ABSTRACT: The day after the conclusion of the radical party's congress in Bologna (January 1988), Gianfranco Spadaccia explains, during an interview, the meaning of some of the most important decisions taken on that occasion.

(Radical News N. 1 of 9 January 1988)

This choice of becoming a transnational party has raised many perplexities, not only in the public opinion but also at the congress. Forty years ago, the communists gave up the idea of an international. The socialist International seems, at this point, little more than an agreement of consultations: therefore it is hard to understand the degree to which, in a society as complex as ours, the radical party will achieve a passage of such importance, and - especially - according to which program.

The decision isn't the result of a sudden idea; the Radical Party has never added the adjective "Italian" in its denomination; in the recent past, it has even had a non-Italian secretary, Jean Fabre. The campaigns we have carried out have always been of an internationalist nature, such as the one against world hunger. Today we believe the organizational step is both necessary and urgent. Clearly, we have suffered two defeats in this field: the campaign against world hunger and the project for the relaunching of the project of the United States of Europe. The conclusion we have drawn is that there are problems which, for their supranational and international nature, cannot even be conceived in national terms. I'm referring, for example, to the problems of the environment, including the destruction of the forests in central Europe or the desertification in Africa, the problem of the struggle against world hunger or that of the relations between industrialized world and countries of the Third World, or the prob

lems relative to crime and drugs. But there is also a vital problem of democracy. Even in England, the most anti-federalist and anti-European country, the English manufacturers' association is pushing toward the single market. Therefore we would have an accentuation of the processes of international liberalization, a further dispossession of the democratic controls of the national Parliaments, and would instead have a growth in the technocratic powers of the great lobbies and of the international bureaucracies, both of the EC one and of the one of the party Internationals, which represent the crystallization of the national impotences. The need to go beyond a national perspective is felt even elsewhere, and together we can possibly find common answers. We don't see why we should have relations only with the Italian political forces, and not with the political forces of the other European countries as well: in fact, even if we succeeded in mobilizing Italy, we would only have reached 5 or 10% of the solution

of these problems.

The radical party has lately been characterized by two phenomenons: on the one hand, especially after the referendums, the hypothesis of the lay-socialist area has collapsed, in the sense that there is a further process of fermentation and coagulation around the republicans or the socialists. The radical project, of reaching a 20% front on a single hypothesis, has had no effect. On the other hand, the party has started a cautious communication with the communist party. Considering today's political climate in Italy, couldn't it be that yours is an escape from the European problems, considering also the contribution which the radicals have given in the past in terms as a movement (I'm thinking of divorce, abortion...)? Also, with reference to your previous statements, we would like to underline a couple more perplexities.

The radical Party has the merit of a series of important intuitions: for example, the East-West bipolarity and the acknowledgment of the North-South contradictions. As regards the recent phenomenons of immigration, do you think a transnational party can better face the problems connected to it? Or are you not "escaping" the problem, also in this case?

I don't think we are people who escape problems. We have also repeated that the fact of not competing in the elections concerns the radical party "as such". Those who believe the radicals are for sale or can be easily sold will be deceived. We have offered a complete availability, which clearly presumes a similar availability from the others. Those who consider this a form of suicide or despair or escape are mistaken. Clearly, for a person who risks remaining stuck in a marsh, it is better for him to get out of it, possibly even facing the open sea, rather than remaining there and seeking for a solution there. This is not an escape, but the quest for other priorities; this is improving the dialogue with the other political forces from stagnant relations of force to contents of political struggle, precise objectives and values.

We understand that you do not rule out the possibility for single radical exponents, not the radical party as such, to continue to work on this project of the lay-socialist area.

During an entire legislature, we worked on a dialogue, we created new possibilities of relationship, in the left and not only in the left; at a certain point, these relations ave been interrupted. For example, we sought a dialogue with all the lay forces, therefore also with the republican party. To make another example, it is us who accelerated the "green" phenomenon, without narrow-minded jealousies, even if this cost was some initial hostility. Facts proved that we were right. This has produced positive relations with the Greens. We do not mean to interrupt our relations with the socialist party. And as for the communist party, it may be that ancient oppositions can be overcome. But to answer your question, Italy is not a racist country because it has had no reason to be racist until now; however it is not immunized from racism. What will happen when the phenomenon of immigration will further increase? Other nations, possibly more racist than ours in appearance, will know how to face the problem better th

an us. As for Europe, some fear a sort of European super-nationalism or neo-Imperialism; there could be temptations in that sense, but we must not be afraid of creating new powers and of struggling in order to endow these powers with democratic bases and controls. Today we are trying to update Spinelli's (2) intuitions. A proposal we are making is that of creating another referent compared to the current one: the president of the executive committee will no longer be appointed by the governments, but elected by the European parliament and by the national parliaments. We are witnessing the growth of a technocratic problem and the elimination of the controls of the democratic powers in Europe, and we want to create a different referent from the intergovernmental and national one of the bureaucracies of the 3 or 4 major party groupings. We want to create a serious parliamentary referent as a source of democratic legitimacy for the EC institutions and powers. This is why we are seriously considering Giscard's id

ea of a co-president of the E.C.'s council of ministers, elected by the European Parliament, by the national parliaments, and who would be in office not for six months but throughout the entire legislature of the European parliament. These are precise political solutions. On these issues we can hold referendums in several countries. At the same time, we also want to draw the attention once again on the struggle against world hunger as a European problem.

Regarding the series of new points you were talking about above, there has been the debate on the Concordat, during the discussion about the teaching of religion in schools. The communists have also started to revise their positions. You have created the anti-Concordat league....

No, we simply foreshadowed it: we were waiting for the Independent Left to tackle the issue. In particular, we were interested in the opinions of Luciano Guerzoni and Pierluigi Onorato...Possibly the outcome was influenced by our bad relations with "La Repubblica", which many exponents of the Independent Left work for, or the conflicts on the referendum on the justice system. Many of them were in favour of a "nay". We waited because we didn't want to do anything that could exclude this sector of the anti-Concordat movement as it is expressed in Parliament. Therefore, with Teodori (3) and Strik Lievers, we simply collected the first adhesions, and we hope that with the liberals on the one side and the comrades from Democrazia Proletaria on the other, with part of the socialists, with exponents of the Catholic and non-Catholic world, we can re-open the anti-Concordat question. Craxi (4) himself made an interesting hint to the question when he discovered it was necessary to revise the treaty, even though everyt

hing was dismissed with the bad solution of the hour of religion. As far as the communist party is concerned, Occhetto (5) has made cautious but interesting hints. In the debate on the hour of religion, I underlined it in Parliament, Occhetto referred to Cavour's motto "a free Church in a free State". Occhetto is no idiot, and obviously this motto cannot be applied to pro-Concordat solutions. At the time it seemed to me as a way of re-opening the matter, albeit cautiously, also inside the communist party itself. Unfortunately, the problem with this country is the slow pace at which political processes advance. I do not share many of the positions supported by Bruno Zevi, however he has said a very true thing: that the opposite of what happened in "Il Gattopardo" is taking place: the essence there was that "everything must change (on a political level) in order for nothing to change (on the social level and in terms of the country's civilization)", whereas today the opposite is taking place: in forty years, n

othing has remained immobile in this society because everything has changed, for good or for bad, in the life style, in the civilization, even in the Church, and politically speaking everything has remained the same. This is the real anomaly of the Italian situation. It is the opposite of "Il Gattopardo".

How did the bulk of the party react on seeing the crisis in militancy, the crisis of the movements that we are experiencing in a dramatic way, especially in the left? Are there concrete spaces to operate?

