Counter accusations are flying over the 30th anniversary of Freedom Day. The opposition accuses the government of failing to commemorate the anniversary properly; the Nationalist Party accuses Labour local councils of using public money and a national feast to organise partisan events. Both, in their own way, are accusations of negligence: neglect of the feast in one case, neglect of national unity in the other.

Both ignore the real startling neglect concerning the feast: its meaning. Today it lies caked with the dust of a past era of international relations.

Whatever it may owe to Dom Mintoff's desire to match Giorgio Borg Olivier's achievement of Independence, the feast's meaning always transcended the circumstances of its origin and the international agreements that made it possible for Mr Mintoff's government to forego the rents from the British military bases.

That meaning lay in the radical break with the past, represented by the end of Malta as a military base. If Independence can be construed as the crowning of a developing quest for national liberty with long roots in the past, then Freedom Day can be construed as the celebration of a nation's freedom to reinvent itself and break with (at least some aspects of) that past.

The 1987 constitutional amendments enshrined Malta's proactive commitment to peace in the world, especially its region, but, unfortunately, in a flawed way.

It was right to introduce that commitment in the first article, as part of the definition of the Republic.

However, it was a mistake, pointed out by Eddie Fenech Adami at the time, to spell out the commitment in such contractual detail as to render the provisions anachronistic as soon as the Cold War was over.

That happened, as it turned out, within two years. For different, politically understandable reasons, neither of the major political parties has cared to initiate a public discussion on what a post-Cold War meaning of the feast could be and how that meaning might be enshrined in the Constitution.

Those Labour politicians who would concede that the constitutional provisions need updating have been afraid of a shibboleth of the last Labour government to be considered, by an important section of its grassroots, the last truly Labour government. Nationalist leaders have been afraid that broaching the subject would be understood by Labour as an attempt to undermine the point of the feast rather than an attempt to renew it.

Avoiding the subject, however, risks embalming the feast. Neutrality may still be meaningful, perhaps, but not neutrality defined as non-alignment between two poles, one of which no longer exists while the other, the US, has since 1987 become an international partner almost entirely across the southern Mediterranean, including the whole of North Africa.

A commitment to peace that addresses military security is important; but only that? Today Nato is more than a military alliance. It is a security organisation that pays attention to various dimensions of security, including cultural dialogue.

The reason it does so is that the nature of war itself has changed. It may be declared as much in the name of humanitarian intervention: particular cases might stink of humbug but the fact that humanitarian intervention is resorted to as political cover shows the force of the claim. It is a claim given some credence when the use of military force is joined up, as it frequently is, to a network of other forces - including legal, development and medical aid - making it difficult to distinguish neatly between states of war and peace.

A change in the meaning of war necessitates a re-think on the meaning of a commitment to peace.

In Malta's circumstances, the re-thinking needs to take on board membership of the European Union and the growing polarisation between Africa and Europe.

The point of such fresh thinking would not be to dilute the commitment but, on the contrary, to give it new life.

Such thinking should include expanding the sense of "our region" to include sub-Saharan Africa.

The conditions of peace should be seen to include not just the military but also the economic and ecological aspects of security. And the idea of commitment should include a bipartisan idea of how best to use the development aid (0.7 per cent of GDP) that Malta is obliged to give as an EU member.

Such thinking would, of course, go beyond what should properly go into a Constitution. But the discussion would serve to create that political understanding and trust that would establish the parameters within which different governments could interpret the constitutional commitment and by which they would be judged.

Without such a discussion, Labour will continue to celebrate the feast as an achievement receding ever more into the distant past; Nationalist politicians will continue to seem as though they are only going through the motions. It is to be hoped that one of the tasks that the new President of the Republic will take on will be the facilitation of constitutional talks that would permit the feast to become a living signpost.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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