Yankee, go home

Lino Spiteri (The Sunday Times, January 21) took Labour leader Dr Alfred Sant to task for showing foresight and sound political judgment when he stated loud and clear that a Labour administration will seek the closest ties possible with the United States.

Dr Sant based the MLP's new approach to Maltese-US relations on the fact that both countries share the same political, economic and cultural structures which make them "bone of the bone, flesh of the flesh" of the same Western sciety. It is really a pity that a man of Mr Spiteri's calibre and stature restricts American cultural contributions to a limited literary and musical field because he, it seems, has only drunk from the refreshing streams of a Hemingway and a Steinbeck and of jazz music and an Irving. Our learned cognoscente of so many fields is clearly missing the wood for the trees.

Mr Spiteri criticises Dr Sant's forward-looking policies while confessing that he has still "that old democratic socialist bent". This is exactly Mr Spiteri's problem. He wants us to know that he still holds to his basic old-fashioned principles forged in his soul during his younger days at Oxford, that old hotbed of anti-Americanism. He holds on to what he had learned and believed on Monday, even though it is Wednesday, ignoring that the world had changed on Tuesday.

Yet, with his tongue in his cheek, Mr Spiteri proclaims that he is not anti-American. I bet my bottom dollar that during the Eighties he was against the installation of MRBMs in Western Europe to counter and check Soviet SS20s in Poland and Hungary and he supported the mammoth demonstrations in Western cities against President Reagan's massive rearmament programme which in the end dismembered the Soviet Union.

Sunday after Sunday Mr Spiteri has been using his "Wide Angle" to zoom on the new US embassy at Ta' Qali, berating Dr Sant's MLP for not protesting in Parliament and outside against the land transfer. However, he still wants us to believe that he is not an old-fashioned anti-American. The Yankees say: "If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck". Then Mr Spiteri cannot help reminding us that the younger generation is far from enthusiastic with American foreign and military policies in the world.

Overgrown media

In our day and age, it has become almost impossible for any statesman to conduct a sound foreign policy. The media are impatient and demand results immediately. Any statesman worth his salt has to take a long-range view of his foreign policy. He sows today in the hope that future generations will reap the fruits of his endeavours.

The media have to live from day to day, they gloat on bad news, they glorify the enemy and and put forward the impossibility of total victory. It is a sad story that most politicians pander to the crazy media of today's world which hark for America's defeat in Iraq not because they share Bin Laden's Islamic madness but because they hunger for George Bush's humiliation.

The media are panicking the politicians into an exit strategy in Iraq, ignoring the consequences. Most of them have never read history, so they do not know that when the Portuguese mariners rounded the Cape of Good Hope and burst into the Indian Ocean, they dominated those seas and cleared them of Islamic shipping because of long range policies which exploited the inherent rivalry between the Shi'ite Safawi power of Iran and the Sunni Ottoman Empire. In this way the Portuguese were able to establish their two major naval bases of Hormuz and Malacca.

Even today, Mr Bush's Middle East policies are giving their first fruits as Sunni Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are running for cover, seeking US protection against aggressive Iran while Palestine's Abu Mazen has also realised the threat of Hizbollah and acted upon it.

My aim is to show Dr Sant's foresight and political acumen by leading his party out of barren and inhospitable desert of anti-Americanism. Unlike Mr Spiteri, he has the cultural depth to realise that faraway America is bonded to our country by a common membership in the same Western society. If Mr Spiteri has read his history books well, besides reading Hemingway and Steinbeck, he would have grasped this truth.

Wholeness of the West

To help Mr Spiteri grasp the meaning of a Western society, I shall try to plot a geometrical figure on the political map of the West.

When Charlemagne's dominions were partitioned between his three grandsons by the Treaty of Verdun in AD 843, Lothair as the eldest established his claim to his grandfather's two capitals of Aachen and Rome; and to connect these by a continuous belt of territory, he was assigned a portion which straggled across the face of Western Europe from the mouth of the Tiber and the Po to the mouth of the Rhine, ignoring the barrier of the Alps and uniting Northern Italy under a single sovereignty with the Rhineland and the Netherlands. Lothair's portion is commonly regarded as one of the curiosities of historical geography, chiefly because it finds no place on the political map of modern Europe.

Nevertheless, the three Carolingian brothers were right in believing that Lothair's portion was a zone of particular importance in our Western World. If we produce this zone northwestwards, ignoring the Channel as the Treaty of 843 ignored the Alps, by adding to Lothair's continental dominions the domain in Britain over which King Egberth of Wessex had established his hegemony before his death in 839, we shall find that we have plotted a locus of a line which twice over has constituted one of the structural axes in the human geography of Western Europe.

Today, we can observe that a straight line running roughly southeast and northwest and drawn from Rome to Britain's Roman Wall is, so to speak, the transverse axis of our geometrical figure. Its mid-point falls near Metz in Lorraine (Lotharingia). If, through Metz, we proceed to draw another line, at right angles to the first and therefore running roughly southwest and northeast, we obtain the main axis along which the Western society has increased its geographical extension overland in both directions.

Southwestwards, this main axis was carried across the Pyrenees by Charlemagne himself in 778, extended to the mouth of the Guadalquivir by the Castillian conquests in the 13th century and eventually produced across the Southern Atlantic into what is now Latin America.

Northeastwards, the same line was carried forward from the Rhine bridge-heads to the Elbe by Charlemagne between 772 and 804; to the Baltic, the Vistula and the Carpathians within two centuries of Charlemagne's death, when Scandinavia, Poland and Hungary were admitted to membership in Western Christendom; and to the Pacific at the close of the 17th century, when the Muscovite Empire, which had extended to the Pacific rather more than half a century earlier, was received into the Western society as a proselyte.

The production of the transverse axis from its northwestern extremity in England, which followed in the succeeding age of Western history, has achieved results which are to all appearances of an enduring character. It has filled North America with an English-speaking population from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle, and, radiating from the North Atlantic into all the other seas of the world, it has planted new communities of English origin and Western culture round the southern rim of the Pacific to share the possession of that Ocean with the peoples of India, China and other Far Eastern nations. This was the bearing of the line embedded in Lotharingia upon the subsequent expansion of Western society.

As a scholar and a Westerner, Dr Sant is conscious of the fact the United States and Malta are offspring of the same Great Mother. He knows it and chose to act upon it. Dr Sant knows that people who turn back to see the cities of the plain are turned into pillars of salt. The only way to look is forward. Under his leadership the MLP has boldly left behind it the Pillars of Hercules to sail on the open waters of the Atlantic.

I am sure that unlike Lino Spiteri, who chooses to read only Hemingway and Steinbeck, the MLP leader has also opted to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall, where this literary giant instructed us that "...the Balance of Power will continue to fluctuate, and the prosperity of our own or neighbouring kingdoms may be alternately exalted or depressed; but these general events cannot essentially injure our general state of happiness, the system of arts and laws and manners, which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of Mankind, the Europeans and their colonists (Americans)."

That is why we can never cry "Yankee, go home". All Westerners live in a common home.