everywhere I have gone, however, I have found the Radical Party much better known and more esteemed than I would have been able to expect. I don't know if there are not strange tam-tams, I do not know how and why, but truly I have found an unimaginable amount of curiosity, of information and thirst for more concerning this Radical affair. Awareness, therefore, of the potential that exists and also of the expectations. Awareness, furthermore, of how our model of trans-national party has nothing in com

mon with traditional party organisation models (headquarters, sections, millions of members, establishment of territories, bureaucracy and apparatus), and thus is disposed to co-ordinate actions and initiatives in very flexible ways.

And finally, direct experience has shown that to function in this way involves a clear-cut choice of priorities, that is to say it means "to think trans-national" and to "act trans-national" as our comrade Dell'Alba has it, whom I want to thank for the decisive help he has given me, just as I thank the European Parliament members for their stimulating collaboration.

Thus, if we choose to put trans-nationalism at the centre of our politics, as I hope we will, we must do so with the awareness of these things. But it is at this point in our reasoning on the trans-national party, on the party that in order to be up to the mark of this challenge cannot have specifically electoral goals and characteristics (unless the United States of Europe or at least a serious process towards European political unity were soon to become a reality, in which case I think it would behoove us to reconsider this basic orientation) - it is at this point that in the pre-congressional period objections have arisen, even in myself as well as among us all, which at first seemed to me very sensible, in a very good conservative spirit - something which is not by any means always negative inasmuch as to preserve the wealth of a political heritage is something serious, not something bad - but which little by little became not very understandable to me. I will sum them up in a few phrases. This choi

ce means abandoning Italy, withdrawing from the scene, entering a blind alley; to omit running in the elections is folly, we will lose the public financing resources to keep alive that jewel of a public service which is Radical Radio, it is to desert from the great battles, old and new, which we are called upon to lead. I want to be very clear on these points. First I want to say that I deeply respect these doubts, these worries, that at times become torments which many comrades feel not for themselves but for the party. In fact, intellectually I find doubts of this kind more respectable than a possible "daredevil" attitude for the trans-national choice, a bit superficial and irresponsible, which fortunately has not made its appearance as yet. Nevertheless, in the present debate these objections strike me as unjustified and unmotivated.

Possibly the whole dilemma arises not from the thing one is observing, but from the way in which one observes it, and this is not a question of pessimism or optimism (there are those who see a glass half full and those who see it half empty) but of politics, entirely of politics. But I beg your pardon - the party that has realised that the great reform of our time is, on the political-institutional level, that of the United States of Europe and to function on a trans-national level, why in the world should it exclude rather than include, motivate, and re-launch the battle for the democratic reform of the political system which is the really indispensable reform for Italy? And why, and who has ever said that although the party as such may re-found itself on a trans-national level and thus no longer have specifically Italian characteristics, that this means there are no longer Radical policies in Italy and for Italy?

Quite the contrary. Without a specifically Italian party it will be indispensable to increase Radical politics in Italy, and every militant, every person must know this and feel the full weight of responsibility it carries. I say each Radical and not certainly the parliamentary groups alone, the elected representatives, since to give them a blanket proxy would mean to free oneself from a residual, routine management of something which, in accepting our proposal, one does not in the least intend to leave behind one but rather to re-launch, to build something new in Italy too. Withdrawal? But this choice involves and demands a precise political itinerary!

Dear Comrades (first you, then all the others);

Dear party-power system which is in crisis and reeling as a system and is now squawking loudly for self-reform because it has reached the end of its political rope;

Dear party top levels who ten years ago pre-empted Parliament by making the decisions that count only in and among your secretariats, and today, bewildered, you note that the decisions that count are no longer made in your secretariats because they are being made elsewhere where they don't give a hoot about the primacy of politics;

Dear Mrs. Jotti (20), you who know how indispensable it is to alter the trick of the system, you who know that three parties hold 80% of the vote and so you manage to maintain that reform is certainly necessary, but you mean the reform of the remaining 20%;

Dear Bettino (21) and Claudio (22), comrades who are so necessary for seeing to it that after 40 years Italian Socialism can catch not only the falling sceptres of power, but also and more important the banners of hope and reform, not therefore those - probably from fear rather than conviction - for the defence of the patrimony and the piddling counter-reforms;

Dear Communist comrades, you who have for the first time received us in your headquarters for more than three hours where we spoke to each other politically and personally not like enemies, and yet you rightly say that the crux of the matter lies in the reform of the parties and creation of a European left;

