Integrating representative democracy through non-violent proposals. Two cases in comparison: Danilo Dolci and Extinction Rebellion

After his reading of Der Mann auf der Brücke. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und Nagasaki (Anders, 1959) Norberto Bobbio, in 1961, started reflecting on the problem of war and the possibility of achieving peace (Bobbio, 1979; 1989). He made an enlightening categorization of the different forms of pacifism to face the fundamental problem of this research: with the atomic bomb, the war changed qualitatively and became no longer justifiable as a means to resolve international conflicts. It entails, indeed, the destruction of the whole of humanity or, at best, the destruction of the current forms of organisation of human life. Bobbio's arguments were formulated during the Cold War when the threat of a potential atomic conflict was significant. However, after the fall of the USSR, the probability of such an event diminished considerably. The problem of atomic war gave way in the public debate to the ecological problem (UNCED, 1992) focused on the issues of polluting production models and alternative energies. Notwithstanding this substantial transformation, Bobbio's arguments are easily translatable to the ecological problem. Indeed, there is a close link between pacifism, nonviolence, and ecologism (Capitini, 1969; Santese, 2017), and this combination can have effects on the political sphere. Considering the link between Bobbio and Capitini (Capitini-Bobbio, 2012) and their common interest since the ’50s in a non-violent activist, Danilo Dolci, operating in western Sicily (Dolci, 1956) my work aims at analysing the contribution that this kind of non-violent and ecological orientation may give in terms of critique to the representative democracy. For this purpose, I will compare the thought and action of Danilo Dolci with the instances and practices of "Extinction Rebellion" (abbreviated to XR), an ecological and non-violent organisation born in the UK in 2018 and arrived in Italy in 2019. In particular, I will develop my analysis through four steps: First, I will illustrate, through a bibliographic review, the so-called “mutual maieutic” (Dolci, 1962; 1996) that Danilo Dolci elaborates since the '50s and the main integrative proposals to the insufficiencies of institutional democracy (Dolci, 1957; 1987). Second, I will describe the organisational structure of the XR movement. I will consider, as well, the dynamics of facilitation used therein, and the proposal of Citizen Assemblies (https://extinctionrebellion.it/). I will integrate this part with the analysis of the contents published on the official websites and with extracts of interviews with some Italian militant groups. Third, I will highlight the similarities of the XR's method with Danilo Dolci's “mutual maieutic”. Fourth, I will compare the respective proposals for the bottom-up integration of democracy. The expected results will allow defining the place that non-violence can have within political thought: providing a critical reflection on the inadequacies of representative democracy and an integrative reflection on the problems of participation and distribution of power. This is a deficit from which twentieth-century democracy has never been completely immune and which exploded definitively with the crisis of mass parties and the influence of the mass media (Sartori, 1987; 1993).