ABSTRACT: In countries where justice, freedom and legal civilisation exist, the division between science and power, culture and government, the ruling classes and the new "third state", of men and women with their hopes and their feelings, seems to be becoming increasingly serious and definitive. Politics today are less and less equipped to take into account the possible and necessary future of life and the quality of life in order to preserve the environment and civil and democratic traditions, thus to effect the appropriate reforms on the threshold of the year 2000. There are new horizons to reach, perhaps also a new epic to represent, and maybe a new party to do so.

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

The "Greenhouse effect", a phenomenon which was predicted 20 years ago by the Club of Rome and by its President Aurelio Peccei, has now become a reality. There is talk of a "hole" in the ozone layer over the antarctica which might contribute to the desertification of large parts of Europe. The media are full of it and yet we continue to produce the causes of the planetary catastrophe. Billions are vowed to certain death before this century is out due to hunger, poverty and war because of this phenomenon. Tens of millions are already dying now, together with their environment, their air and their water. Within the next 50 years at least 50 giant cities in the Third World will have grown into what we can hardly imagine today: explosive, barbaric melting pots of violence, death, and despair. Already today, millions, most of them under fifteen, under ten, live in streets and shantytowns without families, houses, schools, work or sanitation on the outskirts of cities in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Fa

ntastic resources are committed and spent on projects mostly military which are beyond human control, while scientific knowledge and discoveries which for the first time in five thousand years could be used for the benefit of mankind remain unused. In all this, food remains the most deadly and decisive weapon in the context of contemporary history and its struggles. The desert is advancing in the south, where hundreds of millions are dying of hunger, while pyramids of butter and mountains of grain are growing in the EEC alone and the industrial world is plagued with the malnutrition of excess. The food arm is wielded by both of the imperial contenders, USA and USSR. And then there is Aids mentality, the first world epidemic in the global village era creating new taboos and spreading new and ancient forms of alienation while it is forgotten that in the southern hemisphere the disease is due to conditions of unbearable poverty.

For the health industry Aids represents a colossal opportunity: 100 billion dollars in the next five years. This leads to merciless competition and the rivality of the pharmaceutical multinationals, encouraged by national governments, which in fact are detrimental to rapid solutions and the health of the world as a whole.

In free and just countries, bastions of civil liberty and political democracy, the gulf between knowledge and power, between culture and government, between the ruling classes and the new "third state", which consists of the vast majority of men and women with their hopes and feelings, between the uses and functions of the mass media; the separation between "knowing" and choosing, basic tenets of democracy, is growing wider and more permanent. The functions and the very existence of international, multinational and national institutions are facing a growing crisis. They tend increasingly to disregard the rules of the game. Not only the UN but also the Court of the Hague are in crisis.

The existence of a totalitarian empire with its centre in USSR (reinforced over 60 years by the application of arbitrary and absolute power structures that even a Gorbachev would find difficult to dismantle in only a few weeks) has produced the same reactions as in the 30's favoured the rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Such a response is conniving, blind, merely defensive and verging on the suicidal. It leaves billions of human beings at the mercy of their oppressors, in accordance with the ancient motto: "cuius regio, eius religio".

While scientific work, on the basis of scientific evidence that Europe is about to face, within the next twenty years, an immense telluric upheaval of unprecedented magnitude, men in power, "politicians", are trying to remove the problem and to lead people to ignore the imminence of this event, which, depending on how one is prepared for it, could either produce a cataclysm of biblical dimensions or be circumscribed and made humanly tolerable. It is enough to consider what an impact such an event would have on the dozens of German and French nuclear power stations.

Throughout this century, and even today, large portions of the cultural and scientific community have lived under the illusion that totalitarian solutions such as Fascism or militarism or nationalism could do better than democracy, mobilisation and conscious participation of self-governed peoples in producing the new humanism which is needed to safeguard civilisation. There are signs that the illusion of non-democratic, intolerant and violent shortcuts is still prevalent, particularly in the US, but also within the national states of Europe even though it is to their civil and democratic traditions that the modern world owes most of its creativity and social peace. Four fifths of mankind live under dictatorial regimes. The fatal premise of this state of affairs was the nationalistic fragmentation of the Third and Fourth Worlds. Where the right to life holds no sway with those in power, conscience, religious rights, development and thought become abstract, incoherent and impractical suprastructures wit

h no theoretical impact whatsoever. International disorder is further fomented and exacerbated by State and legislative intervention and by prohibitionist regimes which themselves confer tremendous and uncontrollable vitality to the very phenomena they aim to prohibit.

The multinational crime syndicate, which is itself more powerful than the majority of the UN member states, provides a frightening evidence in this respect.

Inside Europe the constitutional and political order, based on concepts of pluralistic and ideological representation within the community, is degenerating under the influence of party politics and undemocratic pressures. This is happening above all where the myth of proportional representation is preventing the electoral process from forming appropriate governments. The resulting regimes are incapable of conceiving a necessary and viable future based on life and quality of life, environmental conservation and reconciling the defence of civil and democratic traditions with the implementation of appropriate reforms by the year 2000.

In the face of this power structure which is out of control, absolute yet impotent, the great original parties of the 19th century or of the first half of the 20th, have now fulfilled their historic and civilising function. They must necessarily have room for new parties that are more suited to the times and whose basic objectives are no longer national but continental and universal, urgent, but not hasty or hurried, action is needed. Action will have to be efficient and the appropriate instruments must be prepared.

This may mean a new epic to perform, new horizons to be reached, a new migration, a new "western", new loyalties to be expressed. There is a possibility of salvation but we must be aware that the new "pastures in heaven" to be explored are in our own conscience and in our work. All this novelty is in segments, some segments will be swept aside, others will be taken up, transformed and expanded by others. The challenge proposed by the 32nd Congress, in its closing phase, is for the thousands of Radical Party members to be able to reach the consciences of all Italians, of Europeans, of the whole of the world with a message which is really simple: "When the good guys are too few, the bad guys will win."