Why anyone from outside should want to denigrate Malta's neutrality today is mystifying, besides intrusive. Certainly there is nothing to suggest that the present government has been fastidious in its interpretation of the neutrality clauses. So it is either the calculation that even PN governance must one day come to an end, or the Ambassador of the United States of America knows something that we do not need to know, yet. What we need to know is that our neutrality fell out of fashion with the end of the Cold War and may now be hindering us from upholding pax americana. The ambassador's suggestion was taken up by others (e.g. Austin Bencini, December 9), who further played round the theme that Labour shoved neutrality down the Nationalists' throat in 1987 as a condition for amending the clauses in the Constitution concerning election outcomes.
Aside from the fact that the duress argument overlooks the basics of all political negotiation, there is little evidence that the Nationalists were ever disturbed by that particular quid pro quo. Knowing better than to denounce a constitutional clause they signed up to, successive Nationalist administrations have shown by their actions that they did not care for neutrality, such as by their eagerness to host foreign warships and, more poignantly, by twice pegging the country to Nato through membership of its Partnership for Peace. If the government does not send soldiers to Afghanistan or Iraq, it is because there is still some common sense left and not because of the country's neutrality.
As regards the proposition of the US Ambassador, one tries not to read in it the implication that being neutral is now seen as an affront to the US. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attack of the World Trade Centre, President George W. Bush announced - not that it followed - that those who did not support the US in its war on terror were themselves supporters of terrorism. Mercifully, Mr Bush is a fading memory, and his successor Barack Obama is a Nobel Prize laureate on account of his peaceful intentions. However, US presidents change, and US national interests remain the same.
Here is not the space and the scope for analysing the post-Cold War world, and what replaced the specific bipolarity that oppressed the planet for almost half a century. But certainly, Cold War bipolarity is not the only historical context for a country's choice of neutrality. (Hospitaller Malta, for example, was neutral vis-à-vis European contending powers, a condition that would prove vital for the long-term sustainability of the island's autonomy, unique among Mediterranean islands with the exception of Cyprus.)
For one thing, what many non-Americans hope from the new American administration is an end to the tendency of laying down what the important international issues are, and then seeing the world in either-with-us-or-against-us terms. Although it was not the Obama administration's doing, it remains a fact that the most important states and groups currently at odds with the United States belong in the Islamic world, not just because of the 9/11 aftermath, but also because of America's steadfast backing of Israel under all circumstances. At the risk of sounding obvious to those of us domiciled here, half of the neighbouring countries that surround us are Muslim.
Sixteen years ago, one Samuel Huntington came out with the pugnacious thesis of an impending "clash of civilisations", in which he postulated that the Western world should brace itself for an almighty standoff with Islam, because the two civilisations are intrinsically and historically irreconcilable. Serious scholars have soundly debunked him. But it is not evident that policy makers in the US and certain of its Western allies did not subscribe to it at heart. Two years later it was Nato's Secretary General, the Belgian Willy Claes, who mouthed the opinion that, with the Soviet threat gone, the next threat facing the West was Islamic fundamentalism.
The fact that he was made to take back his words did not stop Nato strategists from proposing the scenario of a Euro-Mediterranean "arc of crisis" as fair game for Nato intervention. Groping for a substitute to the Soviet threat so as not to become redundant, they constructed this "arc" by combining the real or potential instability of certain Soviet and Yugoslav successor states with the chronic turmoil and instability in the Middle East and parts of north Africa.
Long before Osama Bin Laden's kamikazes flew into the Twin Towers, a new form of bipolarity was already being invented, quite possibly creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As for the specificity of Malta's neutrality, then, to write it off on the grounds that the Cold War ended long ago is to gloss over, not just the complexity of the contemporary international picture, both the geopolitical context in which it was developed. The East-West cold war was only one context - and not necessarily the most important - within which Malta's Labour government of the 1970s and 1980s developed the notion of neutrality. The other context was the Mediterranean area, with its dangerous multiple fractures along north-south lines, rendered more dangerous by the interference of powerful outsiders.
Arguably that was the only time that Malta had a foreign policy of its very own. Far from rendered irrelevant, that policy has been fully vindicated by later events. The biggest convert to the Mediterranean idea became the European Union itself, although that never quite registered with the most passionate Maltese Europeanists.
In that policy, "neutral" and "Mediterranean" were the defining words, to be read together. If Malta's neutrality appears to have lost its sheen, it is not because of diminished relevance, but because for a whole generation the Maltese Nationalist government has shown no more fervour for it than it has for the Mediterranean idea and the pursuit of an active, and profitable, foreign policy to match.