In a recent article Gianni Vattimo anlyses the "immaginario collettivo" evoked by the revolution of the East in us "Westerners".

The end of the cold war, the falling of walls and chains, the recognition of the superiority of the democratic model, give us peace and security. But the curiosity and expectations lie elsewhere, in concern for the rapidity and volume of change in those societies compared to the degeneration and the status quo of our "democratic society"; and Vattimo reasonably concludes that "in reality, even we here in the West would like to be capable of changing radically, not to let democracy put itself off in a painless way, but not for this reason less inexorable, in the triumph of cynicism, faithlessness, of corruption accepted as a minor ill ...". If we therefore think with anxiety and curiosity of what may come out of the ruins of real socialism, it is also because we are more or less aware of, and feel ourselves more subject sudditi to "real democracy" than protagonists of live democracy.

It is pleasant to think that Hungary or the Soviet Union, with greater freshness and innocence, is looking not for something that we already have but something that even we lack, despite greater well-being and happiness than the peoples of the East.

But it is precisely on the basis of this analysis that the transnational intuition of the radicals is appropriate. More rarely and with great difficulty it succeeds in becoming directly political (in the sense of breaking the political struggle with the force of provoking confrontation) but defines the indispensable framework of the new democracy, beyond whose dimensions no democratic solutions are possible for prolems that do not respect national boundaries.

Placed also in the same ambit are the difficult attempts, and the first steps to a non-violent initiative that we have laid underway in the last few days, with Marco Panella and other colleagues, inviting one to a more mature reflection on the crucial question of "the power of information" and of its exercise.

It is not at all paradoxical that in Moscow and Prague demonstrations were staged in front of Western embassies revindicating the right and liberty of information. Atleast it is not more paradoxical than a demonstration held in Rome or in Brussels for liberty and civil rights in the east. It was not a matter of contingent support with difficult electoral proofs conducted in the west in an a-democratic condition, in which not only is the management of information questionable, but also the calculations of ballots and votes. It was not sought to so much "protest" against censure and discriminations through these demonstrations and fasting, so much as placing a problem - in political, and not merely in academic or abstract terms - that is faced on the transnational level, and therefore also in the countries that we live in.

We live in a democracy that is faulty and degraded by the theoritical and practical absence of the new State of Rights and the new balance of powers that effectively operate in contemporaneous societies. The classical scheme of the tripartition of powers (executive, legislative judicial) has suffered the eruption of a mediate power that arose domineeringly in this century, upto the point of contemporaneously the functions of exercising heavy conditioning of other powers, and as a powerful vehicle of consensus control. It is not the only major anomaly of traditional democracy, but the harmony of dialectic democracy - seen as the fruit of a complex system of control between powers - is today crushingly compromised by a power that is in fact uncodified and unregulated.

If this is true in the East and West, more so will it be in the society of communication and superimposition of reality and appearance; it continues to be the object of research but is descreasingly addressed in political and legislative terms. And yet we see imbalances and errors every day. The absence of protection guarantees of the identities of collective persons or of one individual lead to the abolition of entire political social minorities, often to the demolition of the image without possibility of redemption. Penalties, sanctions, correctives, counterbalances, and instruments of control are non-existent or inpracticable. The logic of brutal power prevails, with an authoritative ethic, prohibitionist in the broad sense, while the democratic institutes lose value and role from the voting to the Parliament stage. This is the reality wherein one feels impotent. Neither is it discounted that the radical party can be the seat of reflection and action on this central matter of "real democracy", that can

manage to effectively operate efficiently on the transnational level, that an articulate, collective non- violent initiative is mature, different from that what we are used to know, and directed to the respect of the democratic legality that even our constitutions solemnly sanction. Still, reflecting on this, one and all of us, will not really harm us. As in many other occasions the radical thrust could perhaps stir the many "sleeping" democrats, lost in repression and inertia.