Dear Green and Proletarian Democratic comrades - and on the other hand dear Liberal friends - who petition together with us for civil and political requests of enormous importance which so often fall into the abysmal and myopic inattention of the political and information spheres;

Dear newspaper editors, you who by now thunder daily against the guilty Roman palaces of power, not rarely without making any distinctions at all, and not rarely remaining silent about other, far more important palaces, possibly including your own;

Dear Montanelli (23 ), who, with all the respect due to you, have during the election campaign and in recent days we feel given space and publicity to those who for their direct, calculating interests, electoral ones as well, have inflicted an absurd blow (or far too clear a one) against the strong and limpid League for the English-Style Uninominal System which has already been supported by hundreds of parliamentarians and authoritative figures;

Dear men of culture, editorial writers and commentators, who have often followed and encouraged analyses and reform proposals advanced by Pannella and the Radicals;

And Dear Fellow Italian Citizens, who are certainly not a few, who no longer intend to submit to a regime which in every aspect of public life (from justice to social security, from health to information) is not capable of maintaining respect for the rules because it itself has none and does not respect them;

and so Dear All of You, it seems to me that we are proposing here, in the light of the flood of words being spent on the great reforms, which are in danger in the best of cases of becoming little anti-reforms, that the Radicals are the first party of the Republic to announce that it will not run as a party in the elections any more.

And you well know that this is an announcement by a party that has seats in Parliament as well as an announcement of the party that has never put its hand into the party-power pork barrel. You also know that we are not motivated in this by moralising on the horror that the elections arouse or the corruption they cause. It is obvious that one makes politics also by using in one way or another the election dates. It is obvious and legitimate - in some cases a duty - that individual Radicals, as persons, become candidates and ask for the necessary strength to affirm their goals and projects in the institutions too. But given these reasons, we say that as a party for us (but as parties, as "these" parties, also for all the others) there is no longer any sense in functioning, no true political sense, if one is not able to bring about reforms.

Therefore we are doing our all by taking a truly trans-party step for true democratic reforms of the institutions, the parties, of politics and the way in which it is practised. And we do it, in essence, by declaring our party's unilateral electoral disarmament.

Is there anyone interested in reasoning together with us, in understanding the things we ought to do together, in not reacting like the usual Pinocchio coming to grips with the usual talking cricket?

We do not believe in election reforms in themselves except as the natural, unavoidable consequence of the necessary party reforms which is the only really serious problem on the boards: the democratic reform of the party-power system. That is why we have proposed the straight English-style uninominal system. Furthermore, we think that direct democracy must be defended and extended (in an epoch in which there is more and more desire to choose personally, on specific questions, by-passing the parties) and the local agencies and great metropolitan areas in particular drastically reformed since it is no longer acceptable that a Milanese should be forced to take an attitude of sacrosanct, contempt and indifference towards the orgy going on at the municipality in which everyone is participating and where every kind of behaviour can be seen, only to rediscover that in the end nothing changes and the system is simply buffoonery.

These are our ideas, which we are ready to discuss however with anyone who wants to, with those who think they have wiser recipes. Besides this we are interested in leading the battles for federalism and European union and other battles are ready to go, beginning with several referendum requests that have already been presented.

Thus we propose that the party make this choice and above all that it endow all possible interlocutors with their real significance. Certainly to bet one's life, to bet without a net on the creation of something new is always difficult. But it is a precise road to be followed and I say again that it is part of our history, our strength. If we choose the trans-national party, does that mean abandoning of politics in Italy? No. If we make this choice then we will have the real party of reform, even of the reform of the Italian political system; then we will have the party of democracy and law. Allow me to say this: here we have the Radical Party that chooses and founds itself anew on a level consonant with its history.

But whoever is asking Radical militants when they register as party members, members of the trans-national party, to renounce creating within the party or its associations leagues or movements for democratic reform or specific issues?

This proposal does not ask the Spaniard, the Greek or the Turk to be exclusively a member and a militant of the Trans-national Radical Party. Why should it ask that of the Italian? And why should a comrade of Agrigento not be where he lives a member of the party and militant of the trans-national battles (which I listed earlier) as well as a leading spirit of the League for Uninominal Reform, a political person, then, who promotes that proposal in the parties and groups of his city, as well as a leader - on the local level - of the League for Water in Sicily which is a serious, concrete, vital necessity for hundreds of thousands of people and which someone like Sciascia (24) is waiting and ready to help promote?

