A nationless state or a stateless nation

In his thought-provoking "A nationless state? Malta, national identity and the European Union" (The Sunday Times, December 1, 8 and 15) Professor Godfrey Baldacchino seeks to develop the notion of "states without nations" put forward by Cohen, and apply it to the case of Malta.

In a relatively short albeit tightly packed exposition, he sets out a cogent argument in support of his "nationless state" but I was hard-pressed to find anything other than the occasional passing reference to economic considerations.

We have to accept that Malta is indeed a "creation of empire". As I suggested in a work which admittedly centred on the history of Malta's trade rather than on its political evolution, this archipelago is geographically but another set of islands off the coast of Italy and historically has followed the fate of nearby Sicily.

But a series of attributes, such as insularity, geographical location, a size which is neither too big nor too small, a unique language, chance historical developments, etc. have given it a nationhood/statehood denied to many other Mediterranean islands. Put in another way, Malta should, by right, be a small archipelago inhabited by an infinitely smaller population, with Italian as its official language and perhaps Maltese as a quaint leftover from a bygone age, dependent mostly on tourism and forming part of Italy, not unlike the way Majorca, Djerba and Rhodes, to give but some examples, are dependent on their adjoining land masses.

For close on 500 years, two mighty empires, the Habsburg and the British, were instrumental in pumping in not inconsiderable resources which permitted population growth well beyond what its own meagre territory would have allowed. Both these empires, directly as in the case of the British, or indirectly, as was the case of the Habsburgs, governed Malta like "the foredeck of an admiral's flagship", to use an expression attributed to Wellington.

It was a fortress where the Maltese had to be content to acquiesce to the imperial power having the decisive voice in all matters and where, in return, they were to draw their compensation from the economic advantage of the military presence.

The Order of St John and the British were never short of collaboration from lay and religious elites as long as they kept pumping in the money and were reasonably respectful of religious sensibilities. The bargains struck between the imperial powers or their proxies and the "collaborators" only started breaking down when the resource flows diminished.

From an all-time high of 4,000 in the late 17th century, the number of men engaged in corsairing decreased to around 500 by the end of the 18th century, while the Order's own navy had declined so much that recruitment of Maltese sailors by foreign navies, previously prohibited, proliferated.

Such developments and the loss of income from French estates made the Maltese very well disposed to a regime change. Similar patterns are evident in the economic hardships resulting from post-bellum rundowns in British Malta. The process whereby Malta was apparently able to free itself from its dependence on a foreign military presence, which started in 1964 with independence, and ended in 1979 with the departure of British troops, was lodged firmly within a very specific historical scenario of antagonism between two contending systems, the capitalist West and the Soviet Bloc.

In this scenario, Malta, by now formally "independent", still retained a residual strategic value by being held by one of the contenders or being denied to both. Within this context, two very different but equally astute politicians were able to secure an unprecedented level of capital inflow into the island's economy, but we have yet to see whether this capital was wisely and imaginatively invested for best long-term effect.

In the post-independence period notable advances were registered in developing a tourist sector and attracting foreign industrialists. The former had initially been the consequence of a fairly fortuitous event, Britain's economic crisis and the imposition of the £50 limit on the amount which British tourists could spend outside the Sterling Area. It produced both an avalanche of tourists and massive property speculation.

Regrettably, but perhaps inevitably, both major political parties also succumbed to the temptation of promoting and protecting enterprises which had no chance of surviving and frittered away precious resources and time which could have been better used de-industrialising and de-bureaucratising. Because post-independence governments were weak and inexperienced, they also put the cart before the horse and constructed a comprehensive and modern social welfare system which although laudable in itself paid little heed to what our antiquated micro-economy could afford.

The scope for independent national economic policies is becoming more and more circumscribed as time goes by, even for large countries. In the case of our own micro-economy, options have always been limited anyway and we may be on the verge of frittering away what remains of our capacity for independent action and in the process scaring away foreign entrepreneurs who come here seeking less tax and less controls.

As I see it, our only hope lies in an open society which throws overboard customs and traditions, be they of the left or of the right, where these are not focused on functionally moral values such as honesty and hard work. Create the right environment for entrepreneurs, local and foreign, and there is no reason why they will not seek to maximise their profits here creating jobs and wealth, away from the increasingly stifling conditions of countries like Germany. But that requires more imagination and spunk than our politicians seem capable of.

In my opinion, it is not so much a matter of a "nationless state" but of a nation, albeit of Lilliputian proportions, whose state and economy have lost their viability and are living on borrowed time, a nation which risks becoming stateless.

Last summer, I visited the beautiful island of Martin García in South America. It belongs to Argentina but is within hailing distance of Uruguay. It lies in the delta where the Paranà and the Uruguay rivers drain the waters of the jungles of the central regions of South America. Owing to its strategic location the heavily fortified island had changed hands many times.

For hundreds of years thousands of people had lived on it but the troops are gone now and just a few hundred people remain on the island, engaged in agriculture and tourism and as keepers of a wonderful natural park where nature is in the process of reclaiming its own. I could not help thinking that it was one possible future scenario for Malta.