E. Stradella, La libertà di espressione politico-simbolica e i suoi limiti: Tra teorie e “prassi”
| Autor | Giuseppe Martinico |
| Páginas | 249-257 |
E. Stradella, La libertà di espressione politico-simbolica e i suoi limiti: Tra teorie e “prassi”, GIAPPICHELLI, TORINO, 2008, PAG. 428, 45 EUROS.
Page 249
The book1 is the outcome of a long research conducted by the author during the three-year PhD programme in Public Law and Economics that she attended at the University of Pisa, and its contents have been partially anticipated in some papers and articles published during these years in Italian and international journals.
The work is organized into five chapters: the first chapter is devoted to the identification of the analysed subject (namely, the “political speech”).
This chapter is paramount for understanding the vocabulary used in the author’s pages (i.e. the notions of symbol and speech) and it can be seen as a sort of methodological and terminological introduction of the work (quite exhaustive indeed).
In the second chapter Stradella introduces the role of political (and symbolic) speech in the dynamics of democracy “protection”, which is the true issue of her analysis.
The third chapter dwells on the interconnections between the freedom of political and symbolic speech and the political power’s “self-conservation”.
Page 250
I would like to stress the importance of these two chapters to the economy of the book since (in my opinion) they represent the fil rouge of the author’s argumentations.
The last two chapters are devoted to a comparative analysis of the limits in the European symbolic political speech (with a particular focus on the Italian vs. the American case-studies).
These cases indirectly confirm what has been supported by Stradella in the previous 200 pages.
After having explained her definition of “symbolic political speech”, the author tries to map out the chosen fields of analysis by distinguishing those dynamics connected to the manifestation of the political thought seen either from the perspective of the symbol’s objective nature or under the expressivity’s subjective profile (pag. 69-71).
Three categories of “symbolic” have been identified by Stradella with regard to symbolical speech:
The expression that utilizes a symbol which is precedent to the expression itself is the stricto sensu conceived political speech; some examples of this phenomenon can be found in practices such as the cross burning and the flag burning.
The speech through the symbol, in which the symbol is forma ad substantiam of the speech itself or, in the author’s words,” the symbol and the speech are in a relationship of identity and indistinguishability; this is the case of contempt of the flag (“vilipendio alla bandiera”).
The third category is represented by the meta-symbolic dimension: in this case “the symbol is necessarily abstract (i.e. non-perceptible) and the content… of the speech prevails on the speech itself” (pag.71). Here the symbol is the whole of wordsPage 251 recalling messages that come beyond the speech and its context (pag. 78), clearly the vaguest category identified by the author who, in order to overcome possible ambiguities, provides the reader with examples of those conducts expressive of instigation and apology according to the criminal law’s provisions.
Given this tripartition, Stradella’s attempt to insert the symbolic political speech in the democracy protection’s framework confirms the significance of such an issue to the economy of the book.
Stradella2 pictures three models representing different protection levels for the constitutional boundaries.
“Protectionist democracy”: it is the strongest form of the system’s protection; it is represented by those democracies that introduce in their own system of repression some mechanisms by which purely expressive conduct is punished, such as content-based restrictions.
“Democracies which protect themselves” by contingent enemies without having as constitutive telos the self-preservation.
“Protective democracies”, i.e. those systems that protect their founding values (fundamental rights, equality principles) in order to ensure minorities or other disadvantaged people. In this case the self-protection of system is just a consequence of the protection of those subjects’ rights.
Each model corresponds to a certain degree of freedom of speech granted to the members of the constitutional legal order it represents.
Page 252
As previously mentioned - and despite the title (which I would translate as: “The freedom of symbolic political speech and its limits: between theory and “praxis”)- the true subject of the volume is the issue of the Constitutional State’s self-conservation, that is the Constitutional State and its limits: how much is the...
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