ABSTRACT: At the last meeting of the FC before the congress, the Secretary recalled the decisive decisions adopted by the FC of 1988 and then went on to confront the question of the possible closing down of the party and the difficulties of those who do not join the PR because they are afraid of its closing down. Was the trans-national choice an ambitious error, a failed grand illusion? Given the outburst of new "springs" inside and outside the Soviet empire on the one hand, and the failure of the Radical undertaking in the all the large countries of the European Community on the other, an effective response could be the establishment of the PR in the Eastern European countries. There is only one question: "What to do?" There are two possible answers: a strong membership and self-financing campaign or proceeding without hesitation to the closing down of the party.

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Dear Comrades,

In keeping to the decisions adopted at Bohinj, this is the last meeting in 1988 of the Radical Party's Federal Council. (We will meet once more just before the beginning of the Congress, but only to study and approve the order of the day.)

We all know the reasons and the events which have led to postponing of the 35th Congress until the end of next March - for the first time in our history - thus not fulfilling the statutory duty of holding the Congress each year on the pre-established date.

I take this occasion to greet and thank our comrades residing in Italy and Yugoslavia, and in particular the Slovenian Socialist Youth League which, with its assiduous participation, made a decisive contribution to that important result which was the holding of our Federal Council meeting in Bohinj.

Despite our solicitations and the devoted work of our comrades who persevere in the work of affirming and developing the presence of the party in this country, the hopes once again expressed by the Federal Council and which are contained in the motion approved at Bohinj for obtaining approval to hold the Congress in Belgrade, Ljubljana or Zagabria has not had a positive outcome. But we still hope for the opportunity of opening a dialogue with the authorities and other official organisations of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and its individual republics which will be as open and useful as the one begun with the comrades of the Slovenian Socialist Youth League.

It is my conviction that the decisions and the activities of the party during 1988, if studied with enough attention, put into relief the effort and dedication of all our comrades in attempting to overcome difficulties whose vastness and complexity, to my mind, the party has rarely encountered in its history.

THE ENCOUNTER AMONG THE PARTY'S STATUTORY ORGANS

In particular, the road we have travelled this year was also marked by the encounter among the party's statutory organs: First Secretary, Treasurer and Secretariat on the one hand and the Federal Council on the other.

The frequency and regularity of the Federal Council's meetings held this year and our comrades' extraordinary participation in its work, both quantitatively and qualitatively, have been a new element in the life of the party and have given this encounter not only the stamp of continuity but also substance and a capacity for dialogue that have created a feeling of effective confidence among these organs despite moments of particularly vigorous and relevant dialectics.

THE "LEADING" ROLE OF THE FEDERAL COUNCIL

During the year a "leading" role" for the Federal Council

thus emerged which is one of its tasks foreseen in the statute but which the Federal Council had never so strongly assumed in the past.

On the eve of the 35th Congress I consider it important to recall the moments in which the Federal Council's decisions were decisive in our common undertaking.

BRUSSELS

In Brussels

- The Federal Council did not consider that - in terms of the statute - the Bologna motion was binding, according to the proposal presented in the Council;

- The First Secretary - consistent with what he declared at the Congress - in his report foresaw the need of calling a special Congress if the progress of the membership and self-financing drive could not guarantee the accomplishment of the goals set in the motion: the Federal Council, even though accepting the goals and deadlines proposed in the report, excluded the eventuality of a special Congress.

MADRID

In Madrid

- The Federal Council, in approving the report of the First Secretary and the Treasurer, noted that on the basis of the first four months of activity it would be impossible for the party to reach the goals set by the Bologna motion by the end of the year.

GROTTAFERRATA

At Grottaferrata

- The First Secretary and the Treasurer proposed along with the of special self-financing and membership drive, the blocking of all activity for implementing the Bologna motion in order to try defending the continuity of the party which was threatened by the serious financial crisis and the insufficient number of memberships;

- The Federal Council instead gave them a mandate that "included preparing to close down the party - preparations that were obligatory in the present serious financial crisis".

JERUSALEM

In Jerusalem

- The First Secretary and the Treasurer, in verifying the inadequate results of the self-financing and membership drive they had promoted and conducted, and in assuming full responsibility for this situation, resigned their mandate to the Federal Council in order to allow the Congress's substitute organ to freely adopt the most suitable provisions and solutions;

- The Federal Council took note in its concluding motion of the inadequate results achieved, approved the report of the First Secretary and the Treasurer and twice rejected their resignations while committing them, together with confirmation of calling the Zagabria Congress, to prepare the formal mechanisms required for the possible closing down of the party.

All these decisions were proposed by Giovanni Negri in Brussels, by Marco Pannella in Madrid, Grottaferrata and Jerusalem, and approved by wide majorities of the Federal Council.

TRIESTE - BOHINJ

In Trieste and at Bohinj the meeting was highly involved in the events which had the Federal Council as their protagonist. This did not prevent an intense and useful debate which deepened the aspects and terms of the problem that did and does worry us so much: the possible closing down of the party.

THE POSSIBLE CLOSING DOWN OF THE PARTY

I consider that debate to have produced important clarifying elements and reciprocal understanding.

Here in Strasbourg Paolo Vigevano will describe to you the way in which it will be possible secure by the end of March those prerequisites which in Jerusalem were recognised as indispensable for allowing us during the Congress to decide on closing down, freely and without formal impediments due to financial conditions and the budget situation.

