Charles de Gaulle famously and loftily declared that he had always had “a certain idea of France”. Apparently, so has Tony Zarb, the general secretary of the General Workers’ Union. In fact, it’s evident that the GWU has a certain idea of all the EU member states: they’re in the Union purely for what they can get for themselves.
Why else would the GWU urge all MEP candidates to declare that they’ll put Malta’s interests always first, above all else?
And, on the 10th anniversary of our EU membership, shouldn’t we compare this idea of nationalism with how nationalism features on the European map of values?
It’s a peculiar formulation, when you think about it: Malta above all else. Could anyone mean it seriously? Malta first, even before human decency? It’s idolatrous.
The GWU will retort that what it obviously means is that, in any conflict of interest between Malta’s clear national interest and the national interests of other EU states, Maltese MEPs should attempt to score for Malta. If that’s all the GWU means, then it’s saying something banal, which no one has ever questioned.
The problems begin when what’s in the national interest is an object of contention. There are several interests and sometimes they are in conflict. Short-term versus long-term interests. Social or environmental interests versus financial ones.
Roberta Metsola and David Casa, for example, have always maintained that, in lobbying against the citizenship by investment scheme, they were acting in Malta’s best interests, against a scheme that (they argued) would undermine the foundations of national solidarity by making citizenship a consumer commodity.
They were arguing against the commercialisation of citizenship just like others argue against the commercialisation of Christmas.
You might not agree with them. You might think them hopelessly out of touch. But they do have a right to insist that they have the best interests of Malta at heart. In such conflicts, it’s pointless urging people to stick to the national interest because they’re not in agreement about what it is.
The GWU stopped here. But others have taken nationalism further. They’re proposing a political doctrine: you can debate any issue all you like in Malta; but, in Brussels, you will have to support government policy. Because, away from Malta, ‘Malta’ is the government. In Malta, you may disagree with the government but, away from Malta, you shouldn’t challenge it.
The problem with that doctrine is that it sounds very much like, ‘my country, right or wrong’. To which G.K. Chesterton liked to retort: “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Chesterton’s point was simple. You will always love your mother (or ‘motherland’). But there’s good love and there’s destructive love. Rooting for your mother when she’s stone drunk is actually against her best interests. One should try to bring her to her senses.
The distinction between patriotism and nationalism belongs to a much wider Europe
If all of this is obvious, then why do we trip ourselves up when discussing nationalism? Part of it has to do with the weasel phrase that, here in Malta, politicians of all stripes seem fond of: ‘proud to be Maltese’.
The only public figure I know who resisted it was the late Fr Peter Serracino Inglott. He was once asked, by the TV host Joseph Chetcuti, whether he was proud to be Maltese. Fr Peter replied that he preferred to avoid pride wherever he could. “But I do love Malta.”
I suspect Fr Peter had in mind a distinction that the late former German President, Johannes Rau, famously made. He declared he was a patriot, not a nationalist. Why? “A patriot is someone who loves his fatherland, a nationalist is someone who despises the fatherlands of the others.”
In other words, pride in oneself makes it easier to slide into bigotry and disdain for others.
It’s easy to write off Rau’s attitude as understandable, given Germany’s historical burden. But maybe that’s too easy. Rau’s point about patriots and nationalists is usually attributed to the writer, Romain Gary, who was French but of Lithuanian Jewish background.
The distinction between patriotism and nationalism belongs to a much wider Europe. In fact, it’s there animating the founding fathers.
Three of them, Alcide de Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman, all served their respective country as prime minister, a role that is difficult to occupy without being a patriot.
But their attitude to nationalism was something else.
It’s not just that their adult years were scarred by two devastating European wars. Their personal background made it difficult for them to make nationalism an absolute value.
Schuman was a Frenchman with a German surname, born in a border territory, Luxembourg, and associated with a French city that, like him, had a German name, Strasbourg. Schuman only became a French citizen in his early 30s. Adenauer was a German from another border city whose name is best known in its French version, Cologne.
De Gasperi was born in the Tyrol at a time when it was still part of Austro-Hungary. He studied in Vienna. The future Italian prime minister began his political life as a parliamentarian in the Austrian Reichsrat. He only accepted Italian citizenship when he was almost 40.
This border experience did not make them cynical about nationalism. In rebuilding their countries in the wake of the disaster of World War II, all three appealed to national solidarity.
All three sought to protect their countries against communism and the spectre of another war.
But none of them saw nationalism as the be all and end all of political development and solidarity. They had seen the ugliness of nationalism as an absolute value in their anti-fascist struggle.
They saw national solidarity as the basis on which to build wider solidarities. A pan-European one. But even beyond. In 1953, De Gasperi gave an important speech in which he explicitly stated that “our project excludes no one”.
He was referring not just to the European countries which, at the time, couldn’t hope to join the emerging community: Spain, Greece and the Slavic countries. He was also referring to what lay beyond Europe’s formal borders.
He explicitly mentioned the Near East and North Africa. But, as successive European leaders have affirmed, the ideal was to develop a form of governance that could be shared with the rest of the world.
In the years immediately following World War II, it was fashionable in certain cosmopolitan circles to declare that one was a citizen of the world, detaching oneself from any single national community. The European founding fathers didn’t think we were stuck with two choices: either rootless cosmopolitanism or provincial, chauvinist nationalism.
After 10 years of membership, is it too much to hope that our understanding of national interest will encompass what the European founders wanted?
ranierfsadni@europe.com