I believe there are open fields to carry out political projects. First of all, there is the field of the party's specific activity: in other words, the transnational activity will be valid also for those who operate in France, but especially and even more so for will there be subjects of transnational but also of national interest. Clearly, steps will need to be taken in the fields in which we are best organized, in order to achieve them, assert them and advance them. Then there is a field which is empty, the field of the convergence with the other political forces, which needs to be filled in ways that need to be invented. We have started a period of refoundation which probably leads us outside of institutional politics "as" Radical Party. I remember that already in 1963, to those who offered us, the year before, to enter the institutions taking the short cut of running in other parties' lists, we had the courage not to refuse, but to say that we would have entered the institutions with civil rights, with d

ivorce, or that we would not re-enter them, as happened. In those ten years, the external relation with the political forces was not a relation of rejection against those who were in the institutions; it was a lively, contradictory relation, based on the contents of political initiative. There is a field of political initiative also beyond the institutional policy. If the problem were that of having parliamentarians, we would have proven to be capable of solving it alone; we do not open up "markets", we will not beg other parties. I believe this choice can open a profitable season, in which our relation with the other Italian political forces can become, in the long run, the same type of relation we want to create with the Belgian or French or Spanish socialists, or with the German or Dutch Christian democrats, or with the Green or French "Greens". The only problem of true division and of delay is that of the symbol of Gandhi, related to the issue of violence/nonviolence. I don't think the radical party want

ed to reject Gandhi's teaching of nonviolence. There are contradictions, because it is not an ideological party and it requires no faith in a given theory, in a given praxis. The specific reservations of some people on this subject have unfortunately been advanced at a moment of passage from old to new, at a moment of a crisis of identity which expressed itself in the fact of clinging to the old symbol (the rose in the fist) of the electoral and referendum victories; a symbol which could not be used in the rest of Europe, where it is recognized as a socialist symbol. I hope it is only a crisis of identity, because I have to say that the choice of nonviolence as a radically alternative theory and praxis of the political struggle has been an outstanding radical heritage, which enabled us to be not legalists nor revolutionaries, but of being reformers and revolutionaries in a different sense, and gave us the strength to indicate an alternative to those who, despairing, found no other force but those represented

by weapons and armed revolt. If members of Prima Linea are in the radical party today, if Vesce is now a radical parliamentarian, despite Toni Negri (6), if Franceschini, who was sentenced by a jury of which Adelaide Aglietta (7) was part of, is now in the radical party, if we managed to speak to these people, this was thanks to our being concretely nonviolent and Gandhian.

edited by Andrea Bianchi and Umberto Brancia

Translator's notes

(1) IL GATTOPARDO. Title of a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), a verist-decadent representation of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of the Risorgimento.

(2) SPINELLI ALTIERO. ( 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".

(3) TEODORI MASSIMO. (Force 1938). Italian member of Parliament and senator. Among the founders of the Italian Communist Party. Architecture graduate, professor of American history at the State University, at the John Hopkins University and at the LUISS. In Parliament he has focussed on the problems relative to the greatest political scandals. Expert in electoral techniques.

(4) CRAXI BETTINO. (Milan 1934). Italian politician. Socialist, deputy since 1968. Appointed secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1976, he operated important changes in the party's phisiognomy, turning it into the core of a wide project of institutional and other reforms and of unity of the socialist forces.

(5) OCCHETTO ACHILLE. (Turin 1936). Italian politician. At first exponent of Ingrao's group, he then shifted to Berlinguer's centre. He became secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1988, succeeding Alessandro Natta. After launching the idea of a major "Constituent" of the left with all reformist forces, he then decided to change only the name of the party ("Party of democratic Left").

(6) NEGRI TONI. (Padua 1933). Italian writer and philosopher, exponent of the laborite and revolutionary extreme Left, was convicted as the architect of the assassination of ing. Saronio. Ran on the Radical Party ticket (provided he waive his parliamentary immunity and accepted the trial), he was elected member of Parliament in 1983. He escaped his trial by fleeing clandestinely to France, where he currently lives.

(7) AGLIETTA ADELAIDE. (Turin 1940). Currently President of the Green Group at the European Parliament. Former member of the Italian Parliament, Secretary of the radical Party in 1977 and in 1978, year in which she was chosen to be part of the popular jury at the trial in Turin against the Red Brigades and Renato Curcio. Promoter of the Turin-based CISA (Information Centre on Abortion and Sterilization).