XI.

THE NEW "SPRINGS" IN THE USSR, POLAND, AND HUNGARY.

THE HOPES FOR DEMOCRACY BY MEANS OF REFORMS.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE "PERESTROIKA" BY BUILDING A CONSTITUTIONAL SOCIETY AND STATE.

THE POSSIBILITIES OF ANALOGOUS PROCESSES IN SEVERAL AFRICAN SOCIETIES.

ABSTRACT: In the eleventh part of his report presented at the Radical Party in Budapest, First Party Secretary Sergio Stanzani expresses a highly favourable judgement on the process of overcoming "applied Socialism" (1) which is taking place in Eastern European countries. The danger that the new democratic "springs" will fail because of nationalistic pressures and an exaggerated multi-party system.

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

Today we are witnesses to the bursting out of "springtimes" followed by developments, sometimes happy, sometimes critical, in what was once the Soviet empire. They are bursting out everywhere with their distinctive characteristics - in Moscow as in Budapest, in Warsaw as in the Baltic states, Latvia, Armenia and Georgia in particular, and outside the empire, in Yugoslavia.

This acceleration of events seems to have been imposed, at least apparently, by Gorbachev's "new deal". This is, in any case, what created the conditions; and it may itself have been determined by the Soviet ruling class's taking stock of the rigidity and dangers of a one-party, centralist government, ruled from the top and undemocratic, as well as the desirability of more flexible forms of government, decentralised and subdivided according to the historical, social and cultural characteristics of the various countries involved.

Our party was one of the most intransigent opponents of Soviet totalitarianism and a supporter of human rights for the citizens of the countries of applied Socialism. After a period of prudent waiting and suspended judgement, "glasnost" and "perestroika" seemed to us to be potentially favourable elements of opposition within the Soviet system. One must challenge these policies and draw from its premises and promises all the logical conclusions, gradually and prudently, but also with Radical rigour. One must, that is, verify and probe them to see how they correspond to the facts. We have seen how the room for liberalisation and democratisation which has opened up, however minimal, have been occupied by the forces of dissent and of reform, some even within the Communist world and the one-party system - forces which had been previously suppressed and repressed, even if - as happens in every true historical process that involves a break with the past - they have been subject to ethnic and nationalistic rebe

llions which have already had tragic consequences in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Even these crises, which may appear at times to be dangerous and hard to control, nevertheless have the merit of bringing to the surface and calling attention to a reality which was unrecognised and suppressed before, and which rather should be managed and find just, if difficult, solutions.

The more recent developments in the perestroika seem important to us, which appear to be moving towards the reconstruction of a constitutional society and state in the countries of applied Socialism and in the Soviet Union itself. This is happening in different ways: in Hungary the process of reform seems to be moving towards a constituent phase, in the direction of pluralistic democracy, even if there is a lack of consensus in Hungarian society about the when and the how; in Poland the leap forward has been an institutional compromise reached between the Unified Polish Party and Solidarity which prefigures a bipartite form - however unbalanced and imperfect; in the Soviet Union, for now, it seems to be leading to the democratisation of the state structures and of the Soviet party, which may also result, if there are no brusque interventions, in a movement towards a constitutional society.

I must give an account of the debate within our party on these processes.

We have long asked ourselves if it was possible to escape from Soviet totalitarianism by reforms made within the Soviet system itself. As a non-violent political force the answers to this question interests us greatly. As pacifists, we reject the use of violence always, even when it is counter-violence, even when it is revolutionary violence employed against the violence of power. It is not true that the ends justify the means. The means must be coherent with the ends. The means presage the ends. The violence exercised in the name of justice has, in this century, produced atrocious results. But one of the objections theorists make to non-violence, to the revolutionaries who entrust themselves to this higher form of revolution which is non-violence, is precisely that it requires as a counterpart and an antagonist a power that is in some way bound to some form of legality and that is in some degree democratic. According to these scholars, it was possible for Gandhi to be non-violent because his counterpar

t and antagonist was British colonial power with its common law and the courts of His Britannic Majesty as well as the Anglo-Saxon press and information media.

Spain, and to a noteworthy degree, Portugal, demonstrated in the Seventies that it is possible to pass from a dictatorship to democracy by a process of reform and a dialogue between the opposition and the forces within the regime, by the conversion to democracy of a part of the ruling class of the preceding regime. In Spain the survival of the laws and the structures, and even of Franco's ruling class after the acquisition of democracy, was far less than in post-Fascist Italy where the transition to democracy was marked by the violent and traumatic events of the defeat in the second world war and of a civil war. In Spain, even if they were traumatic, the changes were more rapid and more thorough, just because they came from internal change and not imposed by external events.

