European credentials

It is not so much that 15 years divide 69-year-old Eddie Fenech Adami from 55-year-old Alfred Sant. What really separates them is the cultural chasm that lies between them and it is too late now for the ageing prime minister to bridge the gap. Dr Sant is the quintessential European intellectual whose existence reflects the tension between "optimism of the will and pessimism of intelligence" that characterises the best of European culture.

Dr Sant has had - and continues to have - direct first-hand access to European culture and has devoured it raw, bones and all, the good and the bad bits, the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the ridiculous, unexpurgated and integral. Crunching it, digesting it, attempting to understand it in its complexity, with all its internal contradictions, without cutting corners, is not an easy process and obviously requires talent and skill. It is, of course, an on-going process for the simple reason that we are speaking about a great, living culture. Dr Sant has metabolised vast amounts of this material and has emerged from the process as a wiser European, wary of facile enthusiasms.

Like the best of European intellectuals today, Dr Sant has learnt to take the sterile, sanitised and aseptic phraseology of Brussels' bureaucratese with a very large handful of salt. In the best traditions of the European critical spirit, he shares the broad consensus that unites the best European minds today about the fact that, one, the acquis communautaire is only a fraction of the acquis europeenne and, two, that the former - its potential and its limits - can only be understood within the context of the latter.

Only with reference to the whole of the European experience - what the real historical Europe has acquired through this tormented experience - can one estimate what Europe (and the world) have actually acquired with the acquis communautaire and what it has not.

It is ironic that Dr Fenech Adami, the head of a government that stubbornly wants to take Malta into the European Union immediately and at all costs, should be so obviously alien to the spirit of the acquis europeenne. Dr Fenech Adami's Europe is a two-dimensional caricature of the real historical Europe. It is a Europe acquired - at a high price - at the fast-food outlets of the Commission.

It is the Europe of dim metropolitan bureaucrats, edited and simplified for dimmer provincial bureaucrats who at best aspire to become the unthinking governors of remote provinces, purveyors of imperial directives and tax collectors, guardians of orthodoxy. A Europe intended to reassure those that are not quite convinced that they are European because the critical positive "pessimism of intelligence" that distinguishes the best European culture is so alien to their own traditional provincial cultures. It is a Europe for those accustomed to simple unchanging truths, for those that fear freedom and the responsibility that it implies.

Of course, Dr Fenech Adami cannot be blamed for this. He is what he is, the product and prisoner of a narrowly provincial and - to my mind - somewhat bigoted milieu. Although both he and Dr Sant live in Bir-kirkara (fascinating Arabic toponym...), for Dr Sant it is the deliberately chosen place of residence of a cosmopolitan intellectual who is equally at home in Paris, Brussels and Boston (the most European of US cities) or in his birthplace Sliema (another fascinating Arabic place-name). Although Dr Fenech Adami has certainly travelled extensively as prime minister or as leader of the opposition, it is difficult to imagine him at home outside of his native town or his summer place in Bu-gibba (yet another).

It must also be said that Dr Sant's profoundly European approach to Europe and the world has been favoured by his formation (sounds too French in English). His science degrees, the breadth of his humanist culture, his management and economic studies, his literary accomplishments (yet to be comprehensively studied), his diplomatic, professional and political experiences... have produced a unique and formidable synthesis. One that Dr Fenech Adami cannot and will never be able to match.

Those around and below Dr Fenech Adami know this and attempts have been made to construct an intellectual persona for him (at home with his favourite books, remember?). The result has been unsuccessful and has been, I am told, abandoned. It has also, of course, been noted in Brussels. Of course, Daphne already said as much years ago. Evidently we have more than a surname in common.

Dr Vella was president of the Labour Party between 1992-2001.