II.

THE REASONS FOR THE RADICAL PARTY'S TRANS-NATIONAL AND TRANS-PARTY CHOICE: A RISKY BET FOR A PARTY OF ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY ITALIAN MEMBERSHIP, EXPERIENCE AND HISTORY.

ABSTRACT: In the second part of his report presented to the Budapest Congress, Radical Party First Secretary Sergio Stanzani describes the reasons for transforming a prevalently Italian party into a trans-national one and the difficulties encountered in realising this objective.

(35th Congress of the Radical Party, Budapest, April 22-26, 1989)

At the beginning of 1988, the preceding Radical Party Congress - the 34th of a party which heretofore had had an almost exclusively Italian history because, even while being open to militants of other countries, and while having played a leading role in great international questions, its territory and range had been almost exclusively Italian - had given us a mandate to try realising the most radical refounding that a political force had ever attempted: the transformation of the Radical Party into a trans-national political organisation. To do this it practically coined a new word [i.e. trans-national, ed.], almost unknown in the language, not only political, of various countries: a term that designated a party and a policy capable of crossing national borders, institutions and political parties. This word was used to counterpoise the one currently in use, the word international which designated rather the relations between national states and, in reference to political parties (the party internationals

) the relationship between national parties that remained separate from each other, each one jealous of its own national autonomy and sovereignty.

This choice was determined by the urgent conviction that the great problems of our epoch are by now of planetary dimensions that cross national borders and cannot be dealt with, hence cannot be controlled, by national states and their laws, budgets and powers. Humanity's overriding worry since the end of World War II has been the risk of a new global conflict which, due to nuclear bombs, could be catastrophic for the entire planet.

But the risk of catastrophic events has grown enormously and spread beyond the idea of a general world conflict.

Such events would be the ozone hole or the hot-house effect, the deforestation of the planet or the desertification of constantly vaster areas, the pollution of the seas and of the air. They are matters like the human rights denied to millions of people or the right to life denied to tens of millions of people who die each year from starvation and disease, and to the hundreds of millions of others who suffer from hunger and misery. They are things like the growth of tumultuous megalopolises in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or the growing immigration into Europe and North America of millions of people chased out of their native countries by the lack of food and work. They are things like the geographically limited wars, nourished by the exporting of sophisticated weapons from the industrialised countries, or, in the more developed and richer nations, of the spreading of drug use and criminality. It is evident that the present law, the politics and institutions are impotent to dominate these phenomena

, since the whole world seems to stand by paralysed to watch them develop which can result in catastrophic results for all humanity.

On the one hand awareness is spreading, not only among intellectuals, but also among the general public, of these problems and their dimensions, their rapid development and their danger. On the other hand, one knows that the knowledge and the means exist to confront these problems and control them in the interests of humanity in an epoch that has seen, in less than a century, the accumulation of more scientific acquisitions than had been acquired in the entire previous history of humanity.

Thus it is a problem of political will, but not only that. For even if this should manifest itself, it would clash with the slowness of international procedures, the fragmentation of national powers, the multiplicity of interlocutors, and the resistance of private interests which can operate better by taking advantage of these difficulties.

Politics, understood as the capacity to confront effectively and creatively the great problems of our times, is thus negated. It is necessary to regain the right to politics now that the polis has become the entire world.

If there is no possibility of actuating the right to life, it is life under law itself which is brought into play and threatened. We need, therefore, to affirm a new trans-national and supra-national law which does not annul nations but crosses them and is above them.

This is the challenge the Radical Party has decided to launch: an apparently impossible challenge disproportionate to its strength - the challenge to construct a political force that will unite and organise the citizens of various countries who intend to struggle together to reach common goals and to transform their programmes into trans-national law and justice.

This party has no intention of competing with national parties. Consequently its members can be those Communists, liberals, Christians and Socialists who share the belief in the necessity and urgency of these intentions and objectives and who recognise along with us the insufficiency of their respective "international" organisations.

All of the latter will discover a lay party, not an ideological one, which one can join on the basis of its programmes and goals of political struggle. The Bologna Congress asked us to find the terrain into which plant the roots of the trans-national party on six great questions of almost unlimited scope due either to their importance and breadth or to the grandeur and difficulty of the task:

1) the struggle to revive and accelerate the process to bring about political unity in the European Community;

2) anti-totalitarianism and the struggle for democracy and human rights;

3) the fight against extermination from starvation and under-development in the Third World, for disarmament, security and peace;

4) anti-prohibition [of drugs, ed.] to counter the criminality, culture and ideology which has developed thanks to the clandestine drug market;

5) the defence and development of the principles of constitutional states;

6) the great environmental problems and the survival of humanity itself.

These are the same subjects which all belong to our heritage of ideas and our political history.

For more than thirty years this party in Italy has played the leading role (often victoriously) in the battle for civil rights.

We have been the moving force for a great fight against extermination from starvation in many parts of the world and the intransigent opponents of nuclear energy and the destruction of the environment, the spokesmen of the refuzniks and the dissenters throughout the world.

But the singularity of this experience and these successes was due to two conditions: our counterpart was prevalently if not exclusively always identified in Italian institutions and public opinion. Its theoretical characteristic as a non-ideological party also allowed the Radical Party from one occasion to another to concentrate its attention on specific political struggles and precise reforms.

These methodological characteristics have been overturned. From fighting in a limited geographical territory and on each occasion politically circumscribed single objectives we have been forced to pass onto a terrain unlimited both geographically and in its issues.

We have not wanted to be an international of national parties and movements, but rather a trans-national party, which is to say a single association with members in various countries united by common ideals and common political goals and so to find our identity in this new instrument and to desire to construct it together.