It was not a bad day’s work. Owen Bonnici, as culture minister, last week paid a visit to Valletta 2018’s Dutch counterparts to persuade them to participate in V18. He left them with the impression that he, as justice minister, didn’t understand the first thing about free speech.

The Dutch began the public discussion by believing the problem was essentially V18’s chair, Jason Micallef, especially comments he passed that parodied Daphne Caruana Galizia’s last published words. The Dutch, however, ended by all but saying that Malta did not enjoy what Europeans take for granted when it comes to protection of free speech.

They said Micallef’s behaviour generally – with respect to the Caruana Galizia memorial and commemorative banners – was inhibiting public dialogue. So they will continue to boycott V18 because there’s no point celebrating culture and the arts with a country that doesn’t share the same basic democratic culture.

On his part, Bonnici strongly implied that it’s the Dutch who don’t understand freedom of speech. When he insisted that he could never curtail anyone’s freedom of speech, including Micallef’s, he virtually said that the Dutch were asking him to violate someone’s fundamental right.

So, who’s right? As we shall see, both.

On one detail, the Dutch got it wrong. They said that by parodying “The situation is desperate” – Caruana Galizia’s last published words – while pointing out the celebrating crowd on St Patrick’s Day, Micallef was legitimising her assassination.

This is an overstretched interpretation. Context is all. It’s clear that Micallef was mocking not Caruana Galizia but the government’s critics who keep repeating those last words. He accused them of being desperate that the general mood in Malta is upbeat despite their arguments.

Micallef was callous and offensive. He was culpably careless and stupid in saying something that, it was easy to predict, would attract the negative international publicity that V18 can little afford. But he was not legitimising an assassination. He was saying that protestors are hysterical.

Freedom of speech protects the right to give offence and to prove yourself a right royal idiot. So are the Dutch completely wrong?

No, because they got the broad issue right. They are defending the European standard of free speech protection. What Bonnici was defending is something else.

Free speech can be traced back to two different ancient rights. One is the equal right to participate in public discussion. In classical Athens, this right was there to protect not the powerful general, Pericles, but the poor (who were even given a subsidy so that they could afford to attend the long debates).

The second right was the freedom to speak your own mind frankly, without fear. It was there not to protect the powerful Demosthenes but the persistent gadfly, like Socrates, who irritated the crowd.

Free speech is there to promote equality between the powerful and less powerful, not to consolidate the inequality that already exists

In other words, the right to free speech is linked to the idea of speech as action. Through speech, we participate in public life, change minds, cause some things to happen, others to be stopped. Because it is action speech can energise and mobilise, it can hurt and offend. To curtail speech curtails the freedom to act with some and against others.

Free speech is also linked to the idea of levelling the playing field between the powerful and the less powerful – making the freedom to act a real right, not just a theoretical one. It is there to protect individuals against powerful men with the platform and muscle of the state at their disposal. It is there to protect individuals against the crowd (including, today, the organised Facebook Rottweiler packs).

This background explains the liberties of and limits to free speech. It must include the right to offend, however deplorable giving offence might be. Otherwise even the truth can be repressed in the name of not giving offence.

Hate speech goes beyond the limits not because it’s super offensive but because it threatens to create a climate that endangers the freedom of action of others – by making certain groups of people fearful of public participation or speaking their minds.

It’s therefore ridiculous to invoke free speech when it involves what a high official has said, using his state-given megaphone and platform to attract attention. Given such an official’s connections and resources, what he says has a force beyond that of him as an individual.

Moreover, it is hypocritical to define him purely as an individual, when the attention he attracts, and the meaning of what he says, comes from his official institutional post. To contradict him carries risks that contradicting an ordinary individual does not.

Given his official post, if he mocks a group of people, his mockery has a meaning and force – it is official mockery – that can inhibit others from exercising their freedom of speech.

This is true even if what he says would be protected speech if uttered by an individual who does not occupy high public office. Free speech is there to promote equality between the powerful and less powerful, not to consolidate the inequality that already exists.

The Dutch explained to Bonnici that they weren’t asking him to curtail Micallef’s right to free speech. They were asking the government to assume its own responsibility. Keeping him on means backing him: agreeing to give him a megaphone and a force to his views that they otherwise would not have.

If the government keeps backing him, it shows it doesn’t care enough about equal access to the public forum, the only environment that can pro-mote an egalitarian culture of public dialogue.

And, if the Maltese government doesn’t care that much about such a basic condition of democracy, then the Dutch don’t care that much about co-celebrating Valletta as a capital of culture.

However, just because the Dutch expressed the European logic behind the protection of free speech, it doesn’t mean Bonnici’s views don’t have a logic of their own.

On the contrary, they are of a piece with other developments. The notion of common good and public property is fading away; we’ve got to the stage where we can almost only conceive of a multiplicity of private interests.

The State is being taken over by private interests and clientalism. Inequality in practice is rising rapidly despite greater equality on paper.

Against such a background, it makes sense to think of public officials as private individuals, with more clout than others, having arguments in which they represent no one but themselves.

So Bonnici, too, was right. But next time he really must speak more clearly.

Oh, and he should remind the Dutch that, if we are going to go all the way back to classical Greece, the Athenians did in the end condemn Socrates to death. That didn’t make Athens any less a perennial capital of culture, did it?

ranierfsadni@europe.com