These prerequisites will be secured notwithstanding the postponement of the Congress (not foreseen in Jerusalem) which has involved us in another three months of full, intense activity. And for this result the Treasurer's dedication must have our recognition.

But we cannot hide the fact from ourselves that the possibility of closing down the party - a possibility that we cannot ignore - has generated among our militants, our members and our sympathisers worry and disorientation, doubts and uncertainties, ambiguity and incomprehension, almost as if the party's directiorial organs had been seized by a destructive and self-destructive fury in bringing up and facing the question.

THE REASONS FOR CONSIDERING CLOSING DOWN THE PARTY ARE POLITICAL

The reasons that lead us to consider the question are political in nature even more than they are economic and financial. Above all they aim at safeguarding our heritage of ideals, our values and the sense of our history. But they also allow us to have the strength to seek other solutions that will permit us to live and not be overcome by useless efforts merely to survive.

We are going through a difficult situation which inevitably weighs most heavily and immediately on our Italian comrades and thus also on our new memberships.

The Treasurer will discuss this aspect as well as the question of who has the right to vote in the coming Congress and the evaluation of memberships in 1989.

THE RESISTANCE TO JOINING BY THOSE COMRADES WHO FEAR THE CLOSURE

At this point I want to speak exclusively to those comrades who fear more than anything else the possibility of our closing down and who put all there hopes in the continuity of this party as such, thus seeming to resist strongly renewing their membership in 1989.

To all of these comrades, to whom I feel - and I am - closer than the others, burdened as I am with the responsibility I have had to assume, I can only point out the deep and absurd contradiction inherent in their resistance.

Is it at all possible they do not realise that the more intensely they fear this the greater is the danger that they will make it come about if they avoid contributing at this moment - precisely by renewing their membership - to showing that the party, that very party that might close down, is a living and vital reality because it was pre-constituted, before the Congress began its work, by thousands and thousands of registered members present and ready to support their convictions during the Congress?

How else avoid the danger that it will not be the Congress to decide on the closing down (an occurrence which furthermore is still to be decided), but that it will be they themselves with their hesitation and their absence to close it down even before the Congress convenes?

With the things I am about to illustrate, I hope to be able to offer everyone - and these comrades above all - words and arguments of confidence and hope which will help nourish more serene and positive ideas concerning our future, on the progress and the growth of action, of life, of our existence as men and women, as citizens, as Radicals.

HAVE WE SUFFERED FROM MISTAKEN AMBITIONS, A GRAND ILLUSION?

The decisions we have made, the initiatives we have begun in applying the combined proposals of the Secretariat and the decisions of the Federal Council - must they then force us to conclude that we have definitely failed in our attempt to re-found the party on a trans-national basis, that is to say to create a new trans-national party on the basis of a nucleus from the old Radical Party?

Must we conclude that this was a mistaken ambition, a grand illusion, or, at best, the ideal founding of something great and important for which, however, the time was not yet ripe?

I would beware of making such a judgement and drawing such a conclusion. At the very moment in which, with the honesty which is typical of us, we are at grips with the disproportion of our organisational and political strength and our energy for action compared to the objectives we have made our own, we must take care not to find consoling answers; but we must also escape the temptation to make disparaging judgements on a year of political action in which while facing difficulties and failures, coldness and resistance, we have nevertheless begun to see the flowering of trans-national theory and practice, step by step.

THE REACTIONS WE HAVE HAD SO FAR, EVEN IF SLIGHT, ARE YET IMPORTANT ONES

And it is also true that if the responses have been disappointing, unsatisfactory or entirely lacking in those places where we have sought them, it is also true that in the places where we had less hope of getting them there have been more substantial responses than were foreseen. And it would also be unjust and a mistake to underestimate this.

Certainly the latter are still extremely slight and furthermore in a field that is still entirely new and unexplored.

A year ago we started out, in Bologna, with the intention of seeking out a terrain in which to sink the roots of the trans-national party on six great issues of almost infinite repercussions because of their substance and breadth, or because of the greatness and difficulty of the undertaking when, as for the question of legalising drugs, the objectives might have appeared to be more limited.

I will spare you an analysis and a summing-up of the little we did and the great deal we failed to do. These are in any case the subject matter of all our debates and all our attention. We are well aware of this. It is the very measure of our difficulties and even the impossibility of our continuing along this road.

THE DELINEATING OF REASONING THAT COULD CONSTITUTE A SPECIFIC PROPOSAL BY THE TRANS-NATIONAL PARTY

But from what has happened during the year, and what we or others have done, from what I have heard or from my reflections, I manage for the first time to glimpse perhaps some reasoning that could constitute the specific contents of the trans-national party's political proposal based on the context of various one-party regimes (in Eastern Europe as in African and Third World countries) as well as, at least, the multi-party and proportional regimes established primarily in Europe and the European Community with the exception of Great Britain.

What is this reasoning?

Two years ago we set ourselves two ambitious goals: on the one hand there was the democratic reform into a bi-party and single candidate [per party, ed.] system, and on the other hand the establishment of a trans-national force capable of dealing with problems no longer manageable on the level of national institutions.

IS OURS A SINGULAR ATTEMPT TO FIND A CREATIVE SOLUTION TO THE CRISIS OF A SMALL PARTY THAT HAS ALWAYS HAD BIG AMBITIONS?

