Identity Malta

I recently chanced upon an essay written some 15 years ago on the subject identity and nationalism and how the relationship between the two can be applied to Malta.

The author interviewed a few Maltese historians, tracing out two schools of thought, each following strict party lines. Nationalist historians would write the history of a people – in this case the Maltese people – and Labour historians would write the history of the people – a social history.

He quoted Peter Serracino Inglott’s observation, made in 1988, that the Maltese were a nation with two views of the world. Probably, the two examples that can illustrate this are Henry Frendo’s and Oliver Friggieri’s Malta: Culture and Identity and Alfred Sant’s 28 ta’ April 1958: IlHobz u l-Helsien, both of 1988.

The Nationalists sought to use history to establish the identity of the Maltese people; the Labourites sought in history the justifications to reform society in order to bring about social justice.

The passport selling telenovela, with its latest Puttinu instalment, can be understood in this context. Joseph Muscat took a leaf out of the Nationalists’ book, namely the abstraction of Malta’s identity, and concretised it into a money-spinning contraption, ‘Identity Malta’.

For the Nationalists, Malta’s identity was a process, its roots sunk deeply in the past to draw the nutrients for the leaves and branches to grow in the future.

For Joseph Muscat, that identity was something to be monetised and sold.

What for the Nationalists had almost a quality of Hegelian ‘spirituality’, for Dr Muscat was nothing more than an intangible asset useful for making money, apparently on many levels, an unashamedly materialist approach.

This was the critique the Nationalists levelled at Dr Muscat, but it seems not to have struck the right chords with the electorate that the Nationalists had expected.

So why did Dr Muscat use the passport money for Puttinu?

He didn’t need to take €5 million from the passport fund. As a matter of fact, his Finance Minister saw it as illogical and even wrote on Facebook that the money came from government funds.