ABSTRACT: The federal council of September; the federalist initiative of building the United States of Europe; the energies, the resources, the difficulties of the Radical Party and of the transnational approach.

(Notizie Radicali n. 224 of 17 October 1989)

Q: We will start almost inevitably with the last "public event" of the Radical Party, that is, from the federal Council of the beginning of September. A meeting with over 100 people, including the whole of the party's historical leadership. Has this federal Council been a turning point, an occasion for change and growth?

A: It has been, first of all, a very demanding and exhausting federal Council: for the first time - for a total of five days - activists and exponents of the new dissent in the East, who have become acquainted with the Radical Party only through the very few informations given by the press, have met, along with the many comrades who have shared a responsibility within the Radical Party in these last twenty years. We should also think about the work that kept us busy during the whole of the month of August to manage to have the Russian comrades among us (their absence has caused the postponement in July of the Council summoned in Strasbourg). These highly qualified presences sustained the debate with points of view and proposals of great importance for the evolution of the Radical politics in the East.

But to answer your question, I can tell you that this federal Council - unlike others that were often hindered by too internal a debate - gave me the impression of a lively party, filled with ideas and political initiative, still capable of producing policies and asserting values. The impression, the image of a group of people - the members of the federal Council - who for the most part agree on the choice of the congress in Bologna, the choice that asserted the historical urgency of the transnational dimension of politics and of the creation of a new transpartisan and transnational organizational model.

But, and this is its most dangerous limitation, they feel impotent as regards the tasks that these choices involve.

In spite of this, it has been a federal Council which after having confirmed these analyses, also by developing projects of important initiatives - ranging from the one on the Berlin wall to the hypothesis of resuming the campaign against mass starvation, on the basis of the assertion of human rights and of the right to interfere - finally replied with a clear-cut position toward the problems which the Secretary had been posing for two years now. It certainly did not solve them, but it did have the merit of not removing them. I'm referring to the impossibility, for this partisan instrument, as regards the decay and the restriction of the spaces of real democracy, to give a political shape to its ideal contents. Hence the central statement contained in the final motion of the Council, which commits all Radicals to work for the birth and the affirmation of a new transpartisan, transnational and non-violent subject, capable of giving political body and force to the Radical ideals.

The federal Council thus rejected the accusations according to which it intended to close the party down, asserting the great morality and rigour of its choice, which remits the decision concerning the possibility or not to continue the Radical political experience to the public opinion and to the political interlocutors.

A federal Council, therefore, that could not but confirm the analyses contained in the motion of the Budapest congress, acknowledging the fact that all the conditions are there to carry out its device which establishes the assumption of "full powers" on the part of the quadrumvirate.

This is the phase we are presently going through.

On this subject, I believe that those who reduce and explain our problems and our difficulties to the sole presumed inadequacy of the people appointed by the Congress to conduct the Radical policies are committing a serious political mistake.

If the fact of not having been able to make the transnational party take off depended only on the incapacity of a few people, or of the party's organizations, the solution would be very simple: it would be sufficient to send these 2 or 10 incapable people home and replace them with others. And it would be a readily available solution, in a party in which at no time has there been any competition to obtain the office of secretary or treasurer, but in which, often, we have had to tie the unfortunate person in charge to her seat to force her to take up such a great number of tasks and no honour at all.

Rather, I believe that the problem we must face is twofold: on the one hand the impossibility of transmitting the radical message with completeness. Not only censorship, but also the most refined manipulation and sterilization of the scandalous and revolutionary contents of the Radical proposal. The terms transnational and transpartisan strike many as senseless swear-words, if we are deprived of the possibility of explaining the contents.

On the other hand we have not been capable of locating the thread to be pulled, the end of the tangle of an intuition, the transnational intuition, so exciting and stimulating as it is complex and clearly disproportioned as compared to our forces.

To make a comparison, I'm thinking of the seventies and of the clerical oppression of Italian society, starting from the pillage of Rome to the Church's interference into citizens' private life.

Well, in a very complex situation like that we have been capable of finding a thread - first called divorce, then abortion - which has involved the theme of sexuality and of individual freedoms, and, generally speaking, has asserted the necessity for the reformation of politics. We had followed the thread of the concrete battle, of an apparently peripheral battle, to try to disentangle a matter which at first sight appeared unapproachable for the extremely modest means of the (very few) Radicals.

Q: From the congress of Bologna we located and found several of these threads, and there are still many more, even if perhaps they have turned out less solid than they appeared. For example, in the federalist initiative we saw the rope we had grasped begin to fray.

A: It seems to me that in the federalist initiative we have not managed to locate a topic, a goal which can give people and public opinion the sense of the necessity and the urgency of building the United Sates of Europe.

Today the federalist issue is considered by public opinion as an optional, not as an urgent necessity for which it is urgent to act. We have not been able to represent with concrete examples the importance for every day life, for people's jobs, for the protection of the environment, of the decisions taken in Brussels or at the useless summits of the heads of state of the European Community. If many believe - rightly or wrongly - that the coming Roman elections represent a deadline that can change their life, or at least solve the problem of traffic in the city, only a scanty minority is presently convinced that a true federal government of Europe could positively act on the problems they must face every day.

