If you look it up on You Tube, you’ll find the interview Hans Keller did with Pink Floyd on BBC 1 in 1967. An Austrian Jew who had become a naturalised British subject, Keller was a musicologist who knew philosophy and psychoanalysis. Though not too enthusiastic about them, he pronounced the magical words “People who have an audience ought to be heard” and went on to interview the band’s frontmen.

So when certain Maltese social media claim to attract almost one-fourth of the country’s entire population then, if the claim is true and using Keller’s logic, they ought to be heard, particularly when they deal with ‘European-ness’.

One blog has been throwing not-so-subtle hints over the past months on our low degree of European-ness. It compared the Maltese to Sicilian peasants.

That’s funny... It had been during the fascist regime that Sicilians faced a(n ideological) problem relating to identity and fascist thinker Julius Evola had to devise the formula that, though not racially Aryans, the Sicilians were Aryan in spirit!

The blog often suggests that not all Maltese are Europeans but some are Middle Eastern. Recently, the argument was built on what a Scottish transport company had to say.

Before analysing why this is an old trick, we should bear in mind that the blog is never clear on whether it is talking ethnicity or culture. Be that as it may. Two intellectuals give us some insight into why the blog is pulling an old and tried trick on its readers.

One Labourite intellectual somewhere analysed how the British colonial authorities viewed Dom Mintoff: “Rather than attempting to understand the vocabulary and the grammar of his unorthodox game, they simply labelled it as evidence of his otherness and interpreted his otherness as evidence of an aggressiveness associated with a lower stage of social evolution, one that is more direct and in-your-face because it is unencumbered by the refined etiquette of the more advanced civilizations.”

The concept of ‘European-ness’ corresponds to no reality

In an article that he had once written for this newspaper, one Nationalist intellectual had made the argument that “European fears of Islam actually stem from a history of similarity”.

The blog is playing with these themes when it makes assertions about our European-ness. I think they are wild and off-the-mark assertions.

It is self-evident, I believe, that the concept of ‘European-ness’ corresponds to no reality. In the Middle Ages, there had been Christendom. You were either a Christian or a Muslim. Former Muslim possessions Malta, Spain, and Southern Italy were considered cushion states upon their return to Christendom. However, this was at the beginning of the other millennium!

In post-Christendom Europe, ‘European-ness’ does not exist. The exceptions have probably been fashion and pop music. Bell bottoms and rock music, say, were popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain at the same time.

But, in reality, to paraphrase an essay published in a book edited by Henry Frendo, ‘Europe’ was constructed “as a political and historical expression” in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is an artificial construct, with no real basis in reality, so much so that the European Union claims to be “united in diversity”.

What is ‘European’? The Eurovision Song Contest allows Israel to participate. The Council of Europe embraces members as diverse as Azerbaijan and the United Kingdom (which has been toying with the idea of leaving the Council’s Court of Human Rights).

In Europe, there are liberals and conservatives, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, and atheists. And the Jews, whose influence has been enormous.

There’s a Mitteleuropa (with its heimat-coloured provincial worldview), a Western Europe (Occidentalist and bourgeois-driven), a Nordic-Baltic Europe (with its matriarchal legacies) and an Eastern Europe (still grappling with the havoc wreaked by Communism). Let’s zero in on doing business with people from different cultures.

In his best-selling 1996 book, When Cultures Collide, now in its third edition, British author Richard Lewis charts the cultures of the world. He draws an equilateral triangle, putting the multi-actives (Latin Americans) on the first, the linear-actives (Germans, Swiss) on the second and the reactives (Vietnamese) on the remaining corner. The other cultures are on in-between points along the three sides of the triangle.

The Maltese, with the Italians, Spaniards and Greeks, are next to the Latin Americans on the way to the linear-actives. The Arabs are almost next to the Latin Americans but on the way to the reactives. And the UK is next to the Germans but on the way to the reactives.

The Scottish company quoted by the blog might benefit from a seminar delivered by Lewis.

It all reminds me of that beautiful 1973 cult movie, The Wickerman, scripted by the English Jew Anthony Shaffer, which deals with Christianity and Paganism on a remote island off Scotland... or, at least, that’s what’s on the surface.

On a deeper level, my gut feeling is that Shaffer, as a sort of outsider, was challenging viewers.

Are those lands on the fringe of Europe really European?

What is ‘European’?

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