Perhaps all of us have been used to considering these affirmations of ours as highly subjective declarations of intent, very much our own (I mean to say very much concerned with our existential experience), as the attempt to find creative solutions to the crisis of a small party that has always had big ambitions. Thus it has been a very Italian response, because our history has been Italian and the problem of the passage from the party-power swamp to democracy in the classical bi-party and alternating form is primarily an Italian problem. It is a very European, Euro-centric response, and, in fact, our trans-national choice was conceived, in our political theory as well as in our aspirations, primarily in terms of European federalism.

And since we experience this choice in a subjective, existential way, we fall into despair if we do not see democratic and single-candidate reforms just around the corner among the Italian political ranks and in the political system; if in Europe the wind is not blowing in the direction of supra-national political institutions. Suddenly our choices seem to us to be wrong and bankrupt; the will and the hope of being a new, revolutionary force to change the habits, the schemes and the interests of present politics appear to us as an impossible dream, a flight from our real problems and a search for problems bigger than we are.

Now then, it is indubitable that these problems are bigger than we are, and that is the reason we are here and confronting such critical debates. But that does not mean that these are not our problems, our problems as Radicals, because they are the central problems of our times. The line of reasoning that I want to develop tells me that our choices in the last two years (democratic reform of the institutions towards a classical bi-partisan system and trans-national reform in the sense of creating supra-national institutions, but also through denationalising and trans-nationalising the political forces) may contain the key to a political and institutional response, not only for Italy and the European Community, but much more generally for the political problems of our time.

THE OUTBURST OF <> INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE SOVIET EMPIRE

Today we are witnessing this outburst of "springs" alternating with dramatic evolutions in what is still the Soviet empire. They are breaking out everywhere in ways of their own, in Moscow as in Budapest, in Warsaw as in the Baltic states, Lettonia in particular, in Armenia as well as outside the empire in Yugoslavia.

The acceleration set off, at least seemingly, by Gorbachev's "new order" - which, however, could be the result of a stock taking on the impossibility of a single-voiced, undemocratic, government, unseparated and unarticulated according to the historical, social and cultural characteristics of the individual countries or groups of countries subsumed under it - seems for now to be happily, but for the future dramatically characterised by the lack of mature, strong and adequate responses to the exigencies of the new - that is, to the needs of reform.

THE POSSIBLE CRITICAL POINT OF GORBACHEV'S <>

The possible critical point of this process and this movement does not lie so much, as everyone thinks, in a possible defeat for Gorbachev, nor in the limits of this "spring", so beautiful and rich in democratic hopes: it lies in the risk that this democratic springtime may explode in a thousand wild and ungovernable splinters which would be the opposite of alternative and alternating government; it lies in the risk that the thawing out of the empire, rather than evolving in the direction of a democratic federation of the Soviet republics, will explode, as did the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, into fragmented revolutions and nationalist and ethnic separatism, each different from the other and all together destined to failure.

In the face of such perils, we who have been - in our relations with the governments and one-party systems within the Soviet empire - for so many years the party of constitutional law and human rights, the party of non-violence and the Helsinki agreements as well as the United Nations Convention - we could perhaps be the political force capable of helping to furnish a theoretical and practical reply, capable of constituting a real democratic, strong alternative to this possible evolution and these two perils. And the reply is precisely in the two choices we made at least two years ago and which we have written into the motion of the Bologna Congress last year.

If, in fact, one were to go from dictatorial, one-party regimes to parties that automatically restore old ideological divisions of a national or even nationalistic character, one would be going from the by now recognised failure of an efficiency oriented and anti-democratic model - which obliges governments to immutability and not only to instability - to the fast and certain failure of the multi-party and proportional model that has marked the fate of democracy in many parts of Western Europe between the wars and which has unfailingly offered again in recent years the tendency to instability and even more to the sterility of the governments and the governing of the crisis in the world society and every "national" society.

Just as it is our duty to look back at the crises in democracy during the Twenties and Thirties before the advent of the various Fascisms, so it is our duty to keep in mind the tragedies of the Eastern European countries in the post-war era. ANyone who is not content to being an object of history and of movements, but who wants to be a subject and protagonist, must not ignore the fact that these dangers can represent a possible and even probable coming tragedy and must decide to confront them and, if possible, beat and block them.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE RADICAL PARTY IN THESE COUNTRIES

Without presumption and overweening ambition, with humility but also with conviction, I say that the most effective response may be precisely the establishment of the Radical Party in these countries with its tolerant, non-violent and trans-national lay radicalism which make it capable of inspiring prospects of supra-national and multi-national institutions. It would form a first governing class nucleus, a first, small but strong army of non-violent militants for the right to life and a life under law while waiting to realise on an institutional, state level the new constitutional society, the regional or inter-regional federations which with the strength of freedom are indubitably necessary to escape from the national and international disorder reigning in the world today.

If I turn my glance from Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean countries and to Africa - in particular to Algeria, Tunisia and perhaps also to Morocco, I think I cannot exclude the possibility of a similar outcome of the crisis, while in all of French-speaking as in English-speaking Africa there is an evolution going on - however laboriously - towards a constitutional society and state (clearly adopted with the African Charter of Human Rights).

GOING FROM ZERO TO AN INFINITELY SMALL 0.1

This year we have begun to realise a few very slight conditions or premises in this direction which nevertheless should not be totally underestimated or cast aside, because going from zero to an infinitely small 0.1 can in the long run mean a first leap in quality more substantial and important than much larger momentary growth which could - once self-satisfied - remain forever a marginal or losing factor.

Yugoslavia

They allow us to hope:

- Yugoslavia, where we had wanted to hold our Congress and instead were refused authorisation by the Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian national and federal authorities. The request for holding the Congress, the non-violent dialogue that we had promoted and sought in a spirit of friendship with the people and government of Yugoslavia, the initiatives taken during the year by our comrades working in Yugoslavia in close collaboration with the party Secretariat and the Radical association in Trieste, all provoked attention and interest in the Yugoslavian press, opened a not fortuitous debate on our presence and our supporters, caused a progressive series of memberships going from 135 to 240 within a few months. These new and renewed memberships with their explicit manifestation of the will also to contribute financially to the party's activities, overcoming the obstacles presented by the legal norms in effect. Our comrades in Trieste are also devoting themselves to the task of overcoming these obstacles and

are even now actively working with those resident in Yugoslavia in the search for new contacts and in holding meetings to establish and maintain constantly more significant relations with cultural and political circles. The activities of these comrades are, furthermore, sustained by specific written work which will also be distributed at newsstands in and around Carso and Istria, in the factories and the offices of government agencies and organisations, and by advertising in a Slovenian newspaper.

- Burkina Faso, where there is the active presence of Basile Guissou and comrade Salif Diallo on the one hand and the so very meaningful messages made at the Trieste-Bohinj Federal Council meeting by President Campaoré and Minister Zango.

- We have fifty members in Hungary, in Budapest, in a country where 32 years after the Soviet invasion a process of democratic social and state reform has been renewed. These members are the most recent indication of the results obtained by the party which, however minimal, arouse surprise and sincere admiration in circles and figures one would hardly expect: on the ministerial level the fifty Radical members are judged to be an incredible, an exceptional result of a relevance which we ourselves are certainly not inclined to give them. It is true that these fifty members all registered within no more than three months, ever since the presence for a few days in that country of two of our comrades. They established some first contacts and spoke to a very limited number of people in a country where we have managed - with what efforts only the comrades who worked on it know - to send only one issue of <> in Hungarian to 500 addresses. Yet these very new comrades are at work, ask for the p

resence of the party, solicit information and suggestions from us, which unfortunately we cannot give or, at best, only to a limited and inadequate degree.

- Our Polish comrades - these few dozen members who mostly came to us as a result of our direct action in their country when the "new order" was encountering obstacles that at the time seemed insurmountable - asked us to provide information, confrontation, and debates to strengthen their initiatives which were made more arduous in Poland by the presence of the Catholic Church, careful not to encourage autonomous tendencies and political struggle in the evolution that was also going on there. The hopes aroused by the Radical Party's promotion in the European Parliament of an "intergroup" to represent the interests of the human rights movements in Poland and other Eastern European countries unfortunately did not have the results the party had hoped for either in its relationship with our members nor with movements like "Solidarity" or "Volnosc i Pokoj".

These members, these requests, these vivid and pressing requests made on the party - both the first and last ones - are indications of a much higher potential and needs than the actual figures can express in countries where great hopes have been revived and where almost daily examples of highly important and significant facts are taking place.

Only our incapacity to furnish adequate answers, and so to establish and cultivate our presence and our action in these countries, has prevented us from realising and extending the full potential there.

THE FAILURE OF OUR INITIATIVES AND THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR HOPES IN ALL THE LARGE COUNTRIES OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY

In contrast, we must take note of the failure of our initiatives and the destruction of our hopes in all the large countries of the European Community, countries which are normally described as being "democratically mature". Whether it is a question of Europe's political unity or of the need for common policies to confront the great ecological questions of our time; whether it is a question of the responsibility of contributing to the peace process in the Middle East and not merely of putting pressure on Israel but of taking direct action to secure that stability and that security - above all for Israel - which are the necessary conditions both for peace and for resolving the Palestinian question; whether it is a question of making budget allocations, using one's own resources, initiatives, and national, EC, and international policies to halt the process of degradation of the Third World and the infamy for the civilisation of our time of extermination by hunger - in all these cases it is right here in

the heart of Europe that we have found the worst case of deafness to our issues, our proposals, our initiatives.

THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT HAS SUFFERED THE SAME FATE

Furthermore the European Parliament has suffered the same fate. This direct expression of European peoples has been limited by the inter-governmental summits of the Community to a decorative role without power, unless it were that of making proposals destined to be ignored by the Council of Europe and its participating governments, and of making denunciations destined not even to be given a hearing because the public is ignorant of them.

The biggest countries of the Community - while rhetorically affirming fidelity to Europe - are by now accomplices in blocking the growth of democratic, supra-national European institutions and in rejecting the responsibility for international policies that devolve upon the Community from its economic power which is second only to that of the United States of America.

After their initial enthusiasm as neophytes of the Community, the policies of Madrid and Lisbon now seem to have aligned themselves with those of London, Paris and Bonn. Even Rome by now fears becoming isolated and so aligns itself ever more frequently with the orientation or the impositions of its partners. The debate among the political forces - even those who have had statesman of federalist convictions such as De Gasperi, Adenauer, Spaak, Monnet, Mansholt, Schumann, and Martino - is by now totally extinguished or dominated by considerations of Realpolitik, power and economic interests.

Nevertheless these difficulties would not be insurmountable for a political force, like ours, that combines the tools of democracy with those of non-violence.

