Recently, the CEO of Henley and Partners said that Maltese passports had become a must-have among the global super-rich. Christian Kalin told Bloomberg that “if you have a yacht and two airplanes, the next thing to get is a Maltese passport… it’s the latest status symbol”.
On Thursday, the Parliamentary Secretary for Digital Cleverness Silvio Schembri said that Malta was “a cosmopolitan city in which artificial intelligence (AI) companies could test their products in a real-life scenario”.
I don’t know what that means, but maybe Sophia the Robot, who was sitting next to Schembri, did. Certainly, she looked happy enough. As well she might, because Malta it seems is set to become a global AI hub. Good news for Sophia, then, also because I imagine dolls must get tired of human overtures at times.
These two vignettes have at least one thing in common. Both refer to Malta as the centre of something much bigger, namely the world. In both cases, surprisingly so. I would have thought, for example, that places like Japan and the Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds had stronger claims as android capitals.
Japan has a legacy of technological brilliance generally and lifelike androids specifically, and it was in La Chaux-de-Fonds that the Jaquet-Droz family built three magnificent automata in the 1770s. Still, Malta it is.
On passports, too, my (limited, admittedly) acquaintance with the global super-rich suggests to me that the yacht and two airplanes would be followed in the covet-order by a private island, a Picasso, and a bigger yacht. Instead, Maltese passport it is in third place.
Maybe it’s just me, but my antennae have a habit of twitching uncontrollably every time ‘Malta’ and ‘centre’ are conjoined. Take the Mediterranean. The region has in many ways and on many occasions been represented as one of the world’s key cultural and political stomping grounds. At Helsinki, in 1973, Mintoff campaigned against the odds to establish the Mediterranean as an essential player in European peace and security affairs.
You might say that the sale of citizenship, too, is a marginal activity, in the sense that it inhabits the fringes of what is legally, politically and morally legitimate
It makes sense to think and talk a region you happen to be at the centre of. As Harry Luke put it, “if anything shaped as differently from a circle as the Mediterranean can be said to have a centre, that centre is Malta”. By that logic, no amount of geopolitical and geometrical imagination is too much if it leaves you at the centre of the action.
There are, however, two things. First, the placing of places at the centre is not always a delusion of locals. Harry Luke was not Maltese, neither was the Italian archaeologist Luigi Ugolini, who in 1934 called Malta “la perla del Mediterraneo” (the jewel of the Mediterranean). In the latter case, the idea of a gem so central and brilliant that it could be seen from Sicily on clear days, dovetailed very neatly with Italian politics at the time.
Second, there are centres and centres. At times, it pays to operate at the margins, particularly if those margins are figurative. Take blockchain. We’re told that one of Malta’s newfound vocations is for it to become the blockchain centre of the world. We were once assured we were on the verge of becoming a bridge between civilisations and a hub of world thinking, among other things, but never mind. Let’s assume the best.
If what I’ve been told about blockchain is accurate, it’s a technology that will make the marginal more possible than ever before. Money transactions, for example, will no longer have to be routed through banks or overseen by a meddlesome taxman. It’s no accident that John McAfee, who was in Malta proselytising about blockchain the other day, is a libertarian.
You might say that the sale of citizenship, too, is a marginal activity, in the sense that it inhabits the fringes of what is legally, politically and morally legitimate. I’m not necessarily saying it’s wrong – indeed I confess I have a certain tenderness for the marginal. I’m just saying it’s at the edge.
Now it happens not to be the first time in Malta’s history that the edge has paid dividends. The book of clichés tells us that Valletta is a city built by gentlemen. It doesn’t always tell us that quite a few of those gentlemen were corsairs, whose income came from being very nasty to passing ships. The Knights figured that, given that there was a margin, it paid to be in the thick of it.
McAfee, the star guest of a government who proceeded to tell that government that it would become obsolete, would have made an excellent corsair. He sums up my argument, which is that the edge is the land of milk and honey.
Thus the blockchain capital of the world, and the global allure of a Maltese passport. It may be that Malta has given up trying to be the centre of the centre. Instead, it has discovered that the sunniest place to be is at the centre of the edge.
mafalzon@hotmail.com
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece