De Marco’s Handbook for Peace

When Mrs Kmiec and I arrived in Malta roughly a year ago, more than anything else, we missed the large, sprawling bookstores in the US that rather mysteriously sell more books by allowing the general public to read any of them for free for hours on end. In the midst of the family vacation in our home state of California, I have been reading for hours in the sun drenched second floor window of the Barnes & Noble directly across the street from our vacation rental.

The tranquillity of mind has been unexpectedly pierced by the sad news of former President de Marco’s passing. As I beg my family’s understanding to interrupt our short time together so that I might journey back to Malta to extend the sympathy of the President of the United States to the de Marco family and his saddened nation, my estimation of the American bookstore has lessened. It would seem that nowhere on the shelves can one find Dr de Marco’s splendid autobiography, The Politics of Persuasion. Perhaps this oversight can be forgiven in light of the physical distance between our two nations, but I doubt it. The Politics of Persuasion is a modern classic written with the universal insight of a scholar of law and politics and the sincere eloquence and depth of high philosophy and diplomacy made perfectly understandable to all.

It was the nature of Guido de Marco to be grasped as readily by common labourer and university lecturer. Some of the most poignant passages in the former President’s work relate to the devastation of war. This was a devastation that not only laid waste to landmark structures like the Opera House, but more insidiously, erected unwanted national barriers that would hurtfully separate a young Guido from schoolyard and neighbourhood friends merely because his ancestry fell upon the Italian side of the conflict.

A good portion of the book details the internal political struggles of Malta as a newly independent Republic. Were Prof. de Marco’s book appropriately on US bookstore shelves or more widely in our local libraries, he would readily win over American hearts and minds with his personal distaste for what he referred to as “monarchial” ways of thinking. So too, Guido de Marco’s denunciations of the settling of political difference by violence were as essential to the newly formed Republic of Malta, as Martin Luther King, Jr’s steadfast adherence to non-violence was in the struggle of Black men and women for civil rights in 1960s America.

Before parting for the funeral, I took a stroll along the village streets and encountered Rachel (not her real name), a young Israeli-American woman, who sold me some far too expensive nail care products from her push-cart. I was uniquely vulnerable since various duties put Mrs Kmiec and myself on different continents for virtually the entire summer, and some charm would be needed to ease another, even brief, temporary absence. The ever debonair Guido de Marco would understand. In any event, Rachel intrigued me because even as this quite young veteran of the Israeli army did not know Malta’s precise geographic location, she knew two things for certain about Malta: it is a member state of the European Union, and by virtue of that, peace was more likely.

“How so?” I inquired. “Well,” she said, “isn’t it obvious that a political union which facilitates greater economic ties also invites a fuller understanding of diverse cultures leading to an ever greater likelihood of peace and stability?”

Of course, that is obvious, but what Rachel did not know was that in politics, what is obvious today was often yesterday highly contested. Unknown to Rachel, it was Guido de Marco’s advocacy for the EU and Malta’s membership within it that made her observation axiomatic. And, of course, if the world is ever to reap the dividend of peace Guido de Marco’s teaching made possible, it is up to all of us to emulate and master more completely his art of political persuasion.

Prof. Kmiec is the US Ambassador.