I don't think any medical doctor who would forbid him this, nor any trans-national first party secretary who would contest it. On the contrary, I presume he would be very pleased about it.

Who then would be entrusted with the development, the revival, the necessary growth of specifically Italian Radical politics?

Every militant would be, every group and association, every one who feels himself to be a Radical, everyone who knows how dramatic and difficult the challenge of the trans-national party is. But for that very reason he also knows how necessary it is to roll up his sleeves, because political reform in Italy is an integral part of our hopes. The Congress thus must put the heavy responsibility for creating the trans-national party into someone's hands - hands which I think must be as robust and expert as necessary. Then, if one feels the need of a specific point of reference, of a centre for specifically Italian initiatives, there is nothing to stop one from imagining an ad hoc organ, or, for example, delegating powers for this purpose to a comrade of the Secretariat or a vice-secretary.

Thus like the entire proposal, these decisions too - secondary to the trans-national choice - are submitted entirely to the Congress for evaluation, emphasising that there are no closed solutions and no miraculous recipes.

I have finished, comrades. I would never have believed the day would come when I would find myself proposing that the party change its symbol, with everything it signifies. If I look at the symbol which has accompanied us all these years, and which with Peppino, we propose to entrust to the custody of the party, there comes to my mind, more from nostalgia than hope and attention to the future, a phrase of Pasolini (25) that a comrade reminded me of during a meeting of the Federal Council: "All I know is that in this rose I am able to breathe".

If I look at the new, possible symbols, they disturb me instinctively, for all that I know them to be necessary.

Only 12 years separate us from the year 2000. Those who hurry usually make mistakes. But it is right that our party should feel and respond to the things that now press us with all their urgency, to the things that are necessary.

----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Bocca, Giorgio - (Cuneo 1920) Italian journalist, collaborator on the Rome daily »La Repubblica , author of books and biographies, among them one on Palmiro Togliatti.

2) Tortora, Enzo - (Genoa 1928 - Milan 1988) Journalist and famous television MC, arrested for drug pushing. Elected to the European Parliament in 1984 on the Radical ticket, he underwent a famous trial in which he was convicted, only to be absolved on appeal. This occasion became the symbol of the Radicals' most important campaign for the reform of justice.

3) Calogero, Guido - (Rome 1904 - 1986) Italian philosopher. He developed a moral philosophy characterised by a strong civic commitment based on the principle of "dialogue". Among his writings: »Lezioni di filosofia (1946-47), »Logo e dialogo (1950), and numerous articles appearing in the weekly

»Il Mondo . One of the founders of the Radical Party.

4) A trial of intellectuals of »Autonomia Operaia , a small far-left party, accused of being Red Brigades leaders. They were ultimately acquitted.

5) Cicciolina - Stage name of porno artist Ilona Staller, Hungarian (Budapest 1951), elected to Parliament in 1987 on the Radical lists.

6) Reale law - Refers to Reale, Oronzo (Lecce 1902), PRI secretary from 1949 - 1964, at various times Minister of Justice and author of a severe public order giving emergency powers to the police. The law intended to fight terrorism during the Red Brigades period (1975). During a referendum (1988) promoted by the Radical Party for abrogating the Reale Law, 76% of the voters were in favour of retaining it.

7) Leone, Giovanni - (Naples 1908) Prime Minister (1963 -'68) and then of the Republic (1971 -'78) forced to resign because of his involvement in the Lockheed scandal, subsequent to the referendum on public financing of political parties promoted by the Radicals.

8) Pertini, Sandro - (Stella 1896 - Rome 1990) Italian statesman, Socialist, imprisoned and sent into exile by the Fascists. From 1943 - 1945 fought in the Resistance. Secretary of the Socialist Party, deputy, Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies (1968 -1976), President of the Republic (1978 -1985).

9) Craxi, Bettino - (Milan 1934) Italian statesman, Socialist, deputy from 1968, prime minister, Secretary of the PSI since 1976, he profoundly changed the party's physiognomy making it the centre of a broad design of reforms, including institutional ones, and unifying Socialist forces.

10) Spadolini, Giovanni - (Florence 1925) Historian and statesman, editor of the Bologna daily »Resto del Carlino (1955-68) and of Milan's »Corriere della Sera (1968-72), Minister of Culture (1974-76), Secretary of the Italian Republican Party since 1979 and then Prime Minister in 1981. At present he is Speaker of the Senate.

