Internationalists! The Radical Party challenges the Italian left, 1963-1995

Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino's Italian Radical Party was a small but influential liberal, non-Marxist political movement committed to upholding individual liberties at home and abroad. During the Cold War, the Radicals held that militarism produced authoritarian welfare states and was at the basis of domestic and global injustice. Antimilitarist pacifism and civil disobedience underpinned their battles for citizen rights, including ones in support of conscientious objection or the legalization of divorce and abortion. Such stances signaled a challenge to Communist and Socialist control over the politics of the left, due to the tendency of both Marxist parties to seek accords with political Catholicism. Radicals rejected Italy's traditional coalition politics and sought to liberalize and simultaneously unify the left against the ruling Christian Democracy. They contrasted their libertarianism and issue-based politics with what they claimed was the tired statism and collectivism of the old left. In the seventies, Radicals interpreted the crisis of Keynesian economics as confirmation that the welfare state could no longer address human needs. They adopted aspects of neoliberalism that dovetailed with their longstanding hostility to welfare all'italiana. After the Cold War, Radicals endorsed military interventions conducted to uphold international law; ethnocide in Africa and Europe motivated a qualification of earlier Radical espousals of nonviolent resistance, revealing a form of juridical pacifism. In their garb as both domestic political group and transnational non-governmental organization, they contributed to the establishment of the International Criminal Court at The Hague instated to try war criminals. Over several decades, Radicals participated in a transformation of global political culture associated with the antiauthoritarian and anti-governmental revolts of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Their antipolitics pitted individuals, self-managed communities, and markets against a declaredly immoral state. Straddling the left-right divide, the Italian Radicals personified both new left and neoliberal dimensions of the antistatist surge of the last third of the twentieth century. Their exaltation of individual rights and negative freedom and their downgrading of economic rights and positive liberty partook in a historical process which has produced freer yet less equal societies.