Can Brazil and Malta form some kind of duo?

What are your reactions to the comments by Fr John Caruana from Brazil on both my questions and your answers on the economic crisis?

The manifest by Fr François Houtart is written in precisely the style and spirit of what I had hoped might have been the agreed Maltese position in the European Parliament. Caruana said that Houtart is very well known in Malta, but perhaps he should have said 'was'. The generations younger than myself or even Caruana are unlikely to know that Houtart gave the decisive stimulus to Archbishop Michael Gonzi to start the process which led to the reform of the management of Church property in Malta.

However, Fr Houtart now writes in a global perspective, but emanating from Latin America, while my dream-statement by our MEPs would have had a central Mediterranean focus.

For instance, the relevance of the Common Heritage of Humankind to the global crisis should feature prominently in any well thought-out Maltese stance on the new world economic order that has so patently become necessary. Or perhaps it should be the concept of 'global common goods' which is the actually more attractive version of Arvid Pardo's concept as revised by the American Nobel Prize winner for Economics, George Stigler.

Oddly enough, this concept has been flown as the primary banner in the current European Union election campaign by the former abbot of San Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome, Giovanni Franzoni, who now inspires and supports the so-called Reunited Communist Party.

Not surprisingly, Franzoni was one of the few 'political theologians' to have identified the source of the Common Heritage concept in St Paul's interpretation of time and history in the Epistle to the Romans. The Common Heritage of Mankind means the sum of resources which of their very nature should not be privately possessed or nationalised, but only used and managed on behalf of mankind as a whole.

Pardo had proposed that this management should be done by an appositely constituted world authority. Stigler envisages, on the other hand, that the management continues to be by national or multinational entities, in the hope that such a system would overcome the objections of the United States to accepting the world authority, while retaining the irrefutable reasoning underlying the Maltese proposal on ocean space.

Surely, stressing the role of global common goods as a response to the crisis would have been more credible had it been advanced by Malta's united MEPs than by Franzoni and the Reunited Communists of Italy.

It may still not be too late for a Maltese rallying around the Houtart manifesto re-embodying it in a Maltese coloured dress.

In the context of the European Parliament elections, last Thursday you chaired a seminar organised by Fondazzjoni Temi Zammit as part of the Europe for Citizens' Programme on Culture, Creation and Dialogue: Culture as a vector for European Union structure-building. Did anything of interest emerge?

I was most struck by the highlighting of the need Malta has for some sort of agency similar to the British Council, the Alliance Francaise or the Dante Aleghieri. It should not be thought that only large countries can benefit from such organisations for the diffusion of their culture abroad.

The island of Majorca has such an organisation, called Ramon Llull, named after the island's best-known son. The agency is held by the Majorcans to be mainly responsible for the millions of tourists who flock to the island, precisely because it brands itself as a cultural centre, in addition to sun and beaches. The European Union was of help in the setting up of this structure.

There is no doubt that, culturally, Malta really has something to sell. Personally, I have strongly supported the idea that we should seek to brand Malta as the island of Caravaggio. But it would also make sense to call the agency that is so badly needed for diffusion of knowledge not just about our heritage but also about contemporary creativity, say, after Nicolò Isouard.

The establishment of such an agency should plainly be promoted jointly by the ministers responsible for culture, foreign affairs and tourism. There was, however, a general feeling among the participants that our politicians lacked conviction about the Lisbon Treaty which clearly states that today innovation is the main key to economic development and global competitiveness.

Moreover, the education young people need with this goal in mind is not primarily about learning how to write a business plan but rather how to compose a song or make an image, that is, a mode of thinking that is creative.

One sign of the inadequate appreciation of investment in culture by our leaders is the fact that, while even a country such as Tunisia devotes 1.67 of its GNP to the Arts (not including heritage) the corresponding figure for Malta is only 0.08 per cent .

Do you think the European Parliament election campaign being conducted in the rest of Europe is better than that in Malta?

Not really. The electoral lists in countries that I know about seem to be made up largely of rejects from the national elections. In Italy, for instance, Grandpa Silvio (Berlusconi) has only retained three of the 25 glamorous girls he had originally proposed, but he has kept the likes of Clemente Mastella who brought down the Prodi government after a deal that Berlusconi had not managed to keep his part in the national elections. He is clearly trying to make up for it now at the European Parliament elections.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.