On not missing boats

Do you have any reactions to the escalation of the illegal migration phenomenon?

The case being presented by both Malta and Italy to the EU is for what is being called 'burden-sharing'. I myself think that a case should rather be presented for not missing the challenge of attempting a radical change of the world economic order.

The need of this change is made manifest by the nexus between the massive migratory movements and the global financial and economic crisis.

Even in the local scene, the burden of illegal migration would not surely have loomed so large had it not been for its coincidence with the sky rocketing of the national deficit as a reaction to the crisis of the capitalist system.

There can hardly be the slightest doubt about the wisdom of our government to allow the deficit to soar in order to cover the cost of keeping employment as full as possible. Nevertheless, there is not much use in blurring the fact that the state subsidies (eventually from taxpayers' money) being paid in order to save jobs are going to multi-national companies normally concerned exclusively with private profit.

Few would question today the view that the worldwide financial and economic crisis was precipitated by the lack of prudence and wisdom in which free market globalisation was promoted by the governments of nation states or of those semi-federations of them such as the European Union. Practically all the governments of the world changed their laws in order to make it possible for the multi-nationals (some 270,000 of them) to have globalisation proceed in just their own best interests.

Equally there can hardly be any doubt that among the many reasons that are provoking the exodus from a whole range of mostly central African countries, such as corruption and tribalism often covered up with a veneer of religious fundamentalism, is the financial economic crisis.

So what do you think the EU should be doing in response to African invasion deeper than merely 'burden-sharing'?

At least concerted efforts should be made to ensure that the globalisation process is qualified in two ways. The first is that strongly put forward by Prof. Saskia Sassen, of Columbia University. She argues that most asylum seekers are driven by violations of human rights.

The influx of these refugees, although they are visibly powerless, has none the less the effect of making it ever more clear and impellent that globalisation necessitates a global responsibility for the safeguarding of human rights wherever they are violated. The myth of exclusive national sovereignty in this regard has become anachronistic.

The condition of powerlessness when it becomes widespread has become as complex in its implications in the political field as that of unemployment.

The second way in which the EU should move is clearly that indicated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his electoral campaign - namely that in the emerging configuration of the distribution of power in the globalised world, even if only for reasons of size, our relatively long-term aim should be a Euro-African Union, towards which the Union of the Mediterranean was originally conceived as a stepping stone.

Even though the first part of this idea has been frustrated, the only sensible way of meeting the African invasion is to lay the framework and foundations for solid Euro-African co-operation.

This perspective should patently inspire Maltese intervention on all particular issues and most notably in relation to Libya, now on the verge of a transition of power between Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his successors. However, the change is not likely to remove the present Libyan commitment to the African Union. Malta should not miss the opportunity of playing a distinctive role in this dynamic context.

Both the economic crisis and the migratory movements have a strong moral dimension. How is Pope Benedict XVI approaching global ethical issues?

What has struck me most in the way in which the Pope has tackled, for instance, the condom issue as compared with his predecessors is his significantly different understanding of 'natural law'.

Like John Paul II and Paul VI before him, Pope Benedict appeals to 'natural law' in the conviction that right reason can discover moral principles that can be universally accepted. However, his predecessors followed St Thomas Aquinas in holding that there was a distinction between eternal and natural law.

In other words, the historical conditions in which human reason was exercised imposed limitations that made it impossible for human beings to attain total understanding of the essential meaning and value of things and events. Thus, Aquinas believed that there was an evolution in the understanding of 'natural law' and its prescriptions relative to the passage of time and change of circumstance.

Pope Benedict XVI tends rather to adhere to the concept of 'natural law' as found in St Augustine (subject of his doctoral thesis) and other Church fathers with a Platonic rather than Aristotelian philosophy. For him human reason is itself wholly imbued with divine light and can establish absolute, trans-historic moral judgements of principle, without need of resort to revelation or religious faith.

Most impressively, in his talk to the clergy of Aosta (July 2005) Pope Benedict said that the moral system he wanted to present could be established "as if God did not exist."

His position is the same in the dialogue with Jurgen Habermas (in Esprit, July 2004) as well as with Marcello Pera (Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, Basic Books, New York 2007). The present Pope lifts his eyes up not so much to the historic Christ as to the eternal Logos believed in by Stoics as much as by Christians.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.