ABSTRACT: The possibility of creating a future of peace, rather than further tragedies, in post-Communist Europe can only be offered by a new anti-militarism capable of opposing both the faint-hearted governments of Europe and the other industrialized countries - the accomplices, once more, of the coup-seeking armies, in the cynical illusion that such armies can establish order through bloodshed - and the old-style pacifism.

(THE PARTY NEW - N. 5 - FEBRUARY 1992)

After the fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, there was reasonable hope that the fruits to be gathered would be disarmament and the peace dividend. However, after the initial positive signs which emerged from the agreements on the reduction of conventional and nuclear arms, a terrible new nightmare and a new threat to security has developed: the proliferation of national armies, some of which have nuclear potential, in Eastern Europe. After the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, dozens of new States are claiming independence and - by a tragic extension of this phenomenon - have organized or are currently organizing new national armies.

Encouraged without doubt by the crisis-ridden Western arms industry, these new States have found decisive justifications and alibis for rearmament in the absence, in Europe, of a security system capable of dealing with the inevitable conflicts with the old imperial power and the "federal" military leaders themselves, who are obviously reluctant to accept the sudden loss of the enormous power they have held up to now. The inability of the European Community to deal even with a limited conflict such as the Serbian army's offensive on the small Republic of Croatia is a clear signal for all the new States: rearm yourselves, because no-one will come to your aid if you are attacked.

No-one seems to realise that the emergence in the East of new nationalist military leaders would disfigure and undermine the democratic desires which are at the root of the popular movements that have battled for independence. The possibility of creating a future of peace rather than further tragedies in post-Communist Europe depends entirely on the growth of a new anti-militarism capable of reacting and opposing both the faint-hearted governments of Europe and of the other industrialized nations - the accomplices, once again, of coup-seeking armies, in the cynical illusion that such armies can establish order through bloodshed - and the old-style pacifism, which as always is deaf, dumb and blind in the face of massacres which are not perpetrated by the United States or Israel. An anti-militarism capable of bringing about revolt, in the Western world, at the absence of a security policy, and of offering a real alternative to rearmament in the new democracies of the East. An anti-militarism, that is, which wi

ll take the side of the victims of aggression with strength and conviction and which, from a position of concrete solidarity with those who oppose totalitarian and racist violence, will be entitled to point out the risks that the armies of liberation and national defence constitute for democracy.

This new anti-militarism can become the laboratory for a u2e. true nonviolent and democratic alternative in post-Communist Europe, the reference point for the ideas and the policies of new democratic and tolerant political leaders capable of rejecting nationalist and militarist short-cuts. However, it can do this only if it is armed with concrete transnational political and organizational instruments and with the enormous strength and will of all those who fight the same battles in isolation; only if all such people join together in the Radical Party.