Aldo Moro was not an especially progressive politician. Or so argued Rocco Buttiglione at the AŻAD-Strickland Foundation seminar held last Friday about Mr Moro's legacy. But he was keen to draw the Italian Communist Party into the heart of the democratic process. That way, conflicting visions for society could clash politically, rather than in more sinister and tragic ways.
President Emeritus Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, speaking at the same event, argued it was a mark of Mr Moro's success that, 30 years after his assassination, two of the highest offices of the Italian Republic are respectively occupied by an ex-communist and a post-fascist. These were followers, Dr Mifsud Bonnici, remarked of gods that failed, but, he implied, it was constructive inclusive politics that led to their incorporation into the mainstream democratic process.
My question, stimulated by the event, is this: Does Mr Moro's legacy cover only the resolution of a past problem? Or should his close attention to cultural developments - he reflected deeply on 1968 as much as 1945 - nudge us to think more extensively about cultural developments in our own time - say, 1989 and 2001?
Writing from the antipodes, John Braithwaite, a self-described social democrat, has given the question some attention. Even if he does not formulate it in quite this way, his new book, Regulatory Capitalism (Edward Elgar), is concerned with whether 1989 really did spell the victory of the privatising neo-liberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher over not only communism but also centre-left politics.
And if 9/11 is shorthand for Osama Bin Laden's "open-source terrorism", in which networked terror strikes at the heart of financial and commercial networks, then Mr Braithwaite is interested in the constructive possibilities of the open-source movement - not just for software and biotechnology but also for governance.
He is interested in understanding the politics of networks and seeing how networks can be used to create "markets of virtue" (rather than "markets in vice", which use social relations to saw off the branch of civil strength) and wider, global access to justice. In short, he is interested in what form "participatory, evidence-based social democracy" can take in the electronic age.
Mr Braithwaite begins by insisting that we need to add to our inventory of gods that failed. The success of neo-liberalism (free markets untrammelled by state intervention), he argues, is a myth. Mr Reagan's government greatly increased economic regulation. George W. Bush has redistributed massive amounts of state funds - although towards the super-rich and corporations. John Howard in Australia may have cut taxes - but his politics were also characterised by spending binges.
By the mid-1990s, the apostle of privatisation, the economist Milton Friedman, was admitting that good laws were more important. And an array of distinguished economists, like Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, have demonstrated that the countries that do best economically are those that have most robustly rejected the one-size-fits-all advice of the International Monetary Fund.
So we misdescribe our age if we call it neo-liberal. Mr Braithwaite prefers to call it regulatory capitalism. In a highly interesting passage, he argues that, historically, international corporations arose in response to regulation (and anti-cartel measures); in turn, the dominance of corporations facilitated tax collection by states. In 1980, the number of international regulatory agencies was fewer than 20. Today, there are over 100.
Regulation is embedded in the economic cycle. Boom tends to come with underemphasised rules. Bust tends to be followed by regulation - mostly of the ritualistic kind ("let us seem to be doing something").
Can the results be improved? Regulation for its own sake often favours the strong (who have better resources to understand and manipulate them) over the weak.
Mr Braithwaite has dedicated a career to understanding how law and social theory can be used to come up with responsive regulation that combines institutional hierarchy (and therefore accountability) with horizontal networks, which rope in stakeholders that are given incentives to build up the strength of the regulatory system.
The key, he says, is to recognise the networked nature of our society. Governance must be concentrated at the "nodes" - the "place where resources, ideas, deliberative capability and leadership are available to make networked governance buzz".
Mr Braithwaite provides a number of examples - from security to markets - to show how such governance can work and how its graduated model of regulation can work.
He claims, persuasively, that such "open-source governance" may provide a better, more workable model than the traditional pyramid model for weaker states (weak internationally or weak with respect to their powers of regulation over their citizens): they can involve international NGOs and corporations in their own positive governance.
The argument is stimulating enough to lead us to consider how such open-source governance can be adapted for sustainable development, in both the national and the Euro-Mediterranean contexts.
Dr Fsadni is the chairman of the Academy for the Development of a Democratic Environment (AŻAD).
ranierfsadni@europe.com