ABSTRACT: To join, it is sufficient to pay the yearly dues. There is no waiting list and nobody can be expelled. One can be Radical even if one belongs to another party. The Radical Party does not compete with the national parties. It is a means of broaching projects and ideals, not a church nor an army. It is a poor party, with a minimal structure. It is an "expensive" party because it wants to finance itself. It is a party which can be disbanded if the energy and money available to keep it going are insufficient. And today this is the case.

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

In order to join the Radical Party, there is only one condition:: to pay the enrolment fee. There are no prohibitions or boards or commissions who can accept or refuse enrolment. No one can check on the behaviour of a member or expel him. There is not even any incompatibility with joining another party far from it, it is in fact even desirable: we feel, that a democrat should be able to be and ought to be "Radical" as well, and not just "Radical". It is really a Party which does not compete with any other party, especially as regards national parties. Its objectives are absolutely different: it is a party with ideals, projects and battles to wage, not an electoral, power-seeking party. It has Gandhi's face as its symbol because it wants to affirm that political non-violence is the actual incarnation of lay tolerance and political democracy. In brief, it is a sort of WWF of human rights, a free association of people who intend to pursue democratic objectives beyond frontiers, beyond parties, beyond th

e boundaries of traditional politics. Precisely to this end it decided at the last Congress not to participate as such in any elections. Its militants are obviously free to run in any list or to found any party. It is a party offering its "service" , open to all and run by free individuals who, as such, stay with the Radical Party. A sort of bus where whoever pays his ticket membership has the right to complete his paid journey to its very end: the right, and not the obligation. The Party does not postulate any discipline: its resolutions are not binding except for those "in charge" who are new each year, and not for members. There is annual registration, as the life of the Party is annual. With its congress, in which all members have the right to participate, and to vote, the Radical party is constituted or reconstituted de facto every year on the basis of the decisions adopted by a majority of two thirds of the voters. On this basis each member decides if he wishes to renew his membership. Th

e Party then is in no way legally "representative" of its members, their humanity, their ideas, or their general interests. A democratic party for us is an instrument, or a tool, not a church, a racial affiliation or an army. Our "leaders", as such, can only achieve the annual objective, decided by the Congress of members, but never be "representative" of them. Thus it is a "difficult" party: there are no orders to be carried out or totalizing, reassuring ideologies to be banded about or "armchairs" to be able to occupy. People join to support ideas, projects and political battles. People are militants of the Radical Party to affirm their own convictions, their own hopes. It is an "expensive" party, with a minimum enrolment fee which is probably more expensive than those requested by the other parties in the world. This is the guarantee of its autonomy, and the reason for its strength: only a Party which is "worth" for its own members at least what they are willing to pay every day for a newspaper,

can pretend to represent great ideals. It is a poor Party, with minimal structures, just the bare essentials. Since it has chosen to spend at least 80% of its resources on political activity and not on salaries or luxurious offices. It can decide its policy quickly, because it is not concerned with safeguarding positions of power. It can even close: if the energy and money which depend on enrolments and support are not sufficient to keep it going. And today they are not. There are no more than 5.000 Radicals in the world. At least three times as many are necessary. In the course of this year, our priority is to make our resources adequate to meet the objectives entrusted to us by the Congress. First and foremost, that of transforming ourselves into a transnational political entity. This option is causing us new difficulties of no small size. It is enough to consider the needs of a party which entrusts all its capacity for dialogue and conviction exclusively to words, written and spoken - and of

ten screamed. But speaking, writing, and communicating in a lot of languages is expensive, very expensive. A single example is this publication which has been published in 12 languages. Each publication, in each language, costs about 18.000 dollars. It should be sent to all those who reply to the campaigns for information in national papers, which in each of the 12 countries, costs on average about 20.000 dollars. In the Eastern European countries, illegal distribution adds to the expense. We have therefore reached a sum of over 430.000 dollars which we do not possess. This is why, for the moment, we have had to limit ourselves only to the areas of French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbocroat and Slovene. It will depend on those who read this publication, on their decision to join, to make a financial contribution, whether we shall be able to continue and to fulfill our information campaign; whether we are to be able to make it possible for our Polish, Russian, Dutch, and German friends to opt

for the non-violent battles of the Radical Party; whether we could enable our friends in Burkina Faso, and the Secretary Basile Guissou who has as the only guarantee for his life, his own non-violence plus the certainty of the information that we are able to circulate that he is not alone. It will depend even more on us all if this publication is not to be the last, but the first link in the chain of a dialogue which will permit all of us to be stronger, better armed with awareness and solidarity, in order to affirm that heritage of reasonable convictions in which we are able to recognise ourselves. Here then is the Party you can join. Here is the project which we shall be able to carry out together. It is possible to do so. If, on the other hand, at the end of 1989 we consider together that this instrument, the Radical Party, has not grown sufficiently, or appears inadequate to meet its objectives, it will have lost its consistency, so we shall have to set it serenely aside and eventually to conceive a

nother.