In fact, we know that we would not find ourselves isolated by public opinion nor even among the governing classes of the Community's nations. The opinion polls of Eurobarometer decisively and periodically confirm our belief that among the European peoples there is a great majority in favour of a higher degree of supranational political integration. Even in England which superficial opinion considers to be anti-federalist and anti-Communitarian, the polls show that Mrs. Thatcher and the leaders of the Conservative and Labour Parties are in a minority with respect to their constituents and public opinion when they are asked if they are in favour of common policies and institutions for handling foreign policy, environmental problems, scientific and technological research, and relations with the Third World.

THE PARLIAMENTARY PARTY

In recent months this small, recently established trans-national party has had the honour and task bestowed on it of becoming to some degree the "parliamentary party", by which I mean the one that has been created in order to quickly bring about the Parliament of the new Europe. It is not by chance that several of the most important and significant political resolutions of the European Parliament have been signed first by Marco Pannella. This expression "parliamentary party", coined a few months ago by Giovanni Negri, evokes that of Gandhi's "Congress Party", the revolutionary element that established India's independence.

This declaration may sound presumptuous, overweening and beyond any real possibility. But I say that it would not be impossible for the party which contains the figure of Gandhi in its trans-national symbol to make an appeal through political struggle and non-violence to the opinion of the European peoples for a dialogue with their governments and to convince them to abandon their resistance.

This demand is, on the other hand, impossible, this ambition presumptuous and overweening for another reason. There is a far more serious and important reason that impels us to speak of the countries of "practising democracy" with the same meaning that we alone and as a restricted minority spoke for years of the countries of "practising Socialism" until the time came when this expression - together with the reasoning that induced us to formulate it - was taken up by the rest of the Italian left, including the Communists.

The knowledge needed to decide and equality at the starting gate in our country's national elections are, in fact, disappearing.

THE POWER OF THE MASS MEDIA

The fact that the power of the mass media - in itself immense and incommensurable with any other power - has not been organised or regulated in any way, unlike the way in which legislative, executive and judicial powers have been defined throughout the centuries, is a de facto annulment of the very possibility for these powers to function physiologically and seconds the formation of an "absolute de facto power" which is rarely "enlightened" and generally irresponsible such as party power. In essence this latter is creating imperfect one-party forms in all (national) states which have a multi-party, proportional system. And one ought not to underestimate the ever greater difficulty of alternation in a "bi-party" democratic regime such as the United Kingdom.

There has been more information this year about the Radical Party in Slovenia, Croatia, and in part the rest of Yugoslavia than has been available in Italy and the rest of the "democratic" world combined in the last few year, except for the mass media's "Cicciolina" (1) scandals. This fact cannot be easily dismissed as due to that country's being provincial, on the sidelines, nor to fortuitous circumstances.

It is in fact indubitable that nowhere today are there masses of citizens thirsting for news and who trust in the power of information and the free circulation of ideas as in certain Eastern European countries.

THE DOMINATING CULTURE IN AND OF THE MASS MEDIA IN THE SOCIETY'S OF <> CONDEMNS ALL FORMS OF NON-VIOLENT POLITICAL THOUGHT AND ACTION

The total ostracising with which the dominating culture in and of the mass media in societies of "practising democracy" condemns all forms of non-violent political thought and action - which was affirmed as long as thirty years ago in Vietnam and the Far East, in South Africa and in Europe - corresponds to something far worse than a conscious plan! It corresponds to a jungle sub-culture and not a political market place, where the raptures of opposing violences, the almost sacred, daily, obsessive, necrophilic homage to violent death constitutes the only lexicon of the mass media in the countries of "practising democracy".

If today we are witnessing in totalitarian states the implosion and explosion of the absolute law of power, the oligarchy of power, in the world of "practising democracy" the crisis of law, penal law, civil law, and international law is such - even in the eyes of the experts and the science of law - as to make us expect that the Radical slogan <> will soon, probably too late, will be taken up by many others.

The complete failure of a more than ten-year tendency to forge in France Radical goals and Radical will, the absolutely impermeable German world, the total indifference in Scandinavia, the varying, but all inadequately slight degrees of interest shown in Belgium, Spain and Portugal must also be considered an objective reality: that the circulation of Radical ideas and actions, the knowledge of the very existence of our party have shown themselves to be practically non-existent, or so deformed and incomplete as to bee counter-productive.

THE FAILURE OF OUR INITIATIVE AND OUR ATTEMPT TO CONVENE THE STATES GENERAL OF EUROPE

For the same reasons we have had - at least so far - to suffer the failure of our attempts to convene the States General of Europe for the purpose of initiating the process leading to the political union of the Community and for testing the possibility of confronting with communal political tools at least one of the great ecological disasters that threaten the planet - the ozone hole - and to try to create a credible and efficacious political response by the Community to the Yugoslavian crisis and the Israeli-Palestinian question. Not only have we been unable to make a dent in the anti-Communitarian logic of twelve-member Community, but we have not even been able to rally and organise significant and substantial minorities aligned along our positions.

THE OTHER SUBJECTS OF THE BOLOGNA MOTION

The awareness of these difficulties and lack of energy kept us from taking action again, although it would have been always more urgently necessary, against extermination from hunger and to attempt to organise the second meeting of the African Heads of State which, three years ago, in accepting the Manifesto of the Nobel Prize Winners and our urgings, had made an appeal to the EEC and the United Nations.

