You are still the chairman of the Mediterranean Institute at the University. What are your views on the current turmoil in the Middle East-north Africa region?

The factor that I find most striking in both the Tunisian and the Egyptian uprisings is that Facebook and Twitter have been the essential tools for their happening, as has been generally acknowledged. It is the communication established through these social networks that enabled ordinary people in both countries to operate successfully, in spite of rigorous censorship and police-state surveillance.

In Egypt, even though the government suspended the internet servers in the country, electronic communication still went on among the opponents of the regime through the use of extra-national parts of the global system. Impressively, in Syria, a Facebook site critical of the government has over 13,000 participants.

The Egyptian even more than the Tunisian experience shows that it is possible for a revolution in the fullest sense of the word to occur in our age in a form very different from the classical model of the French Revolution or even that of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

There can hardly be any doubt that the relatively low bloodshed was in great part due to the fact that the happenings in Cairo were being seen in real time throughout the world. This made it difficult for anyone with the least surviving shred of self-respect to defy the common sense of humanity that is universally shared.

I was impressed also by another fact. The Chinese official media reported the Egyptian events as nearly as possible as if nothing was happening. Moreover, they slanted the picture as much against the opposition as they could. Yet foreign observers in China still found that people there, especially the young, were quite well informed about what was actually happening, again through their overt or surreptitious access to the electronic media.

The Chinese authorities probably pictured in their collective minds the Tiananmen tragedy happening in the worldwide glare of the electronic age, or possibly not happening because of it. Certainly, they must have been afraid of the infectious nature of the Tunisian pattern of non-violent revolution made possible by the internet.

Multitudes of people are summoned through the social networks to just gather in central city squares with banners and placards, chanting slogans and rousing songs. This style of protest in our Mediterranean world may possibly have been actually inspired, even if distantly, by Tiananmen itself. The new IT context has, however, now radically altered the chances of success.

Current events in the Mediterranean must have made it abundantly clear even in China that the electronic age has changed the operational parameters of totalitarian government and opened up new prospects for democratic systems.

This week the political analyst, Michelle Pace of Birmingham University, expressed, in The Times, two thought-provoking judgments, in relation to what is happening in Egypt. The first is that the EU ‘has lost all credibility’ as a promoter of democracy in the Middle East because of its hostility to the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine. The second is that Malta has scarcely fulfilled the high expectations of our helping better communication with the Arab world that were so widely entertained at the time of our country’s accession as a member- state of the EU. Do you agree?

Almost entirely. When the proposal to appoint a substantively hollow figure with the appearance of a foreign minister was made at the European Convention, I demurred although I could only do so in a muted fashion. The move was only too clearly part of the Eurosceptic campaign to emasculate the Commission as much as possible by relating the new position much more closely to the Council.

Both the appointment of Baroness Ashton to the position and her pronouncements, in particular when the Egyptian uprising began, have amply confirmed my suspicions at the time.

She has only been willing or able to express lowest common multiple views of the Council members, which means a very low content of creative or lateral thinking indeed. The EU has proved itself unable to adopt a more constructive approach to the Mediterranean than the US.

As for Malta, only a few weeks ago I was in this column hammering on the point that I was sure Foreign Minister Tonio Borg agreed with – that we should insist that a Mediterranean item should be on the Council’s agenda every time it meets.

Moreover, at various times I have been urging that Malta should be a protagonist in spurring on the EU to implement the provision of special status to neighbouring countries with regard to the Mediterranean in a radically different way to that appropriate to the East of the Union, because of the marine nature of the border.

In this connection, we should do our best not to allow the holistic marine policy which was being put into place to become relegated to the back-burner. The current turmoil is all the more reason for urgency in taking the action best calculated to create solidarity between the Union and its Mediterranean neighbours, rather than laying it aside.

Indeed, all the ideas for promoting Euro-Mediterranean solidarity should be pushed forward more vigorously because of the outbreak of this serious crisis.

These ideas range across from the big ones such as resuscitating Nicolas Sarkozy’s original Mediterranean project in revised form (not a Union, but something like a prosperity zone) to the small ones such as strengthening the Mediterranean parliament with the holding of regular virtual sessions focusing on topical issues.

Should Malta also be doing something with regard to internet?

I don’t know whether the government is pushing its pro-Open-Source policy at the Internet Governance Forum, through our Geneva mission, or through bringing together culture, media and justice experts with its telecoms and diplomatic officials.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.

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