For the establishment of an open and permanent Observatory on Authoritarianism

Until 1924, wrote the Italian lawyer Piero Calamandrei, he held “the generous illusion of freedom defending itself, like a force of nature”. It was not “cowardice or weakness, it was the disorientation and error of honest and civilized people” in the face of the establishment of “a critical anemia”, of a “disgusting uniformity of all newspapers”, of a “repulsive, arrogant and lying rhetoric, penetrated like a contagion”, which had “made even the headlines of certain newspapers unbearable to people of good taste”.

We risk falling into the same disorientation and error today in the face of the continuous shifts in thresholds that erode the democratic space in many ways: the criminalization of conflict, the incense of language, the compression of freedom of expression and demonstration; an ideology of surveillance that is supposed to be pervasive in schools, universities, public establishments and workplaces; a punitive hypertrophy that introduces new crimes and cases of violence every day, for a total of 417 years in prison added to the criminal legal system in the first two years of the actual government. Measures that – from the “Rave” decree to the “Ecovandals” decree, from the use of the “universal crime” to the dissemination of “urban Daspo” and “red zones” – lead to the jumble of rules liable to unconstitutionality collected in the so-called “Security bill”.

We are concerned about the executive’s evident impatience with the limits that the Constitution places on the exercise of power; the construction of reforms detrimental to parliamentary democracy, the Presidency of the Republic, the balance and separation of powers and the autonomy of the Judiciary; the repeated use of emergency decrees and exceptional rules as a government practice, to the point of overcoming, with the introduction of 84 decree laws, the previous legislature, where, however, two governments (Conte II and Draghi) found themselves facing the pandemic crisis. 

The slide from a temporary state of emergency to a permanent state of exception takes place on the basis of a media depiction that creates enemies and scapegoats among the least protected people and emphasizes the perception of risk, justifying and making common sense a policy of reduction of rights and spaces for action.

This is why we have decided, as citizens, teachers, jurists, intellectuals, information workers, to create an open and permanent space for reflection, analysis and testimony on the progression towards authoritarianism in Italy, seen in the European and international context. 

We think of a constellation of physical and virtual places of taking the floor, collecting documents, putting the historiographical acts of the time we are living in, which challenges us and entrusts us with a responsibility in the face of the degenerative manifestations of legitimate authority.

The first step will be three days of study organized by Libertà e Giustizia and the publisher Castelvecchi in collaboration with Sapienza University of Rome, University of Milan and European University Institute, which will see Italian and international scholars and experts as speakers, to outline readings capable of connecting various areas – historical, social, legal, constitutional,  and identify forms of cultural resistance in the face of the crisis of the rule of law. 

In particular, the day in Rome will be articulated on the crisis of representative democracy, the normative foundations of post-democracy and the manipulation of historical memory by authoritarian populism; the day in Milan on the relationship between sovereignty and human rights, the crisis of the rule of law, a-fascism as a project to empty constitutional democracy; the day in Florence on democracy in the age of artificial intelligence and algorithms.

The aim is to lay the foundations for the creation of an archive that collects documents, materials, analyses and proposals on the actual authoritarian tendencies: from the new scenarios posed by the erosion of the constitutional principles of equality and solidarity to the expressions of a surveillance society; from the destruction of welfare and job guarantees to the marginalization of the poor and the cruelty of migration and reception policies; from the advent in Europe and in the world of post-democratic regimes to the progressive narrowing of the spaces of freedom and active participation. 

We are not thinking of an academic initiative, or even a militant one. We think of the archive as a cognitive tool, opening up spaces for analysis, training and information, capable of activating and making accessible to a wider public the dialogue between specialists, intellectuals and civil society, with particular attention to the new generations. The goal is to reach shared synthesis, planning, political and, when necessary, judicial denunciation, in dialogue with the European and international democratic institutions that monitor the rule of law. 

Constitutional democracy, to quote Calamandrei, does not defend itself, but offers us the normative tools to defend it. 

To join us, email to: osservatorioautoritarismo@gmail.com