I have already related what took place in the other areas the Congress had committed us to work in - of the successes, the potential and also the limitations that our work in the field of human rights and with respect to the democratic aspirations of Eastern Europe. Whereas, with regard to fight for the abolition of [drug] prohibition, which is the great accomplice of profits for Mafia and criminality in the drug market, we began to get results for an important first international meeting - thanks as well to our friend of CORA (2) and in particular Marco Taradash, Giancarlo Arnao and Gino Del Gatto. But at the same time that we are fighting this new political and theoretical battle there is a recrudescence, from the United States to Italy - and in Italy primarily due to Craxi - of prohibitionism with its fatally repressive illusions and the reawakening of that "emergency politics" - under new forms and with new protagonists - which has already caused so many disasters.

EVERYONE, INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE PARTY, MUST REFLECT ON HIS OWN ABOUT THESE MATTERS

Therefore it is necessary that everyone, inside and outside the party, should reflect on his own about these matters. I say on his own because it is not within the competence of the "party as such" to be the seat of studies, reflections and research. Not for this reason, but also for this reason, this activity is the responsibility of each individual and not to be delegated.

Let us remember: we are a party of goals and not of "representation", of ideas and not only of people.

I have expounded these considerations - which until now I have generally not considered pertinent to the task our statute gives us - in order to solicit this last broad meeting of the Federal Council before the Congress is held, to understand better that behind our apparently obsessive repetitious considerations of budgets, current debts and necessary expenses, of the members as "contributors", of the risks or the conditions of bankruptcy, we have not omitted to evaluate the certain growth of an ever more secure, deep and wide Radical understanding of what is necessary, opportune, and to be hoped for, as well as the perils and the already irreversible damage deriving from political society, humanity and the territory we live in.

The work Paolo Vigevano and I have done - with scrupulous concern for our duties and responsibilities as well as the mandates entrusted to us by the Federal Council - has secured for us all the conditions and the legal premises for fulfilling all the tasks that the party and the Congress may decide must and can be done.

<>: THIS IS THE THEME OF THE FEDERAL COUNCIL AND THE CONGRESS

Here we must ask the question of what to do. This is the theme of the Federal Council and the Congress. It cannot be left to the First Secretary, but we must all try to find the answers. I hope that it will be precisely our ability, our courage to look the party's inadequacies in the face, to not withdraw even from the prospect - as we have done and are doing - of closing down the party, which will give us the possibility of saving and strengthening our heritage of ideas and policies and to avoid that our closing down will mean our dissolution as would be the case if events were to close us down, and that, on the contrary, it will give us the occasion for constituting stronger, bigger Radical initiatives and a Radical Party.

WE HAVE TWO ROADS BEFORE US

Speaking now as a militant rather than as First Party Secretary, I say there are two possible roads before us.

TWENTY OR THIRTY THOUSAND MEMBERS AND FOUR MILLION DOLLARS OF SELF-FINANCING

The first road is the one we have already tried in the recent pass of putting off the closure even while considering it and setting ourselves the task of realising the objectives and conditions which will allow us to avoid it (the equivalent of the 5,000 members of December 1986 and the 10,000 of February 1987). I have been accused of seeing everything in terms of economics, even of bookkeeping, but I have tried - as we did then, exactly as we did then - to put into figures the necessary conditions for continuing our action incisively and with the hope of success: I already spoke last July of 20-30,000 members and four million dollars of self-financing. If we cannot achieve these conditions, what other conditions could save us from closing down?

TO CLOSE DOWN IMMEDIATELY

The second road is to close down immediately, to establish the organs, procedures and time limits, and to try to find in the party, in ourselves, and outside ourselves the strength to constitute something different and more adequate for pursuing our goals.

Certainly this second road seems more risky. But if we manage to avoid being paralysed by the fear of closing down, perhaps we will be able to find the strength in our ideas for turning the process of closing down the present Radical Party into the process of possibly re-opening the new party that must be conceived and realised. Perhaps in this way we can understand that the closing down could be only one act and one moment in the process of constituting something else for the sake of others.

I know very well that many comrades think, on the contrary, that salvation lies in going backwards, in retreating to past security and the territory of Radical history, in Italy and Italian institutions.

The theoretical and practical replies to this possible choice I already gave at the last Federal Council meeting, and they provoked in a part of the Italian press the belief that I was proposing the party accept or actually the doubling of its public financing. Today I will present a political objection. I am strongly convinced that when a party proposes the reform of the political system and political alliances, and then should do everything possible to preserve itself, it too inevitably becomes an element in the conservation of the system. We have seen that a party which exits "as such" from the institutions and the election race, this does not necessarily mean a diminishing, but an increase in the participation and presence of the citizens, even as Radicals, precisely in the election race and in the institutions, even the regional and local ones, from which the party has always been absent by the decision of its Congress.

THE EFFORTS SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED THAT SO MANY COMRADES ARE MAKING TO PROMOTE TRANS-PARTY GROUPS ON THE GREEN-ENVIRONMENTAL SIDE AS WELL AS AMONG THE LAY PARTIES

I believe that despite the overturning of alliances by the Socialist Party, our effort, the effort being made by many comrades to promote trans-party groups on the Green-Environmental side as well as among the lay parties, corresponds to the policy we have chosen during the last three years and thus should be encouraged. Certainly there are many obstacles and the decision is difficult. It would be a great mistake to interrupt it in this moment when in Italy there is a need to oppose the present wrong choices of the Socialists and to furnish a positive reply to the Communist crisis and the risk of the Christian Democrats returning to power. A party that turned backwards would be a party that renounced its identity and its prospects.

