Imaginative statecraft

In this paper, Professor Godfrey Baldacchino suggests that Malta has become “a nationless state”:

Primordial and secondary elements of identity include ethnicity, language, religion, cultural values and customs, a distinct historical self-view and a sense of territorial bonding. Malta would certainly appear to qualify on all these counts to the untested eye. With a strong history of colonisation of at least five millennia, the Maltese come across today as a people with no internal racial tensions, united by the Catholic faith, speaking a unique language and living on definitively precise limestone blocks comprising just 316 square kilometres..

..It is easy to condone references to a monolithic “Maltese society”. Such a definitive term fails to render justice to sub-cultural traits among the Maltese and fails to take account of the existence of – albeit very small – minority groups, such as Indian entrepreneurs or retired British pensioners. But history, acute population density and the pervasive socialising powers of Catholicism have tended to erode many cultural differences over time. It would therefore be fair to define Malta as a “cross-roads island” with a “cosmopolitan and polyglot” population reflecting the “ethnic and linguistic mixtures of Phoenician, Arab, Sicilian and British colonial influences”. Other than in extreme cases, ethnicity is not a relevant analytical category to contemporary Malta.

The Maltese Islands certainly qualify as pioneers in imaginative statecraft, having been held as a distinct fiefdom by Aragonese and castellan landlords in the late Middle Ages and subsequently having spent a long period (1530-1798) as the seat of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, a theocracy that ruled over Malta in an interesting chivalric and pioneering version of the European Union. Specific nation-building initiatives were not, however, encouraged by the ruling elite, including the Maltese aristocracy of lawyers, medics and priests, a comprador bourgeoisie even in a cultural sense that traditionally and linguistically associated itself readily with Italy..

..In this incessant, internal struggle for loyalty and support, Maltese nationalism has not lost out. The notion of the nation as an “imagined community” becomes relevant. National symbols remain significant in their absence and, where identified, are quickly taken over and co-opted by partisan and/or religious motifs. A brace of poets and writers have struggled for some years to raise the spirit of nationalism, but their message has fallen on deaf ears and reads strangely hollow. Some academics have sought to emphatically announce the cultural maturation of Maltese nationalism, much like a natural development, particularly with the onset of political independence: “Malteseness came of age… The new State was, after all, an old nation.”..

..Finally, the assessment of the past and the present continues to be dominated by contradictory interpretations of the relevance of historical events. As reported by an expatriate living in Malta: “the Maltese are very proud of their (past) history, but apparently not of their present”. The analyses converge: only the members of the troika – the two main political parties and the Catholic Church – loom large as anchors of identity. The “national interest” has been sabotaged, imploded into frenzied partisanship internally, replaced by integrationism externally.