ABSTRACT: With the success of the membership campaign in Italy, the transnational and transdivisional Radical Party has acquired more time to achieve its reasonable objectives. It is now necessary for people from other countries to join immediately. Before the middle of -June there will be a meeting of the Assembly of Parliamentarians, which now has over 500 members: 22 members of the European Parliament; 4 ministers, 8 under-secretaries, and 180 parliamentarians from Italy; 9 ministers, 4 vice-ministers, and 272 parliamentarians from 37 other countries, the representatives of 80 political parties.

(THE NEW PARTY, MARCH 1993)

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The New Party, written in Italian and translated into fourteen other languages (Albanian, Czech, Croatian, English, Esperanto, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish), is sent to over fourteen thousand parliamentarians and around 250,000 other people. It covers an immense area: over 100 countries, including 34 European countries, across four continents.

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An extraordinary response in Italy

37,000 Italians have joined the Radical Party in the space of a few weeks, paying an average of two hundred dollars each to support the life and the project of the new transnational and transdivisional party.

This has happened in a country which is experiencing a serious moral, civil and institutional crisis, where the political system is on the point of collapse and where there is widespread rejection of politics and of political leaders.

Apart from one exception, in 1987, the Radical Party has always had between two and three thousand members every year. In 1993, therefore, the party is over fourteen times larger. Around two hundred parliamentarians from ten Italian parties, which have traditionally been in opposed to each other, including dozens of ministers, vice-ministers, and former ministers, and hundreds of members of regional, provincial, and municipal councils, have joined together - almost out of the blue - to support our dream, a dream which is both reasonable and concrete: to unite people from all over the world in a common undertaking, in a single political force and a single political project. Our objective is not to obtain power but to obtain laws, common institutions and common solutions to the most urgent and pressing problems of present-day society: ecological, economic, peaceful, democractic, and nonviolent solutions..

We had realized that without this Italian contribution, for historical motives, it would not be possible to obtain the time and the resources necessary to spread and organize the awareness of the Radical "dream", its objectives and its needs, in other countries.

The two sessions of the XXXVI Congress

For more than a year it seemed that this hope was destined to failure. The two sessions of the XXXVI Party Congress, attended by hundreds of deputies and parliamentarians from the ex-Communist empire, from Vladivostock to Sarajevo, and by deputies from Africa and Western Europe, seemed to bear witness to an impossible dream. For this reason the success of the first attempts to form a new political force in the world, transnational, transdivisional and nonviolent, however natural and logical, was all the more painful. It was necessary to find a level of human and financial resources that only Italy, at the time, could provide. But Italy seemed to provide nothing, except for the passion and the hard work of a few hundred exhausted "dreamers".

Then, suddenly, came success.

The force of ideas has turned into reality and overcome indifference and disgust with politics.

Those friends and comrades all over the world who share our hopes and our aims, or who would like to share them, and who think to themselves that all this would be very nice but that it is impossible, in their own countries, for the Party to grow and expand in an adequate manner, should bear in mind that all the political observers in Italy, as well as the general public, believe that what we have achieved is a genuine miracle.

After years and years of dramatic struggles, what happened was that we managed to spread an awareness of the sense of our project, and thousands of people decided to adopt it, to support it, with a considerable sacrifice, paying membership fees and making contributions which are unprecedented in Italy. With enthusiasm and emotion.

The force of ideas has turned out to be reality, not a statement of principle or a metaphor: it has moved the mountain of indifference, lack of faith, disgust with politics, factiousness, scepticism, and very often poverty - for many poor people, too, have contributed to the richness of this response, however provisional it may be, to the many dramatic problems of the world.

An added value

Perhaps the most precious contribution from Italy is the fact, the proof, that this New Party, with its symbol of Gandhian nonviolence and transnational unity, is the fruit and also the cause of an unprecedented event: without denying their present and future faithfulness to their own parties, to their own political, religious, and cultural groups, tens of thousands of people have added a new, different group in which their divisions become unity - the divisions remain, but as a form of richness.

One example, among the many possible examples, deserves to be mentioned. That of our friend and comrade Muhamed Kresevljakovic, the Mayor of the martyred city of Sarajevo, besieged at the time (and still besieged) by a violent, barbaric attack reminiscent of the destruction of Warsaw and its ghetto by the combined forces of Hitler and Stalin: Kresevljakovic travelled around Italy and spoke on television, not only to increase awareness of the tragedy of his city and his people and to ask for and organize political and material help, but also to explain to the Italian people that joining the Radical Party, the Gandhian, transnational and democratic party, was the best way for them to try to save the life and the future of the ex-Yugoslavia, to allow democracy and peace in Sarajevo.

More time to carry out the 1993 project

The Italian success, then, gives us more time, in all our countries, in all our parliaments, to carry out the 1993 Radical Party project, to give it the necessary shape and set it into motion. However, it will also be necessary to convince the Italians who have joined us, who have placed their trust in the transnational Radicals of the New Party of 1992, who are now not only with us but form the majority of us, who have shown generosity, intelligence and wisdom, that their action has served a purpose. Any news about new members around the world, in the democratic parliaments, about further support for Radical action, will convince them to renew their membership in 1994, and will convince many others to follow their example.

The countries of the democratic Western world

The moment has now come to expand our presence in the other countries of the democratic Western world, especially in Europe, where the idea of union is coming under threat and single member states are experiencing serious crises.

We will, then, attempt to carry out a major campaign of information and mobilization in France, which could be as valuable as Italy, and for the same reasons. France needs the Radical Party at least as much as the Radical Party needs France's nonviolent European federalist democrats, who so far have been too inward-looking, introverted, affected by a sense of national conceit.

If this difficult campaign were to meet with success, many other European countries, from Belgium to Spain, from Portugal to Italy, could in turn become aware of the Radical Party.

An appeal non-Italians to join

The 37,000 Italian members have, however, brought about a new situation, with the risk of an image that is paradoxically less favourable than in 1992, when there were fewer Italian members than Russian members, and Italians accounted for only a quarter of the total number of members. And if we also consider the 200 parliamentarians, the dozens of men of government, and the Italian artists and intellectuals of world renown who have joined the party, there is clearly a risk that the image of a party which is now no longer "Italian" may be cancelled.

For this reason, we appeal to all our readers - in particular to all the parliamentarians and public figures who chose not to join us last year, not fully aware of the potential force of the party - to join us this year, to give us encouragement and encourage their friends and their fellow countrymen to contribute to projects which are already underway.

The projects

Amongst these projects, it is worth remembering the "parliamentary campaign for the abolition of the death penalty by the year 2000"; the anti-prohibitionist "campaign" against the international criminal organizations involved in drugs, which we are pursuing throughout the world with the help of the "International Anti-prohibitionist League", affiliated to the party; the organization of extrememly urgent ecologistic, democratic federalist, nonviolent and democratic initiatives on the various war-fronts which are spreading around the world; and finally the Esperantist campaign.

Assembly of Radical Parliamentarians in June

In accordance with the decision of Congress, the Assembly of Parliamentarians in the Radical Party and the General Council, the organs laid down by the new statute that was approved by Congress, will meet before the end of June. They will elect the President of the Party and their own Presidents, and will discuss projects and initiatives. It is important that the Assembly be attended (phyically or morally) by as many of the new members as possible in addition to those who joined in 1991 and 1992.

Events around the world are unfortunately underlining, with increasing eloquence and power, the justness of our struggle and the pressing force of our hope in the face of so much desperation and so many dangers of barbaric violence and death.

For the right to life and the life of rights, let us hope that fate will allow us to achieve our fine and necessary aims.