ABSTRACT: Against the new Leviathan of violence and intolerance, we need to affirm a supernational political dimension that can overcome the division now felt around the world between science and power, between knowledge and political decision-making.

The Radical Party aims to organize the activity of those people who believe that it is necessary to take a transnational approach to the problems of the protection of the ecosystem, of the right to life and a life of rights. And to do so now, immediately. In order to do this we need to act and to organize.

(The Party New, n.4, September 1991)

All over Europe the demons of the 20th century, which seemed to heave been defeated, are rising from their ashes and beginning once again to threaten the world, just as it seemed that a great new season of liberty, democracy, and peace was about to begin.

As in the 1930s, Paris and London are bowing down before the Leviathan of violence and intolerance: are they hoping in this way that the monster will be satiated, before attacking them directly, with victims other than themselves?

Berlin is troubled, uncertain as to how to govern its new-found strength. In Italy, which is in difficulty and on the verge of fraudulent bankruptcy, the Foreign Minister can predict with impunity that in no more than twenty years his country will be the leading European power, and the fourth power in the world after the United States, Japan, and (maybe) the ex-Soviet Union. Madness in power, if it is actually power.

The leaders of the world rush off to Peking, the capital of an immense evil empire which continues to rule in a totalitarian and violent manner over more than a billion people, about whom the world knows virtually nothing, and is happy to know nothing: entire populations and millions of women and men exterminated over half a century. Tibet is one example, but an example that doesn't begin to tell the whole story.

They were ready, as they showed, to give immediate recognition to an authoritarian, coup-led "new order" in Moscow, asking only that Gorbachev himself should not be sentenced to death. And they protected the Yugoslavian coup, carried out by the army of the racist and neo-Bolshevic Milosevic, putting the aggressed and the aggressors on the same level, threatening sanctions against both sides, leaving the Albanese population in Kosovo to suffer Nazi-style occupation and oppression, and enforcing "truces" that served only to bring about the occupation of most of Croatia, indifferent to the democratic nature of the choices made by Croatia and Slovenia, to their request to join the European Community (with the ensurance that they would respect the liberty of the whole population, including minorities), and to their willingness to form part of the kind of Confederation that Gorbachev and Yeltsin have in mind for the Soviet Union.

When Shevarnadze continues to warn that the real "coup" in the Soviet Union is yet to come, and when we see the forces of stabilization supported in Romania and elsewhere, we are right to suspect that what is happening with the ex-Yugoslavia is a dress rehearsal for the future reactions towards the Soviet Union and other places.

In other words, the policy which has ruled the world for more than fifty years is triumphing once again. The policy of France under Leon Blum's Popular Front, which allowed General Franco's army to rise up and destroy the legal and democratic Spanish Republic, whilst Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalin's USSR intervened officially: the same France which saw its democratically elected Parliament vote to hand over full powers to Marshal Petain after the dishonourable, lightening collapse at the hands of Hitler's army.

The Munich policy, which hailed Mussolini and Hitler as guardians of the peace when Rhineland and the Sudeten had been occupied, when the Anschluss with Austria had already taken place.

A policy which was then pursued with respect to Stalin and the Communist empire: there was no invention when Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary were annexed by Moscow by the use of force; when Budapest was invaded by Kruschev's tanks and when the same happened in Prague; when the "liberations" of almost the whole of the Third World, and those in the Far East, led to the fiercest of dictatorships, with the endless "cemeteries under the stars" in Pol-Pot's Cambodia, a single, vast Dachau, a single, vast Auschwitz.

Should we be surprised, when the right to life in the world is treated like this, if the anti-democratic cancer also spreads within the great democratic empire, the "real democracy"? Thus Paris, London, Madrid and Rome seem to place the death sentence on the European Community at a moment when its democratization can no longer be delayed, when a federal Constitution can no longer be denied.

The metastasis of this tumour is the prohibitionist drugs policy in the South of the world: this has caused an increase in coca-producing countries, which have multiplied from three to twelve in the space of very few years; it has extended the plantations and the trade, including state trade, of products derived from opium; it has supplied an immense army of tens of millions of drug-pushers for the large criminal organizations of the world, branding hundreds of millions of addicts as criminals; it has polluted the economy and the finances of the whole planet, and has created repressive, unliberal and anti-juridical laws and proposals in the very heart of the opulent industrialized countries, the countries of the "new democracy".

If Denmark, on its own, had not broken the subjection of the twelve countries of the European Community to this policy by recognizing the Baltic Republics, causing the other countries in the Community, and then the Soviet Union, to follow suit almost immediately, that which is happening now in the ex-Yugoslavia would perhaps have happened in the Soviet Union, allowing the army and the Communist Party to succeed where up to now they have failed miserably.

We could shift our attention from Western and Central Europe and the North of the USSR to the crisis-filled system in Azerbaijan and Armenia (when will an attempt finally be made to help these two Republics to achieve a form of civilized co-existence and dialogue?), in the Kurdish world, in the Middle Eastern Moslem world...

We could carry on infinitely, expanding and contadicting this Goyaesque picture of today's world; depicting, on one hand, the strength of the myth of "democracy" which is replacing the curse of the Soviet and Communist myth in many parts of the world, especially in Europe; or, on the other hand, the ecological catastrophes of the biosphere, the waters, large expanses of the earth, and the social catastrophes of the immense megalopoli that are rapidly expanding in the Third World and the Fourth World, and which, taken together, could be used to justify militarized, dictatorial,"emergency" rule of the world system. Or, again, the United States, a country to which we cannot legitimately deny the power to make its crises, its errors and its crimes into a crisis of democracy for itself and for the world. Or the other way round.

We could shift our attention to the Madrid "Peace Conference". Where others see reasons for enthusiasm, which I do not share, I see more reasons for concern, though also for hope.

I have restricted myself to depicting what may be nothing more than a spirit to be exorcised. But of this, alas, I am not at all certain.

M. P.