The examples of Spain and Portugal, which help to overcome these theoretical objections too, tell us that the evolution towards legal forms and the reconstruction of a constitutional state can occur peacefully and be pursued by dialogue and non-violent opposition.

There is no contradiction between opposition and dialogue. The non-violent are not inert. The non-violent make a break, when necessary, with unjust laws and behaviour, laying their own lives and liberty on the line and not those of their counterparts and antagonists of the moment.

But the more opposition he offers, the more he breaks with unjust laws and behaviour, the more he enters into dialogue with his counterpart and his antagonist. His purpose is to convince and not to conquer.

That there should be the basis of a new law as a reference point, that there should be reform programmes of the Communist parties, is something very important. This is the basis of the dialogue, however intransigent, with the power-holders: the non-violent do not demand the implementation of their own future idea of legality, they do not ask for the implementation of their own programmes, but they ask for the full respect and implementation of the legal principles on which the legitimacy of the power-holders is based or of the programmes that the power-holders have declared they want to implement.

Thus we enter into the heart of the problems as they presented themselves to Sacharov or the internal and external dissidents of the CPSU (Soviet Communist Party) - the perestroika extremists as Yeltsin or Afanasiev were called; into the choices that the leaders of Solidarity had to face; to the choices that will present themselves in the next few weeks both to the reformers of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party and to the new forces that express the political, social and cultural pluralism of Hungarian society.

All political experts sustain the idea that the possible critical point of this process and these movements is in the possible defeat of Gorbachev and the Soviet reformist group. This is obvious. But we, quite frankly, must point out another possible critical point of these "springtimes".

This could come from the lack of mature, strong and adequate replies to the need of the new, that is to say, to the need of reform.

There is the risk that these "springtimes" of democracy will explode into a thousand wild and ungovernable pluralistic splinters which would be the opposite of alternatives and alternation. There is the risk that the thawing of the empire, rather than leading to a democratic federation of the Soviet Republics will explode, as happened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, into fragments of revolution and closed nationalistic and ethnic groups, each one diffident in regard to the other and all of them destined to failure.

Faced with these dangers we, who in relationship to the governments and the one-party systems of the Soviet empire have been for many years the party of law and human rights, the non-violent party of the Helsinki Treaty and the United Nations Convention - we may be perhaps the political group able to furnish a theoretical and practical reply, capable of constituting a real, strong democratic alternative to this possible development and to these two dangers. And that reply lies precisely in the two choices we have made almost two years ago and which was inscribed in the motion of the Bologna Congress last year: bi-partitism and trans-nationalism.

If, in fact, one went from one-party dictatorial regimes to parties that automatically re-establish old ideological divisions of a national and also nationalistic character, one would be going from the by now acknowledged failure of anti-democratic efficiency - which compels the governments to be immutable and not only unstable - to the certain and rapid failure of the multi-party and proportionalist model which has marked the failure of democracy in many parts of Western Europe between the two wars and which is punctually presenting again in recent years the tendency to instability, but even more, the sterility of governments and their governing of crises in world society and of each "national" society.

Just as it is our duty to look back at the crisis of democracy in the Twenties and Thirties before the advent of the various Fascisms, so it is our duty to keep in mind the tragedies of the Eastern European countries since the end of the last war. Those who are not content with being the passive objects of history and movements, and who want to be the active protagonists, cannot ignore the fact that these dangers are tragic and even probable prospects which must be faced and, if possible fought and impeded.

Without presumption and undue ambition, but with a humility that does not prevent conviction, I say that if the conditions were created the most effective reply might be precisely the establishment in these countries of the Radical Party with its lay orientation, its tolerance, non-violence, and trans-national character which make it capable of inspiring supra-national and multi-national prospects with the formation of an initial nucleus of leaders and an initial, small, but strong group of non-violent militants acting for the right to life and a life under law in the expectation and with the aim of presaging and realising on the institutional and state level the new constitutional society and federal, regional or inter-regional states which are the only possible democratic reply to the international and national crises of disorder.

If one looks away from from Eastern Europe towards the Mediterranean nations of Africa, to Algeria, Tunisia and perhaps Morocco in particular, it seems to me that one cannot exclude an outcome of the crisis of the same nature, whereas in all French-speaking and English-speaking Africa there is, with considerable difficulty, an evolution in progress towards a constitutional society and state (clearly adopted by the African Charter of Human Rights).