Multicultural Malta

Listening to the far right and to the far right-ish one could easily come to believe that multiculturalism is something completely new to Malta. Posing as patriots and guardians of Maltese culture and values, they propose to mummify a reality that has always been open to foreign influence. They choose to do so completely against the trend of centuries and at a time when we are more open than ever to outside influence.

It is not some poor wretch arriving half drowned that is most likely to influence that amalgam of values, prejudices and habits that can be presented as a falsely homogenous whole dubbed Maltese culture. Coming in at the bottom rung of our social reality, nobody can realistically expect a sudden change of course in Maltese culture due to the influence of the newest arrivals and the most likely candidates for departure.

The panic engendered in a significant swathe of the population by outright deceit and the most unscrupulous propaganda is itself a guarantee against any such development. Add to that the much larger portion of the population that refuses to panic, those hundreds of thousands who did not attend the ANR rally, and there seems to be little fear of us being culturally overwhelmed.

It is with very good reason. Our culture, hard to define as it may be, has survived millennia of foreign domination. Our language, sitting at the very heart of the amorphous and intangible whatsit, has come to us from mediaeval Sicily collecting all sorts of additions along the centuries and becoming ever more unique. It appears that it is the combination of things that makes us what we are rather than some distilled purity held apart from historical developments: our ability to digest almost everything. Freezing up the process would kill it all and be the one truly uncharacteristic operation.

What makes us Maltese is an enigma that has defied definition and challenged the ingenuity of all who chose to worry about it rather than just know it without knowing it and simply live it. At what point do we become Maltese? To be quite honest about it, I don't think it is a matter of citizenship but of social acceptance, perhaps a matter of evident commitment to Malta.

Nor has it ever been a matter of complexion. Some of us are as fair as the fairest of the fair and others in all the darker shades.

Is it a matter of religion? Are we all Catholic? Whatever happened to the third or so of the population that was Jewish before 1492? Is it or is it not true that many Maltese surnames tell of a forced conversion to Christianity? When a third of the daytime population of Valletta was made up of slaves, mostly Moslem but some also Orthodox Christian captured in Turkish domains, did we fear cultural dilution? Their labour built our capital city and we should have no qualms in counting them as major contributors to our heritage. We have always lived in the company of people of other religions. There is an amazing variety present today, of almost every faith under the sun, nearly all the genuine Maltese article.

So what is it that the haters of multiculturalism want to embalm? What is it that they fear so much? Can they be genuinely afraid of the kaleidoscopic variety of people washed up on our shores as part of the immigration to Europe? It is too convenient for the inciters to panic to lump them all as Moslems involved in a global conspiracy. This may be some fanatics' actual pipedream but it is more likely to backfire than any fanatic can hope or dread.

They come to Europe attracted not only by the hope of improving their economic fate but also because they crave the freedom and the security. They are more clearly vulnerable to Europeanisation than Europe can ever be to anything else. The Moslem conspiracy theorists should consider the evident contrary effect to the tide they fear: many will return, almost all can be in constant contact with their lands of origin. Cultural osmosis works both ways. It seems more likely that this wave of immigration will undermine dictatorial regimes long past their use-by date than any European country.

How can we imagine that a Kurd and a Nigerian cannot make out the difference between them? It is easily believed by any population stampeded into panic. Does being Moslem make them identical? If so how come we seem to make such a difference between ourselves and the very Catholic Congolese refugees? Our evident difficulty in absorbing the shock of the new arrivals is evidence also of our cultural impermeability. We have always absorbed change at the rate we chose to do so regardless of the fact that the newcomers have held the power of life and death over us. The fear of being culturally swamped by a kaleidoscopic multitude assigned to a non-status in our society is simply absurd.

Denouncing multiculturalism as some great evil is a rejection of whatever it is that makes us Maltese. It is the greatest idiocy ever committed in Malta. The dynamic of Malteseness is that of a vortex apparently homogenous at the centre but spinning a great variety of minor realities around its edge. We have a strong tendency towards insularity and tend to underscore what appears to be an element in great majority but the diversity never disappears. As it is slowly absorbed more arrives and then more.

We are a process rather than a static phenomenon. We are like all others and at the same time unique. True, we have little or no claim to a cosmopolitan outlook but we are certainly an ever-changing amalgam. This is what we are and we should be able to celebrate it, not fear it and attempt to stop it. We seem to think that we have had an influx greater than we can handle. We certainly seem to have handled it badly but there is no reason to believe that we will ever have to absorb more than what we can handle quite easily. It is a matter of size.

There is no way that Malta can ever absorb more than a tiny fraction of the tide of immigration washing over it. It is patently obvious, to nobody more so than to the immigrants themselves. An endless accumulation of boatpeople in Malta is as undesirable to them as it is impossible for our resources to handle. It has never been on the cards. Only addicts to lunatic websites could believe that anybody ever believed otherwise. The antidote is to be found at http://www.maltanaziparty.zoomshare.com/ .

Malta will have to take on the burden of the reality of its geographical position and the events that wash over it. Screaming and shouting, burning one another's doors and behaving like the blackshirts and the brownshirts who were the only foreigners to bomb us in living memory is not a creditable reaction. It will cost us some money and it should never be allowed to cost us our commitment to safeguard human rights.

Our challenge is to change the application of the Dublin Convention to Malta. It will be done because it must be done, because it is a reasonable demand. It will not be done by neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis. When it is done, when it is achieved by the coordinated action of all the democratic forces in the country and their allies abroad, we will all enjoy the spectacle of wannabe Hitlers strutting about looking even more daft than they do already. They too will be absorbed and eventually disappear, cultural aberration though they are. Malta can digest anything.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

harry.vassallo@alternattiva.org.mt