It is not by chance that those comrades "are always speaking of something else" who - like comrade Mellini in particular - seem to feel not only that they are authorised, but that it is their duty to launch accusations against those in responsible party positions - institutional or voluntary ones - who are daily, by now almost hourly, dragging the party and its administration back from the brink of "bankruptcy" and who thus reduce these attempts to something like the lust for destruction rather than the near miracles they are to continue the material, practical existence of the party. Our responsibilities do not allow us to speak of anything else because that would mean doing what those going into bankruptcy cannot help doing, whether it be fraudulent bankruptcies, bankruptcies of the government, of the Italian regime or those who, in the face of the court officials seizing their assets, in the face of the bankruptcy court that "conserves" by alienating property, in the face of the screams of the credit

ors and those reduced to hunger and bankruptcy can only sonorously proclaim the "corporate name" of the company.

Never has there been manifested in Italy as there was last year the greater potential for commitment of citizens who are "also Radicals", representatives and militants of the trans-national party - thanks to the partial support we decided to give "to sending them off" in the election race in Catania, Venetia Julia, Friuli, Trentino, and the South Tyrol - while the more than 320 members, prevalently Slovene, who are at the centre of tempestuous polemics in Yugoslavia and who are exposing themselves personally, are evidently considered non-existent or irrelevant on our party's political level.

And it seems just to us apropos of this to add a consideration which could appear polemical if it were not rather an obligatory definition of everyone's responsibility and activity.

Comrade Mellini - who today asks the party's "leaders" "What have you done with our jewels, our 10,000 members?" or who seems to enjoin us "Varus, give me back my legions!" - decisively accused of madness those of us who, in the wake of the Florence Congress and then the Assembly of July '86, had decided on closing down the party while at the same time opening the campaigns for first 5,000 and then 10,000 members, affirming that in this way we would not even manage to find 2,000 willing to adhere to a plan of liquidation of this sort.

And this is what our history, that of our party with its ancient, far-off historical roots in political democracy, ought to have taught us all: there is no better Parliament than the one which checks on, modifies, approves or rejects budgets, the acquisition of resources and the criteria and methods of expenditures.

If there is one thing which Italian and European democracy lacks today, and which we are the first to lack, it is not people with new ideas but an Ernesto Rossi (3) always attentive to the material things, not only of the Church, but above all to the managing of one's own.

Therefore I hope that everyone will found his proposed choices and his contrapositions to those of others on a preventive answer to the by now unbearable consequences of the Italian party-power regime with its subsidising, corporative, and corrupting influences in the life of a party such as ours.

Everyone must be willing and ready to claim and take on the running of the party, which is an economic and financial job even before being a political one.

A HYPOTHESIS FOR THE COURSE OF THE CONGRESS

It is on the basis of these facts, these considerations, these reflections and these questions that we have developed a hypothesis for the course of the Congress. It is a hypothesis that should allow for an open and unrestrained debate, open to hundreds and hundreds of comrades, for which reason, one should remember, we have scheduled the Congress for Easter holidays which will enable the greatest number of comrades to be present and participate in our work.

Our comrades of the Secretariat and the Treasury have been at work to arrange things so that the costs of the trip will be as contained as possible as well as to work out the complex organisation of what is to be a true trans-national Congress and a decisive event in Radical history.

Allow me to say that there are no excuses for missing the Congress. I think one can guarantee that the pro-capita expenses for attending will be scarcely higher than those for any previous Congress even though it is being held in the heart of Europe, in Vienna. And even if it is true that clothes do not make the man, it is also true that the site of a Congress contributes to "making" that Congress, to defining its image.

It is Vienna not only because of its past, not only because of its present position as a "balcony" that overlooks the separated, sister countries of Central and Eastern Europe; it is Vienna because it is already the first candidate to become - among all the other possible ones - the thirteenth star in the European flag, but Vienna because it personifies our dream of Europe, our federalist battle, our going decisively and stubbornly against the current at a time when streams of words concerning '92 and thousands of blue and yellow twelve-starred flags are flooding public opinion in the EEC countries with a limited vision, narrow and pre-fabricated, of our continent.

Therefore, after the Yugoslavian government's "nyet" to holding the Radical Congress there, and while in that country there has been an acceleration of the difficulties and contradictions we well know and I would say are continuing to follow up, the choice of Vienna seemed to us the obvious and necessary one. In fact, our Europe is not merely that arid market that is supposed to come into effect in 1992 assuming that the perspectives for '92 remain what they are today. Our Europe is not that economic and financial jungle which is weak with respect to the strong and overbearing with the weakest social classes and countries of the present Community.

Our Europe is not the one which wide sectors of the governing classes intend to construct either explicitly or by hypocritical silence: a Europe lacking in institutions, goals, democratic and sovereign controls, and suffering so much from that terrible disease called "democratic deficit" that logically speaking - this is no mere paradox - if a group like the EEC were to ask to have membership in itself, in the European Community, that request would be rejected due to insufficient democratic requisites. Our Europe, to make things clearer, is not the alliance of twelve countries constrained within their rigid economic, political and cultural borders, but is a new political entity necessary to the world: the lack of a United States of Europe is a lack of responsibility, a vacuum to be filled with prudent urgency.

