A recent BBC radio programme addressed Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination and what it reveals about Malta. In that hushed observer’s voice usually associated with wildlife programming (“now, we can see the cheetah watching the zebra”), the presenter told the World Service listeners about “the two Maltas” all around him.
We shouldn’t blame Tim Whewell. He had plenty of interviewees to shore up that view. One told him that, essentially, Caruana Galizia’s mourners upheld British values of rule of law, while Joseph Muscat’s electoral victory in June was owed to the masses with a ‘Mediterranean mentality’ (as though there’s only one). One of Muscat’s supporters described Malta as divided between circa 5,000 snobs and the rest.
Once Whewell had his theory, he ran with it. In introducing an interview with a local Labour politician from Gudja, he remarked how in Malta even local feasts are polarised. The implication was clear: the two Maltas had parallels at local community level, and they ran deep back in time.
That remark should make the rest of us pause. It’s laughable to suggest that public disagreements about Caruana Galizia’s murder has anything remotely to do with divisions over village feasts. Perhaps we should also pause long enough to question the idea that there are two Maltas.
Why two? Why not three, four or 17?
There’s not doubt that there is a strong temptation to think in polarities. Caruana Galizia herself wrote about the two Maltas. So did Lou Bondì back in his days as a journalist. But that tells us something about thought styles, not about the facts on the ground.
The thought style leads you to say: you either loved Caruana Galizia or you hated her. The facts on the ground say there were many people, perhaps the majority, who viewed her with ambivalence.
For example they admired her for her courage, but had reservations about what they considered her over-the-top judgements. They respected her forensic intelligence in seeing the pattern within a mass of detail, but were baffled at how she could sometimes insist on what was plainly, factually mistaken.
The thought style leads you to say: either you were shocked at the assassination or you thought Caruana Galizia had it coming. Either you mourned or you cackled at her death. The facts on the ground say that those positions are not simple opposites. They are situated on a range.
Whether you say one party was liberal, and the other authoritarian, or that both were or are authoritarian, you will still end up with lots of loose ends
Between the deranged celebrants and the mourners denouncing the authorities, there are those who regret her assassination but think she had it coming; those who are shocked but do not mourn her; and those who mourn but cannot see why the police or anyone else is being blamed before the court cases are over.
The thought style says there are two political Maltas: one truly liberal, the other instinctively authoritarian. The facts on the ground show that, from 1992 on, Maltese general elections have seen massive shifts in votes (many of them under the radar, because votes moving in different directions cancelled each other out). The 2013 election result was an acceleration of a trend, not a complete break with past behaviour.
Not only that. Voting behaviour has tended to be patterned along gender lines and age-groups, not just socio-economic categories. For a long time, the majority of the youngest and oldest voters preferred the Nationalist Party; but the middle-aged cohorts with young families preferred Labour. Women tended to prefer Labour over the Nationalists.
Some of those truisms have changed since 2013. But it doesn’t matter whether you take the old truisms, or the post-2013 ones, or both together. To make that range of behaviour fit into two and only two Maltas, you have to distort the world to fit what your mind says it must be like, rather than stretch your mind to understand the world.
Whether you say one party was liberal, and the other authoritarian, or that both were or are authoritarian, you will still end up with lots of loose ends. The fact is there is a wide range of attitudes to authority in Malta. In some cases, individual attitudes change in the course of a lifetime. You cannot fit a broad range into two neat boxes.
Maybe all these people in the middle of the range are mistaken. Maybe their ‘moderation’ is misguided because sometimes voicing anger and loudly denouncing wrong is needed.
Maybe they were wrong to be ambivalent about Caruana Galizia, and wrong to have switched parties (or not to have switched), and wrong not to support the right political cause for the right reasons. But all that is irrelevant.
The issue is whether they hold such positions, not whether they are right or wrong to do so. The point is that such variegated attitudes exist. The issue is whether Malta’s social and political attitudes can be explained by dividing the country up into two neat categories, or whether the country is more complex.
Nor is this merely an ‘academic’ point. The idea of ‘two Maltas’ is not used merely as a handy description. It’s being used politically to explain our times: why things are the way they are.
If the description is wrong, then the explanation is mistaken as well. It means you still haven’t begun to understand the two most significant events of 2017: Muscat’s electoral victory and Caruana Galizia’s assassination.
Muscat’s electoral success has everything to do with recognising there are more than two Maltas. If journalists and the commentariat were to do the same, they would have a better idea if the forces shaping the country and its future.
The fact that Caruana Galizia herself believed in ‘two Maltas’ shouldn’t change things. She was at her very best when her strong intuitions were disciplined by the facts. Let that be her legacy for Malta’s investigative journalists and commentariat in 2018 and beyond.
Well, that and her courage, resilience and backbone.
ranierfsadni@europe.com