Biographical Note
Giulio Ercolessi was born in Trieste, NE Italy, in 1953. He started his public life as a student, in the years around 1968, upon a political agenda very critical of the Italian ’68 movement, of its myth of assembly democracy, of its ideological subordination to communist culture, and, at the same time, of conflicting hierarchical, traditionalist, clerical and neofascist calls to order. Since 1969 he was active in the youth movements of the Italian Liberal Party and of the European Federalist Movement. Through the left-wing faction of the Liberals, the Divorce Law League and the League for the Abrogation of the Concordat, he then came into contact with the Radical Party, which he joined in 1971. A member of the Radical Party from 1971 to 1980 (with just a short break within), he was from the start one of its national leaders, holding various party positions; in particular, he served as secretary general of the party in the year 1973-74 (at the age of twenty, in a party where the average age of members at the time was twenty-two: under age, according to the law still in force in Italy at the time and criticized by the Radical Party, during his first two months in office). As a leader of the internal opposition in the following years, he criticised the party leadership for not trying to give stable structure and cultural continuity to the policies of the Radical Party, that he thought could have become the party of progressive liberalism in Italy, and for preferring to keep it in the state of a movement centred on the inconstant priorities each time chosen by its charismatic leader. Nevertheless, he supported attempts aimed at reassembling liberals, radicals, social democrats and supporters of state/religion separation in the Italian political system, and dissented from the erratic convergences that occurred along the Seventies between the Radical Party leadership and unconventional milieus of the post-68 neo-communist Left. Later he also disagreed with the restructuring of the party that led to the total engagement in a struggle against famine in the world, that in the intention of the party leadership should have been led in alliance with the Roman Catholic Church and its pontiff, thus inevitably ruling out any initiative on individual liberties related to secularism (including any proposal for non authoritarian birth control policies), for about twenty years. At the time of the controversies over the Osimo treaty between Italy and former Yugoslavia and of the consequent electoral revolt in Trieste (he shared, and gave voice to, its environmentalist, socio-economical and democratic side, while opposing the nationalistic one) he also served for three years as Radical Party city councillor in Trieste. In the years of his direct political commitment, his political interventions, essays and articles appeared occasionally, besides the Radical Party organ “Notizie radicali”, in the journals “La prova radicale”, “Argomenti radicali” and “Quaderni radicali” and in the Trieste daily paper “Il Piccolo”, and also in the national papers “Il Mondo”, “Il Manifesto”, “Pace e guerra”, “Contatto”.
He abandoned active politics in 1982. He made this decision because he had become convinced of the irreversible nature, al least in the short run, of the changes that had occurred to the Radical Party and aware of becoming more and more stranger to the political cultures prevailing in the Italian society; and also as a consequence of his growing lack of confidence in the intellectual competence and ethical reliability of most of the Italian media professionals in their necessary function of mediators between politics and public opinion; and furthermore because he had grown conscious of his incapability of happily adapting to the structural evolution that turned professional politics into showbiz.
Since then almost invisible, apart his personal participations in usually slightly secluded debates, lectures and conferences, his texts, essays, articles and bills have been usually appearing under a pen name (or sometimes liberally given to other individuals). In this way he kept on dealing with individual rights, state/religion related issues, liberalism, European federalist integration, Italian and Western political culture and identity issues, the political use of history in the frontier areas of NE Italy; he took part in the civic opposition movement to the populist, anti-liberal, sleazy, clerical, xenophobic, homophobic and anti-European surge of the last twenty years of Italian public life. Since 1999 he has resumed his regular contribution to the review “Critica liberale”, a contribution dating back to 1969, when “Critica liberale” was the press agency of the left wing faction of the same name within the Liberal Party, already edited at the time by Enzo Marzo. At present he is active within the independent liberal think-tank Critica liberale foundation (one of the founding organisations of the European Liberal Forum) of which, among other things, he co-edits “Gli Stati Uniti d’Europa” (“The United States of Europe”), a European federalist supplement to the foundation monthly journal, together with Francesco Gui and Beatrice Rangoni Machiavelli. He is one of the promoters of italialaica.it and Società Pannunzio per la libertà d’informazione (Pannunzio Society for Freedom of Information), and also contributes to the monthly reviews “MicroMega” and “Confronti”, to the Italian edition of “Lettre International” and, as international affairs commentator, to the Genoa daily paper “Il Secolo XIX”.
In March 2009 he published the book “L’Europa verso il suicidio? Senza Unione federale il destino degli europei è segnato” (“Europe towards Suicide? Without a Federal Union the Fate of Europeans is Inescapable”), printed by the publishing house Dedalo.