Only the absence of political horizons and planning can thus lead to the attempt to use capital and investments to get around the wall that still divides the continent and avoid the inevitable. Or in other words, the political necessity to break down that wall and integrate Central and Eastern Europe that are at grips with serious and highly topical questions about how and when to control the transition to democracy.

So then, it is Vienna with the same issues we were planning to study in Yugoslavia centring on the need in 1989 of taking a concrete step towards a United States of Europe and for collective reflection on the itinerary of what we have intended to be, a trans-national and non-violent party for the right to life and a life under law.

The orientation of the Congress which we have described and are planning is, nevertheless, different from the one we had in mind in January, which was more like an ordinary Congress, even in its original and exceptional nature, than the one which is in the works.

There are three firm points which have induced us to take this different direction for the Congress. I am going to enunciate them clearly in the belief that this will save us from misunderstandings and unnecessary discussion.

We are not going to Vienna to escape from the party's serious problems which have been clearly on display for a year and have gotten worse. We are going there to confront them directly. We are not going to Vienna to hold an introverted debate tortuously wound around the question of to close or not to close, but rather a debate concerning our political thinking and goals, and hence concerning the question of the Radical Party's adequacy for pursuing them. And finally, we are not going to Vienna to put on a sterile trans-national show and to give or receive learned and imposing lectures, but rather to learn as a group what are or ought to be the very concrete trans-national political projects for a group adequate to playing this role.

It is this, Italian and non-Italian comrades, old and new friends from Eastern Europe, illustrious and authoritative guests, that we are called upon to measure ourselves against: policies which must deal with what I have heretofore tried to describe and call to the attention of us all, with the possible implications and the possible developments of these considerations, with the commitment of turning them into perceptible and concrete struggles, a party that must, that cannot avoid coming to terms with the question of its own adequacy and so with its own life and existence.

It seems to us that the Congress's theme could be: <<1989: A United States of Europe. The trans-national and non-violent party for the right to life and a life under law".

The Congress, which will begin in the afternoon of the 23rd and end on the 27th, can be expected to be divided into three days apart from the starting day with the introductory reports and the final day whose title seems to me self-explanatory: "Democracy. Reconstitute the old continent with new institutions and new freedoms".

There will be a day dedicated to the projects for political Europe and that of the East introduced by several reports and speeches on the dangerous illusions of the single market, on the political process underway in the "other Europe", on the indispensable need to convene by 1989 the States General of Europe for which we have been fighting and, finally, the question which lies at the heart of the Congress: in the light of this year's budget and the goals to be pursued, is it necessary to transcend the tool which is the Radical Party? And if so, in which direction? And if not, what are the perspectives and the outlets? Reports, communications, in-depth analyses, therefore, in order to develop the debate afterwards in plenary session.

The same scheme will be repeated the next day on the other aspect of Radical trans-national policy concerning the issue of non-violence, the affirmation of the right to life against threats to peace and to the ecosystem with introductory reports and speeches concerning the fight against extermination through hunger, the failure to produce emergency aid despite all the principal proposals and initiatives for "development", the explosion of macroecological disasters produced by man and not by nature, the great hope of ensuing steps by the United Nations and its Security Council, and once again on questions concerning the how and when of this party's ability to pass from being a know-it-all on the sidelines and become a concrete protagonist of true trans-national political struggle.

Democracy and non-violence, our continent and the Southern Hemisphere, the creation of the constitutional state and the affirmation of the right to life - these are the challenges that we cannot remove from the perimeter of our consciences, thus from our morality, thus from our politics. And it is our morality, our Radical consciences that must lead us to ask without deceiving ourselves, gathered together at the Congress, and ask all our guests, the press, public opinion, if and how our party can continue to live or if and how these policies need to find other ways and means. It is a painful question, I know. Can you imagine that it is not painful firstly and primarily for me?

Then let us prepare for this Congress: the first two days dedicated to the two faces of the coin we call trans-national, and the third to the debate on the decisions we must make. Let us do it beginning with the thinking and the proposals of this Federal Council. Let us do it by filling the two months until the Congress with speeches and dialogue. Let us do it by helping to secure the significant participation, qualitatively and quantitatively, of each of our countries at the Congress.

And in the meantime, from this podium, I want to thank those guests who have agreed to deliver speeches and who will also be connected, not kept at arms-length, from the central issue of the Congress on the fate of our party.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

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

2) CORA - Radical Anti-Prohibition Co-ordinating Committee, an association founded in 1989 by Radical Party members interested in the problem of drugs.

3) Rossi Ernesto - (Caserta 1897 - Rome 1967). Italian statesman and journalist. A leader of <> [an anti-Fascist movement] he was arrested and convicted by the Fascists in 1930. He remained in prison or in confinement until the end of the war. With A. Spinelli he wrote the <> and led the European Federalist Movement in the fight for a united Europe. He was among the founders of the Radical Party. An essayist and journalist, he promoted from the pages of <> a lively campaign against clerical interference in political life, against the economic potentates, industrial and agrarian protectionism, the concentration of public and private power, etc. His articles were collected into famous books (<> etc.) After the dissolution of the Radical Party in 1962 and the ensuing rupture with the managing editor of <> M. Pannunzio, he founded the review <> from whose pages he continued his polemics. During his last years he

established close ties with the "new" Radical Party with which he collaborated in launching the "Anti-Clerical Year" in 1967.