by Roberto Cicciomessere

ABSTRACT: The author suggests a different interpretation of the collection of motions of the Radical Party: to verify which analyses were subsequently confirmed by reality, and which goals were concretely reached.

(Preface to: "1955/1990 - The Radical battles, proposals and achievements through the congressional papers and the statute" - Ed. Partito Radicale)

This is one of those books that one normally buys, browses through and rapidly places in the bookcase, promising to look it up whenever the occasion comes. A collection of a party's "official" documents is not, to say the truth, the most stimulating and exciting of reading matters.

This is why I am suggesting an interactive form of reading, which will, perhaps, convince you not to set this book aside immediately. This collection of congressional motions of the radical party, from 1955 to now, allows for an exercise and an examination which few political organizations, I believe, would be willing to undergo: the comparison between the analyses, the programs, the promises and the real events, the concrete results, the promises maintained. And all this over a period of 35 years, which is quite relevant for a political party.

We need only pick a motion at random, perhaps an old motion, and check whether there is a correspondence between what was written and the reality of that time, the way we remember it; we need only read the final "purview" of that same motion and see how many proposals and projects were then enforced.

If the ratio between commitments and achievements exceeds 50%, the only thing to do is hurry up and join the Radical Party.

I will start this comparison myself.

Even if we know that in 1962 there was a fracture between the "old" radical party of Carandini, Piccardi, Calogero, Valiani, Scalfari, and the "new" radical party of Pannella, Spadaccia, Rendi, Bandinelli, Teodori, I want to respect the ideal continuity with the "old" party claimed by the new radicals by examining the first text ever published, that is, the "programmatic document of the Radical Party of the liberals and of Italian democrats", on the basis of which this new political formation was established in December 1955.

From that document, dating back to '55, I will extract the analysis of the Italian situation and the goals that the radical party set itself and to the public opinion.

The analysis: "The life of thought and of work is deeply troubled by the realization that the collapse of dictatorship has been followed by a shy and clumsy democracy, heir of corrupt customs, weak in defending the State's authority from confessional penetrations and from the impetus of extremism, incapable, ultimately, of expressing the spirit of the new Republican Constitution in its institutions".

The goals: "The enforcement of the Constitution and the concrete establishment of the lay and liberal State, of that State subject to a rule of law which makes all citizens equal before the law, without political and religious discriminations, and which guarantees them with the active freedom from governmental and police abuse".

The disease affecting Italy at the time, and still affecting it now, was, using a radical expression, the abyssal distance between the democracy prefigured in the Constitutional Chart and "real democracy", the one mankind wanted to achieve in institutions, in statutes, in daily life.

After the fall of fascism, in spite of the Constitution's high democratic content and the attention toward the defence of civil rights, all the legislative establishments, the codes and the bad habits of the fascist regime still remained in force. The first commitment the Radical party devoted its attention to was therefore that of trying to achieve a "truly constitutional" Republic, of modernizing Italy with laws that eliminated the clerical and corporate residues, to activate new forms of direct participation of the citizens to the political life of the country, with referendums, for example.

But, once the season of civil rights was over, the new Christian Democrat laws and the emergency laws unanimously voted for years in the municipal, provincial and regional councils and in Parliament, with no distinction whatsoever of responsibility between majority and opposition, increased the discrepancy between "real democracy" and the constitutional plan even further. This was possible because the Italian parties, unlike the other European political families, refused the fair dialectic of alternation, and on the contrary established a system based on party power, that is, a substantially solidarist entity, beyond the appearance of conflict, in the division of power, in the resolve to usurp the sovereignty which the Constitution gives to the population and the institutions.

The battles for the conquest of civil rights, the forms of direct participation of the people, such as referendums, the moralization campaigns were no challenge against this new regime. Every expression of the population's sovereign will, even if expressed with immense majorities, as in referendums, was punctually denied, and nullified by the will of partyism. It was necessary then as it is now to reform politics, the system of parties, the electoral system, in the attempt to reproduce those mechanisms which have, until now, guarantied the best representation of democracy in Anglo-Saxon societies.

But if these were the analyses and the proposals contained in the programmatic statement, later developed in the motions of the radical congresses - returning to the initial question - have the radicals succeeded in affirming them concretely in politics and in everyday life?

Anti-clericalism, divorce, anti-militarism, conscientious objection, abortion, women's liberation, federalism, sexual liberation, anti-totalitarianism, "fair justice", right to information, referendum against special laws, against the public financing of parties, for the demilitarization of the Revenue Guard Corps, for the abrogation of life sentence, against hunting, environmentalism and anti-nuclear battle, antiprohibitionism, electoral reform...

After having said the radical rosary, a practice which I would recommend some radical companions who have become cynical and skeptical at least every morning, I realize that 35 years of history have been deeply and positively impressed by the radical adventure. And I believe that no other party can present a similar outcome. Not to mention non-violence, which we applied at a time in which it was still not fashionable and meant prison, when the revolutionary furore filled the pages of books and newspapers. Today political non-violence is part of the culture of our time. Today non-violence is acknowledged as a universal value also by those populations for which it took 70 years to free themselves of Soviet totalitarianism. Today non-violence is even a guarantee against the risks of a degeneration of student movements.

All this would be enough to say that our "founding fathers" were right, when they wrote not to "promise too much or in vain" in the 1955 document.

Should we therefore revel in our successes? No. I purposefully avoided mentioning the battle against starvation in the world, even if we devoted all our energies to it for 5 long years.

This was our sole defeat. We have thought about the reasons for this. We asked ourselves why, and we understood that to continue our constant battle for the affirmation of that "State subject to the rule of law that makes all citizens equal before the law", we could not limit ourselves to one country. Simply because the source of law is no longer national. The State subject to the rule of law today can no longer be embodied by a national State. To state this would be to lie. Altiero Spinelli recalled this in a radical Congress, when he repeated, for the first time perhaps before a congenial audience, that no major problem can be tackled seriously with national criteria and means.

We realized that these same battles, the antiprohibitionist battles or the environmentalist battle, should have produced international law even more than internal law, to be successful. Little matter if someone thought of embezzling them at a national level, with the sole purpose of gaining more votes and power.

We should accept Spinelli's suggestion to abandon the easy and comfortable national horizons and critically analyse the very nature of our party, to embark in the open sea of transnational and transpartisan politics.

This is what we did.

We do not believe we are "promising too much or in vain", if we state today that 35 years after that solemn commitment, we firmly intend to fight for the affirmation of a State subject to the rule of law, for the right to life, first of all, for the right to a complete enforcement of democracy.

Who wants to take part in this new adventure and write 35 more years of political history as a protagonist, and therefore as a radical?