IV.

THE COMING CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY AND JUSTICE IN THE COUNTRIES OF APPLIED DEMOCRACY

ABSTRACT: In the fourth part of the report presented by the Radical Party's First Secretary to the Congress in Budapest, Sergio Stanzani heralds the crisis of democracy in the West, and in particular in Italy. He emphasises the inability of the Western governments to confront the great challenges of our time, among them the extermination from starvation in the Southern Hemisphere and the destruction of the environment.

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

I have claimed for the Radical Party the honour and the task of having been in some way the "party of the European Parliament": the party of a Parliament fighting to acquire effective powers of democratic management and control.

It is an expression that may evoke the Gandhian one of the "Congress Party", the revolutionary instrument of Indian independence. This may appear a presumptuous and overweening statement, beyond all reality and true possibility. But I dare to think that it would not be impossible for the Radical Party, which has chosen the figure of Gandhi for its symbol, to appeal, through its political struggles and the weapon of non-violence, to the public opinion of the European peoples in order to gain strength in its dialogue with their governments and convince them to abandon their resistance to taking the road of unity.

But in truth this possibility is obstructed and precluded. The very premises of democracy are in ever greater danger of being annulled, which consist in a free choice among differing opinions. But if information should be lacking regarding the factors involved, if there should not be equality at the starting post among the forces involved, the choice is no longer free.

A new power - that of the mass media - has evolved and created for itself a position outside all regulation, contrary to what happened in the course of the centuries when, little by little, the the traditional powers of the modern state - the executive, the legislative, and the judicial - were established and defined.

The situation of this new power escaping all regulation alters the traditional equilibrium of these powers, threatening to annul their normal functioning and to second the creation of a "de facto" power. This power - party power - which is also irresponsible and rarely enlightened, is in essence creating imperfect one-party forms, at least in those countries where a proportional multi-party system is in effect. But perhaps analogous phenomena can be considered responsible for the constantly growing difficulties of democratic alternation even in a traditionally bipartisan country such as Great Britain.

One thing is certain, however: power, from being a means, is becoming an end in politics and that political parties, from being a tool of government for realising programmes approved by democratic majorities, are becoming more and more a tool for monopolising, managing and dividing up power.

It may seem provoking and paradoxical on our part if, just at a time when the one-party dictatorships and absolute right to power in the so-called Socialist countries are entering a crisis, we must discuss and reflect on a crisis of democracy in the Western European countries which induces us to speak of "real democracy" in a very broad sense analogous to the meaning of "real Socialism", which for decades we alone used - except for a few independent intellectuals - until it was adopted by the rest of the Left, even the Communists. I feel the need here to do away with all possible misunderstandings.

It is not our intention to put differing phenomena on the same plane: on the one hand, the lack of democracy and, on the other, phenomena of involution or democratic crises.

But neither can we ignore the fact that just as the Socialist societies are reviving, among a thousand difficulties and a thousand contradictions, the problem of reconstructing a "constitutional society", in the Western countries the crisis of law - of civil and penal law - and the crisis of international law throughout the world, for which the democratic countries (and otherwise who else?) are mainly responsible, are such, even for experts in juridical and political science, as to make us legitimately expect the Radical motto - "For the right to life and a life under law" - soon to become a common one among others, even if probably too late.

In the West there is no longer any real debate over the question of justice in the broad sense. Therefore there is no real difference among the parties as the personifications of differing and alternative value systems. There different names are by now little more than an effect and reflex of historical memory which do not in any way correspond to political programmes and present ideals.

The existing order is, in substance, accepted, but not so much because it is considered good as because it is considered unalterable. The problem is only one of adapting oneself to it as well as possible with everyone (the individual, the social group and the country) cutting out a niche for himself and, at best, working for some adjustments.

The new "power of the West" and its "going over to the offensive", its imposing itself as a model on the rest of the world has occurred - as Gianni Baget Bozzo (1) has pointed out, a political scientist who is among the few in Italy to have, at times, a great capacity for intuition and analytic theory - in this context and this spirit, which is that of Reagan's laissez-faire policies. Reaganism and Thatcherism both manifest the power and efficiency of the Western model, but do not propose the Western model as a value, as the realisation of an idea of the universal "just order" and of justice based on the rights of man and the constitutional state.

Thus we arrive at a paradox: just at the time when the failure of Communism inspires a passionate debate in Eastern Europe and tensions regarding the values of freedom, liberty, law and "Western" justice, the West no longer feels that it is the place which has the responsibility for realising, defending, exalting and propagating these values.

Thus the West is not aware that in the world of today, so radically interdependent, democracy and "Western" law are lame and impotent precisely with regard to fundamental decisions unless they are extended to a supra-national and trans-national level.

The West is the true site today of the crisis in the democratic-liberal model because it is not experienced as a value for which one must fight, not felt as a "problem".

We are attentive to these phenomena and do not hesitate to declare them right here in Hungary because we are afraid of their effects. The democracies lost out to Fascism and Stalinism when - after World War I - they were incapable of conceiving and realising higher forms of national and international order and justice. And they only began again to create the premises for winning when, in Roosevelt's America and the Great Britain of the Labour Party and some liberal theoreticians, they started to furnish adequate answers to the crisis of capitalism of the time, and higher, more humane as well as democratic answers to those proposed by Fascism and Communism. But it was too late. And the price of that delay was World War II.

We must ask ourselves frankly if today the majority of people in Western Europe, so very conditioned as it is by the culture of political indifference and the evasion of ideals imposed by the great information monopolies, are capable of any strong revolutionary movements against the myopic suicide of the national potentates and bureaucracies.

We must take a cold-blooded look at the danger, which is highly probable, that the propelling thrust of Western democracy has now been interrupted - that same democracy that, after centuries of fratricidal wars consented to conceive of a community with which the Germans and the French, the Italians, Dutch, and Belgians could all identify and live in together. A society satisfied with its material well-being, its wealth and consumption, it turns in on itself to live on its revenues - and when it does not produce the despair of terrorist revolution or the suicidal impulse to drugs - spreads resignation: resignation to the economic and political madness of the twelve [i.e.EEC ed.] budgets for research, for defence, for industry. But also resignation to the destruction of the environment which threatens the life of the planet itself. Resignation to indifference towards the holocaust of millions of human lives exterminated by starvation or made to hunger every year by underdevelopment, misery, by disease. Re

signation to the spreading of ever greater violence which grows around the circumference of protected zones with an ephemeral security and a precarious well-being

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Baget Bozzo, Gianni (Savona 1925) - Priest, political scientist, writer. Editorial writer for <> and author of many successful books. PSI deputy in the European Parliament.