XIII.

SIXTEEN MONTHS OF TRANS-NATIONAL EXPERIENCE: THE LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF A DIFFICULT ITINERARY

ABSTRACT: In the thirteenth part of his report presented at the Radical Party in Budapest, First Party Secretary Sergio Stanzani presents a summing up of the activities for creating the trans-national party, emphasising the party's difficulties in establishing itself in Western European countries. But better prospects are opening up for Eastern European countries.

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

We had given ourselves the aim of getting 3,000 members in 1988. Instead we got 1,032. Were we to conclude that our decision to create a trans-national party was a mistaken ambition, that it had turned out to be a grand illusion?

No. That is not how it was. We must be careful of making destructive judgements. The difficulties were greater than we had foreseen. But in little more than a year of political action, we had begun to see the flowering, step by step, of trans-national theory and practise.

Certainly it is a question of a few very slender conditions and premises, but these should by no means be underestimated, because the progress from zero to the infinitely tiny 0.01 could in the long run represent an initial leap in quality that is more consistent and important than a much greater momentary growth which, however, is destined to remain - after having given self-satisfaction - forever on the sidelines or defeated.

In my entire report there is an explanation of the reasons why the response was disappointing or unsatisfying where we went looking for it, and more important and substantial than foreseen just where we had less hope of getting it.

In the analyses of the involution taking place in what I have called the countries of "applied democracy", the reason is probably the repeated failures to establish new Radical type organisations and actions in France, cultural and political impenetrability in Germany and Great Britain and the lack of adequate development after a promising start we had made in Spain and Portugal.

Contrarily, the thaw in the countries of "applied Socialism", with their hunger for information and debate, their search for something new and the need for making the best use of the opportunities that are offering themselves, is probably the reason for the more encouraging response we have had in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, and even in the Soviet Union itself.

I attribute equal importance to the membership of Bourkina Faso with the active presence in the party of Basile Gouisso, who, after his liberation accepted to be our first vice secretary, and comrade Salif Diallo.

This country, whose situation is perhaps among the most tragically typical of the Sahel, sends us a message of hope. Because it is from this country, where events speak the language of violence, where the revolution has entrusted violence with realising the "land of just men", and - repeating what has happened how many thousands of times in the last two centuries - has ended by devouring itself and turning against its children, precisely from here, precisely from the protagonists of these dramatic and mournful events there have come some concrete signs of non-violence and dialogue, of the hope for reconstructing - even in these very difficult conditions - a civilisation and co-existence founded on law.

In that place where nature itself is violence and where first colonialism and then the indifference of international capitalism created new violence, it is difficult even to speak of it. And anything which goes in this direction can appear miraculous. All the more importance then that we give and all the more gratitude we feel for the comrades who have come to testify to this will and this hope of Bourkina Faso's.

All this, all that has happened in the course of the year and that has been done by us or others, all that I have heard and reflected upon leads me to the conclusion that despite the enormous difficulties, our basic choices over the last two years (the democratic reform of the institutions in a bipartisan sense of the classical Anglo-Saxon kind and the trans-national reform of politics aiming at creating supra-national institutions and trans-national law) may offer the key to a reply, not merely Eurocentric and Euro-communitarian, but vastly more general, to the problems of our time.

In these two choices there is perhaps the heart of the trans-national party's political proposal which may they may legitimately attempt to develop both in the context of one-party regimes (in Eastern Europe as in African and Third World countries), and in multi-party and proportional regimes, at least, established primarily in Europe and the European Community with the exception of Great Britain.

Seizing on the essentials of this same reasoning, the concluding motion of the last Federal Council meeting, which we held in Strasbourg, drew the logical conclusions that it was up to this trans-national Radical Party to promote the party of the new democracy and the new law which are necessary to the reform of politics and the manageability of international and national crises. But this brings us to the concrete and dramatic question of our true possibilities; the contrast between our necessary political objectives and the concrete possibilities of pursuing them.