ABSTRACT: In the interview by Zoltan Lovas, which took place before the Hungarian government authorised the meeting of the 35th PR Congress in Budapest (1989), Marco Pannella describes the essential characteristics of the transnational Radical Party.

("Notizie Radicali, no. 65 of March 24, 1989)

Q. Can you tell us about the birth and development of the Radical idea?

A. No. The Radical idea, if there is one, would be an ideology, a closed system. And it would be bad like all other ideologies, or theologies with regard to the governing of our times and our society. We have several ideas and not a single one. Reasonable objectives to realise, even if the powers in command always tell us that it is folly. The things that unite us as party members and which characterise the party are not even these ideas. They can change. What was important in 1980 may not be in 1990. In general those who oppose our struggles end by struggling in the name of the same things they rejected ten years earlier while continuing to reject what is necessary - reform which is a condition for continuity and for the budding of new branches and new flowers on the trunk of existent and prevailing traditions and cultures.

The thing that unties us is rather a rule, a combination of rules. The procedure, the "how" is more important than the "what" and the "why". The means condition and in some way prefigure the ends. Political democracy is, if one takes a good look at it, above all a procedure, a technology for the free and responsible construction in dialectics - with their apparently unbearable slowness - the things which the choice of a single party system, with the dictatorship of the proletariat or otherwise, one imagines one can construct rapidly and permanently...

So it is a new way of conceiving of a party, it is the only new proposal for a party that is anchored to European and perhaps to world realities for some years. This conception and this party practice and idea presents itself as a radical, possible reform which is being tried out not only in the confrontation with single-party systems, party dictatorships, but also with semi-government, bureaucratic and national parties which are identical with those you have known before the dictatorship of the proletariat and which you are on the point of rediscovering. All of these forms of parties have as of now been vanquished by the new needs of the world.

Q. What is the numerical strength of the Radical Party today, and even more than its numerical strength, its political weight?

A. In 1988 there were about 6,000 members of whom 5,000 were Italians, 250 Yugoslavs - mainly Slovenes - a hundred or so Belgians, Spanish, Portuguese, about sixty French. The few remaining ones come from many countries, from the USSR to Burkina Faso, from Brazil to Turkey passing by way of Israel. But more than half of our Federal Council is non-Italian and we have for example among our assistant first secretaries an ex-minister of Burkina Faso, a country of the Sahel.

But what rightly seems most important to me is that our transnational and transparty party, of Gandhian non-violence and libertarian, has managed to unite the absolute majority of European and Italian Parliament members on its very important goals. It has succeeded in winning, or losing, referendums with millions upon millions of votes in favour of its objectives... Thus, for example, in clerical Italy (which certainly does not mean religious) we have been given the merit - according to our own adversaries - of having established the possibility of people to divorce, to abort with out resorting to clandestine abortions, to be conscientious objectors against military service, as well as the merit for the Radical actions is defense of the constitutional state against not only Fascist or Stalinist ideas of the state, but also corporative, militarist and nationalist ones... We are at the origin of laws and not only ideas which have been taken up again today by those in power and who in the past fought again

st them...

Q. Is it a force which is tolerated, with a following, or isolated?

A. It is a force which is legally and totally free. In reality what they use against us is the hardest form of negation, the one that is becoming, as MacLuhan says in "The Global Village", common throughout the world and consists in "pulling out the plug", "cutting off the current", to keep people from knowing about our proposals. As you know, democracy in practice has more and more the same relationship with the generous Utopias of its forefathers as Communism in practice has with its own! The dominant economic, industrial, military, bureaucratic, political and institutional classes have an ever greater desire to be informed on our objectives and have our advice. They have very great respect for them, but even greater is their fear that the people can know and choose them. We have need in the world of great, radical reforms beginning with both Communism in practice and democracy in practice, if we want to defend the planet, the human race, the individual and the citizen the right to life and life under

law in the face of the new problems of our time. We believe by now that if the rules of democracy, of law and liberty are to be established everywhere and must become an indispensable premise for all people in all places, it is necessary to understand well that the divisions cut across all fields. In Hungary and in Russia, just as in the USA, South Africa or Western Europe new unities must be formed, forged together by their methods and their goals. New entities that unite the partisans of yesterday and today on precise and clear points regarding Communism in practice as well as democracy in practice.

If Communism in practice is responsible for even worse crimes than the Nazis (in Cambodia, for example), the West - even more than the East - has caused the extermination through hunger of forty million people a year and the degradation of the biosphere, the atmosphere, the seas, the waters, and the cities of the entire world...

Q. What goals does the PR have in Eastern Europe?

A. Our congress will decide that. If our transnational and transparty party is quickly chosen as an added value by all those who today are working in good faith for the reform of this society, this world, of politics and of power.

But we are as individuals all united too because we are the extremists of the constitutional state and of political democracy, above all of "classical" democracy, otherwise known as Anglo-Saxon, and not of European continental democracy which is the origin of all the ills of our century.

I think we are, almost all of us, convinced that it is a question of applying pressure so that the new will not be the restoration of the thing that had the historical weakness of allowing power to be seized by violence and illegality in the hearts of too many honest people, or a restoration of the thing that gave them the illusion that there were roads other than the one of holding to the principles and to the service of classical democracy, liberty and tolerance.

Personally I am very worried by the understandable fact that in these [political] springtimes that are budding in the East, and thus in our hearts and lives too, one can underestimate how necessary it is to create a season of reform that is valid everywhere and so also in the West.

Q. What are the objectives of the PR in Hungary?

A. That the Hungarians can get to know us, bee among us, choose us or reject us, know our ideas and our absolute and immediate need of them and their support. We hope that our congress can be held here as a proof of friendship and and trust.  It will be in the coming days that this possibility will have to be chosen or abandoned...

I will add that many of us think that it is necessary to give a push to the European Community, the United States of Europe, so that they will invite Hungary to become - very soon, almost immediately, a member to all intents and purposes... And I am precise in saying that it is the EEC that needs to be pushed and not the Hungarian government: it is there that we are present in sufficient strength to bring it about.

Q. Can you tell us a little about the transnational character of the PR?

A. It seems clear to me, simple; the egg of Columbus, in short. Everything which threatens us today, and everything we care about, can be defended, defeated, realised or exorcised only on a transnational, supranational and federal basis of power and those who wield it.

Pollution, the "hot-house effect", the defense of the Danube and the Rhein, the problem of technological transformation in world production and consumption, the protection of labour and of real buying power, the quality of life - all of this must become the object of non-national power on a level of large world regions co-ordinated with planetary ones, or else within the next twenty years we will see the emergence of new dictatorial candidates "to save the world". We will see the sacrifice of rights, of democracy, of freedom, of the democratic self-government of peoples and of the United States of Europe, perhaps even of Eurafrica...

Therefore we must organise, live, fight. We must conceive of new possibilities (instead of continuing to consume the existing possibilities) as political subjects, as a party... It is extremely evident, extremely urgent. The danger of things being too clear is that they can make our eyes pop, or make us close them... or they favour the ostrich reflex.

Q. You wanted to hold your congress in Zagabria. Why was it prohibited?

A. A dying government, bad advice furnished by unfaithful officials, the climate of anxiety that characterise a large part of the institutional leaders today provoked a unanimous reaction in the Yugoslavian press and public opinion... against it.