Beyond national days

Ihave no doubt that if you were to survey public opinion in Malta and Gozo, the overwhelming majority would not list the National Day issue as anywhere near the top 10 problems facing this country. Nor would they be unduly ruffled at being told that, with five national days, Malta appears to hold the world record as the country with the largest number of national days.

The issue is, nevertheless, not a trivial one. Nor can it be swept under the carpet merely by dismissing it as a partisan controversy that is conveniently dragged out by the political parties when they need to stoke up political passions in their respective camps to divert attention from the real burning issues. It would be irresponsible to trivialise it precisely because it lends itself so well to demagogy.

All those who would rather our two parties concentrated on the real issues facing us in the second decade of the 21st century ought to give some thought to the National Day question. They should do so not because it is one of the truly substantial problems our country has to confront now and with increasing urgency in the 10 years ahead. It is not a substantial problem in this strong sense. It deserves attention because unless it is tackled it will make it more difficult to get on with the job of seriously tackling the truly substantial ones.

The big problems will require us to put our heads together across the present political dividing lines. Unless the National Day question is solved, or at least effectively neutralised, it will get in the way of any effort to agree on ways and means of solving the real issues. Those whose political survival depends on placing immediate political gain - more often than not personal political gain rather than a gain for their party - ahead of long term national solutions, have no interest in allowing the two parties to focus on the real issues and to speak to each other seriously about these. Politicians such as these - and there are many more politicians than seats in the Maltese Parliament - will resort to the National Day question when it suits them best. That's why we need to take it seriously.

The National Day theme is dwarfed by problems regarding our economic development, energy, the impact of climate change on our islands, environmental degradation and the consequences of these islands being situated between a highly-developed continent hungry for labour power at the lowest possible cost - unemployment notwithstanding - and a largely underdeveloped one overflowing with hungry human beings who will risk their lives to survive.

Now, the assertion that the National Day issue is not one of the substantial problems facing us does not make it any easier to solve. Clearly, there are many on both sides that feel strongly about it.

Very strongly indeed. Although I am not aware of any empirical investigation of the relationship between opinions on this issue and age, I suspect that there is an inversely proportional correlation between age and strong views on this theme. In other words, I suspect that those who are tempted to react to the suggestion that we ought to go for either September 21 or March 31 as the National Day with the tired old expression "Over my dead body!" will tend to be older than those who are not sure what the fuss is all about.

If this hypothesis is not pure hogwash, therefore, the conditions militating against a pragmatic solution to the problem ought to just disappear in the long run without the need of any bold political initiative by enlightened party leaders. The problem is, in Keynes' well known words, that in the long run we are all dead.

The big problems that require serious political dialogue - understood as dialogue about practical solutions - cannot wait until the majority of voters will be made up of those that were born in the 1980s and after. Moreover, the life experiences of those - whatever side they were or are on - that lived the momentous events of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s - events that have shaped us as a nation - cannot be ignored.

We cannot, therefore, wait until they are no longer here, nor can we go for a quick-fix closure that tramples over their feelings.

Yes, in the absence of an easy way out of the National Day issue we need bold political initiatives by enlightened party leaders. To start with we expect leaders themselves not to stoop to demagogy.

Rank-and-file feelings must be respected but not abused and whipped into an irrational frenzy to turn their attention away from failure to tackle substantial problems.

We also expect them to lead their supporters in a re-visitation of our post-war history. A reconsideration that interprets even the most conflictual moments not as a manifestation of the eternal struggle between good and evil - whereby each party perceives itself as goodness incarnate - but as what is to be expected in a critical phase of the development of a society necessarily composed of different interests and emerging from a long colonial experience.

So far, the younger of the two leaders has shown himself to be the bolder and the more enlightened in approaching this issue.

Dr Vella blogs at watersbroken.wordpress.com.