Even on the question of the assertion of democracy in the East, for which we have struggled in complete isolation for over twenty years, we now find ourselves "overwhelmed" by events that we had foreseen and in certain ways contributed to cause. In substance, out of internal necessities of those countries, that democratic evolution which we had stimulated and favoured seems to be speeding past us, making our engagement superfluous.

The whole world, as a matter of fact, welcomes a process of democratization which seems be autonomous and irreversible. We know, on the contrary, that this is not true: the nationalist thrusts and the economic crisis of those countries can lead, as our Russian comrades dramatically warned, to terrible events, to new civil wars.

Hence the necessity to immediately convert our commitment, in order to stimulate, in those countries, the antibodies against desperate and violent rebellion.

For years we attempted to build a party, a transnational organization for which the North-South problem and mass starvation are priorities; we know exactly how and why we have come to a dead end. To return to the subject of the last federal Council: the comrades who came from far away feel and express the necessity and the urgency for this transnational organization to exist, for it to be a vehicle for many questions, an instrument to confer a political shape to a variety of expectations. Perhaps deceiving all these expectations, the federal Council of Rome - though rich with starting points, meditations and proposals - could not have given an answer to the problems listed above; it succeeded "only" in carrying out a work of truth and transparency, denying that the democratic rules of a party can be have course today, denying that the life of a party can be characterized by the certainty of democratic rights.

In the jungle of partitocracy, in the mass medias, in a large part of the public opinion itself which must endures these violences, the only current values seem to be transformism, speculation and mediocrity raised to virtues.

Hence the voluntary annulment of the rules of our party, hence the "full powers", which are not a bureaucratic or efficiency-oriented choice, but the denouncement of the impossibility for the party of the right to survive in "real democracy".

Q: The question of the rules has been among the ones at the centre of the federal Council, both as regards what Roberto Cicciomessere wrote in his article on Notizie Radicali, both as regards the way Pannella once again tackled the issue.

A: As I said before, rules cannot live in a world void of rules. The Radicals cannot deceive themselves into thinking of building a small heaven to save their conscience. Even the monastic orders most remote from the reality of the world cannot resist if barbarity thrives all around them.

The federal Council therefore said that there surely is the need to invent new rules, but that the current situation at the most can allow for the beginning of this meditation, but certainly not the accomplishment of the theoretical and organizational statute of the new transnational party.

Q: To look at the party one has the impression that there is a problem concerning the extension and the renewal of its leadership. For example: in seven years of initiatives against massive starvation no new energy has been added. The same is happening in this last stage, in spite of the fact that everyone acknowledges a certain strength in the transnational idea. Is there a problem of resources, also from the point of view of the people and of the energies?

A: I think Roberto Cicciomessere is right when he explains that there are more mature battles and more difficult battles which force us to constantly go against the stream. I'm thinking of my experience at the CISA (1) or before that the one at the LID (2), that is, battles which become mature and in which it is "easier" to engage in. But let's not neglect the fact that these results have been the fruit of the obscure, difficult and unrewarding work of the Radicals, who, after so many defeats and humiliations impossible to list, after subsequent corrections and attempts, have managed to disentangle, and not by chance, the muddle I was referring to before.

Today there are battles which are more mature from a cultural point of view, the environmental battle, for example. My fear is that this battle could lose some of its Radical features, and then run the risk of becoming banal. Just as the antiprohibitionist battle is mature, even if not easy. In conclusion, these are battles with a clear context, just as the interlocutors, the counter-part and the goals are clear, not only the "historical" ones, but the medium and long range ones as well.

Faced with the difficulty of the transnational battle, many comrades - "leaders" or "common activists", with perfect uniformity - somehow feel that they are more adequate and more useful in the environmental, antiprohibitionist battle or in the Italian electoral events. It seems to me instead that there is little meditation, little attention and much impatience on the issues that go beyond the "Chiasso" border.

I perfectly understand this attitude.

The Italian Radical opens the newspaper and thinks he understands better than others what is going on. He listens to the Radical Radio and thinks he can understand absolutely everything of the Italian political reality. But rarely will he read a non-Italian newspaper, rarely - apart from the few commendable exceptions - does he get involved culturally in international politics. I understand this perfectly, but I regret very much that there is this tendency precisely at a moment in which we are trying to find the passage in the middle of the desert which could take us to the new transnational dimension of politics.

The result of all this is the following: the group that has the major and exclusive responsibility of the transnational policy is getting smaller and smaller. Not only is there no renewal or input of new energies, but, on the contrary, we witness a progressive subtraction of forces.

At the federal Council in Rome, this phenomenon of "brain escape" from the difficult and unrewarding transnational research has been defined, very clearly, as a contradiction inherent in the fact of trying to join the transnational project with the transpartisan project. We prudently stopped at that stage.

But in the next weeks or months we will have to express a judgement, verify if it is a vital or lethal contradiction, and then decide whether to sustain it and cultivate it or whether to remove it by means of drastic and immediate interventions.

Translator's notes

(1) CISA: Italian Centre for Sterilization and Abortion

(2) LID: Italian Divorce League