Historically, democracies don’t have a good record of avoiding crises. Democracies are rather better, however, at getting out of them. Let’s hope the rule will be proved again with respect to the crisis that arose last week – a crisis that concerned values and principles as well as immigration.

Of course, we’ll have to do more than hope. We have to find a new way of conducting both the national conversation as well as the strategic one with our European partners. The latter requires a fundamental shift from the way it’s been conducted so far, both by the present government and its predecessor. Weak European solidarity is usually identified as the spoiler of the conversation. But even if the solidarity were there, the conversation would still suffer from three weaknesses.

First, there’s the selective quotation of individual statistics, which leaves everyone thinking that their case has not been answered and that the rest are missing the point.

It’s a real conversation stopper even if you get your numbers right. Unfortunately, over the past week, Joseph Muscat has been briefed wrong. He’s been reported as saying that, in population terms, our annual intake of immigrants is the equivalent of a million arriving in Germany or Spain and 800,000 arriving in the UK.

But Spain’s population is just over half that of Germany’s, so their proportions cannot be the same. And the equivalent of our arrivals in Germany would be 400,000, 315,000 in the UK and 235,000 in Spain. Germany would, no doubt, point out that, in fact, it had 440,000 applications for asylum in 1992, as a result of the Yugoslav wars. They have already faced our numbers – alone.

Such errors, potentially, create problems for our case. But even getting individual numbers right won’t be enough.

Second, the conversation is also spoilt by the narrow time horizon. The argument currently turns on whether we’re at crisis point now or not. It’s clear, however, that with a Union of 28 members, any new fundamental policy – and that is what obligatory burden sharing would involve – needs a passage of time to be formulated, negotiated and approved.

All European directives need this. The French and German governments, for instance, usually require 18 months to see a European proposal pass into national law – after scrutiny by civil servants in various ministries and debate by national parliamentarians. And that’s assuming they’re not trying to strangle the proposal at birth.

Just look at the handling of the financial crisis. More immediate, widespread and tangible a crisis you could not have. But, years after the crisis broke, the necessary elements to address it in the long term have still not all been put in place.

So, any discussion of solidarity on immigration and crisis levels needs to factor years of negotiation over a long-term solution. A broader time horizon will change the terms of the discussion – from whether Malta has an emergency now (which is doubtful) to whether, if present trends continue, it will be in a real emergency in, say, five years from now.

Arguing over possible shared futures is the way in which a community of destiny is affirmed

To admit that would be to admit that serious policy discussion must begin now if the future emergency is to be addressed responsibly.

The third weakness of the conversation is that it generally assumes current trends. For a region like ours, with Egypt and Tunisia at risk of turning for the worse, not the better, excluding everything except business-as-usual is reckless.

One can understand, of course, why politicians are wary of broaching the possibility of things becoming even worse. They’ll be accused of pandering to the hysterics of right-wing extremists. Besides, if one admits worst-case scenarios, one should also admit best-case scenarios.

And there lies the clue to the shape we should be giving the conversation. To avoid the three weaknesses of extreme statistical selectivity, narrow time horizons and static trends, we should frame our concerns in terms of several scenarios: business-as-usual, best case and worst case.

Scenario analysis is already conducted by the European Commission and certain ministries of the largest member states. By adopting it, we would be able to have a more focused conversation. (‘If you don’t think we’ll be facing a real emergency in three years, when do you think, on those trends, will we face one? Never? In six years rather than three? In that case, shouldn’t we still begin to address it now?’)

We couldn’t be accused of being alarmist because we’d also be considering best scenarios – and their probability. Since scenarios include multiple factors, we could include factors like costs for education, health and welfare, as well as potential boosts for the economy. We would be able to show that our thinking was based on concrete measures to integrate immigrants and not on xenophobic prejudice against them.

Making an intellectually disciplined, holistic case binds our European partners to making rational objections or else have their irresponsibility exposed. Of course, we have to be bound by reason too – even if scenario analysis does not yield the results we expected.

From scenario analysis we would be better able to insist on scenario planning, on pan-European measures designed to address, as much as possible, each eventuality. No doubt, other member states will have their say on the scenarios facing them.

Such arguments, unlike the present ones, need not be divisive. Arguing over possible shared futures is the way in which a community of destiny is affirmed.

ranierfsadni@europe.com