11) Piccoli, Flaminio - (Kirchbichl, Austria 1915) Italian statesman. He was Secretary of the DC (1969; 1980-82). He has also been Speaker of the Chamber's Foreign Affairs Commission.

12) Negri, Toni - (Padua 1933) Italian far-leftist philosopher and writer, revolutionary and workers' champion, he was found guilty of ordering the assassination of an engineer Saronio. Nominated as a candidate on the Radical ticket (on the condition that he refuse parliamentary immunity and stand trial) he was elected deputy in 1983. But he left Italy surreptitiously and found exile in France where he still resides.

13) Tortora, Enzo - (Genoa 1928 - Milan 1988) Journalist and famous television MC, arrested for drug pushing. Elected to the European Parliament in 1984 on the Radical ticket, he underwent a famous trial in which he was convicted, only to be absolved on appeal. This occasion became the symbol of the Radicals' most important campaign for the reform of justice.

14) De Felice, Renzo - Historian and best-known as author of a biography of Benito Mussolini. Leader of the faction of historical "revisionists" who intend to promulgate a different, more positive vision of Fascism's role in Italy.

15) La Malfa, Ugo - (Palermo 1903 - Roma 1979) Italian statesman, among the founders of the Partito d'Azione (Action Party) (1942) he then joined the Republican Party (1948) transforming it in the attempt to make it into the modern liberal party connected with the forces of production. He was party secretary from 1965-75, and then president. He was at various times Prime Minister and Vice Prime Minister (1974-76). One of the fathers of the liberalisation of commerce after the war.

16) COBAS - Wildcat labour unions.

17) Talking cricket - refers to the sage insect in Collodi's famous book »Pinocchio .

18) Practising Socialism - In Italian Socialismo reale, a phrase coined by the Radicals and eventually taken up by the rest of the left, which refers to Socialism in all of its negative anti-democratic and degenerate party-form aspects as it is practised in the Eastern countries.

19) Spinelli, Altiero - (Roma 1907 - 1922). During Fascism (1929-1942) he was imprisoned as leader of the Communist Youth. In 1942 he drafted together with Ernesto Rossi the »Manifesto di Ventotene which affirmed that only a federalist Europe could impede the return of the fratricidal wars in Europe and regain for the continent a prominent place on the world scene. At the end of the war he founded the European Federalist Movement with Rossi, Eugenio Colorni and others. After the crisis of the European Defence Community (1956) he became a member of the European Commission from which point of observation he criticised the evolution of the Community's structures. In 1979 he was elected to the European Parliament on the Italian Communist Party ticket (PCI), becoming the guiding spirit in the realisation of the project for a treaty adopted by that Parliament in 1984 and known as the "Spinelli Project".

20) Jotti, Nilde - (Reggio Emilia 1920) A major figure in the Italian Communist Party (PCI), she was the companion of Palmiro Togliatti. Speaker of the Chamber from 1979 - 1992.

21) Bettino - see Craxi, note 9.

22) Martelli, Claudio - Prominent Socialist leader, presently Minister of Justice.

23) Montanelli, Indro - (Fucecchio 1909) Italian journalist and writer. Famous for his letters from Hungary in 1956. After many years working with »Il Corriere della Sera he disagreed with its policies and left in 1974 to found »Il Giornale Nuovo whose respected managing editor he has been ever since. Has written successful books.

24) Sciascia, Leonardo - (Racalmuto 1921 - Palermo 1990) Writer, author of famous novels, but also a noted polemic essayist, he participated in Italian civic life for at least twenty years. For one term (1979-1983) he was also a Radical Deputy who fought energetically in civil rights cases (the Tortora case, etc.).

25) Pasolini, Pierpaolo - (Bologna 1922 - Roma 1975) Italian writer and film director. Novels (»Ragazzi di vita , 1955; »Una vita violenta 1959), poetry (»Le ceneri di Gramsci 1957, etc.) theatre, cinema (»Accattone 1961, »The Gospel According to St. Matthew 1964, etc.). But above all he was a formidable polemicist and moralist who denounced the misdeeds of the "middle class" and harshly criticised the Italian left for its incapacity. A sympathiser of the Radical Party concerning which he wrote beautifully, he was to deliver a speech at the party's Florence congress on the day he was killed.