Copernican revolution

Our continent will soon undergo a Copernican revolution, which will change our Weltanschauung, or vision of the world around us.

In a year's time, in fact, the London-Paris-Berlin axis will extend to Warsaw, Prague and Budapest (to Bucharest and Sofia at a later stage). A large part of Eastern Europe will be fused with the West, only 15 years after the collapse of the 70-year-old Communist regime.

Whoever does not realise the far-reaching consequences of this development has a poor sense of history and politics, I think. Whoever does not rejoice is devoid of any intellectual sensitivity.

Uniting East to West has been a continuous, painful and essentially abortive process in the past. With the sole exception of the Roman Empire, which, however, split into two opposite parts in due time.

Now Europe is being reunited to safeguard peace. When Italy was about to be united, Italian poet Giosuè Carducci invited the reigning Pontiff to drink to Italy's health: Papa Mastai, bevi un bicchier. I sincerely hope our great Pope, who surely prayed and shrewdly used his influence for his native Eastern bloc to join the West, will live long enough to see his dream come true.

Europe's enlargement is not an end in itself, Timothy Garton Ash warns us. The end is something else, argues this Oxford intellectual, historian and journalist, a specialist on Eastern Europe.

"Enlargement is a pretty dull word as a goal for Europe. It is a means to an end; what is the end? The end is to ensure that we don't start fighting each other again, because that is what a great deal of European history has consisted of.

"This continent is extraordinarily diverse, extraordinarily rich in culture, in invention, but also extraordinarily disorderly. I quoted in my lecture the wonderful index entry in Toynbee's A Study of History: 'Europe, as battlefield'.

"For me this is a central achievement of the European Union, or the first reason for the EU: it is that we 'make jaw jaw rather than more war'.

"We are again threatened with war in post-communist Europe. We have war in Georgia, in Chechnya, in the former Yugoslavia, that could spread to the parts of Eastern Europe closer to us. I regard enlargement of the EU as one of the crucial ways of making sure that doesn't happen."

"And enlargement is also a way to further the values that you see as important for the states that haven't been part of the European Miracle, namely freedom and economic security, as long-term goals?", interviewer Harry Kreisler, of Berkeley University, asked.

"That's right," Garton Ash replied, "because if you ask what do my Central European friends mean by 'Europe', you pretty soon find that it means a fairly classic catalogue of liberal values: tolerance, pluralism, the rule of law, democracy, and to secure those good things in a larger Europe.

"What I don't believe in, when you say 'values', is that we can very easily say, 'These are European values', because actually Europe has everything. Almost everything has been done in Europe's name. There are some great Fascist Europeans, there are some pretty unpleasant Communist Europeans - Europe has it all.

"What I think I would say is that there is a value of Europeanism as a stepping stone to internationalism, if you like, so that the EU is not an end in itself, but a means to the larger end of international co-operation."

The basic aim of European unity, therefore, is peace in Europe and beyond. Which gives the lie to those who fear that the EU could become an aggressive military alliance.

Unfortunately, the clash between Islam and the West cannot be dismissed lightly; it would be catastrophic, as we all know, unpredictable terrorist and kamikaze attacks from a deeply aggrieved Islam would make life, including economic life, unbearable to us.

This scenario must be avoided at all costs. One of the most effective ways of doing it, according to Garton Ash, is European enlargement.

It is paradoxical that the acceding country which is most lukewarm about the EU is the one which, being the smallest, most Catholic and most compact, should have been the most grateful and enthusiastic to join. It would have been so useful for us internationally if we had been unanimous. I blame the politicians, and some of them in particular, that there is no substantial consensus.

Malta sorely needs its own Copernican revolution, too. The health and environmental situation - just to mention one aspect of our life - has worsened so much in the past six years that nothing short of a revolution could reverse the downward trend.

This is a heavily polluted island. Which means that thousands of people risk contracting serious diseases (with patients waiting for months or years to be operated or seen by consultants), without the government and medical class behaving as earnestly as in duty bound.

They should monitor our air quality and issue regular warnings. Maybe circulation should be restricted to alternate days in this most traffic-congested country in Europe.

Cancer is on the increase (1,200 new cases every year), diabetes rates "extremely high", diesel and leaded petrol fumes are on the increase, lead in blood is the highest in Europe, Fgura and Paola 'boast' the highest incidence of asthma in Europe, particles of dust from quarries and unfinished buildings ruin our lungs more than active and passive smoking put together. Truck drivers and street vendors leave the engine on unnecessarily.

To make matters worse, the Etna spewed ash all over Malta last week, and scientists have just warned us that a huge wave of pollution is drifting from Asia into the Mediterranean.

An international airshow brought to Malta 150 special aircraft which increased noise and air pollution by leaps and bounds, just for the sake of 14,000 onlookers. All aircraft pollute infinitely more than vehicles. Gudja airport is, by EU standards, far too close to inhabited areas.

Rumour has it that Benghajsa will 'host' a landfill and that Kirkop is earmarked as the site of yet another polluting agent. Why not Attard? Why the South again?

Some buildings still include asbestos panels and several rooftops have asbestos water tanks, which are sometimes broken up, carried away and dumped unprofessionally by plumbers (I have seen this happening).

Members of Alternattiva Demokratika campaign to clean up the environment. They deserve everybody's active support. They should start grass-roots demonstrations snowballing into a peaceful revolution to ensure healthy air.

Investigative journalists must come to the rescue. The subject is infinitely more urgent than freemasonry and other sensational items.

Garton Ash wrote an article some time ago to show that the language issue is the EU's most difficult technical problem. Translating and interpreting in 11 languages (Austria, Belgium, Ireland and Luxembourg use German, French or English) is already a source of confusion, he said.

Twenty official languages, with over 300 combinations, will bring the interpretation service to a standstill. Unless resolved, the language issue might end up surpassing the x42 billion currently devoted to the common agricultural policy.

The EU considers as official the national languages of all member states, to confirm parity between big and small countries. And there are associations like EBLUL (www. eblul.org; www.eurolang.net) which rightly lobby for the lesser used languages.

But will the 20 official languages (assuming that the Czech and Slovak Republics will use one language) have to be working languages as well? Irish is not a working language. I am not sure if Maltese will be a working language, but I know that 80,000 pages of EU legislation are being translated into Maltese.

I think that sooner or later the EU will have to take the bull by the horns and reduce to a manageable number its working languages, in which each and every official document or speech has to be translated or interpreted. But which languages?

English has been tacitly accepted by EU citizens as their common medium of communication. Over 90 per cent of students in Europe study English as a second language. French and German are natural candidates for second and third place, considering that several EU states speak or understand them.

Whether Italian, Spanish, Polish, Turkish or Russian will ever be added is beyond me. What I do believe, while talking about languages, is that to become a good citizen in an enlarged Europe one should be able to communicate (even superficially) in a number of languages. How many? I would say four or five.

And I would add that Arabic should be more widely studied in Europe and, conversely, European languages should be better known in the Islamic world as a means to avert the clash of civilisations to which the outspoken Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci has dedicated her latest, ominous book.