Charades about neutrality
On Monday, in parliament, the opposition poured scorn over the prime minister’s claim about his European Council vote for an increase in EU defence spending.
He said he did it only after negotiating a safeguard for Malta’s neutrality. You did nothing, the opposition retorted. A safeguard was negotiated during Malta’s accession talks a generation ago.
Robert Abela had to insist that he had done the negotiating. He wanted to ward off the charge of hypocrisy. He’d been accusing Roberta Metsola of being a warmonger; the president of the European Parliament has supported more defence spending.
The accusation was not minor. It was clearly part of Labour’s campaign for the EP election: the Nationalists are for war, Labour is for peace.
Did Abela really negotiate a “clarification” respecting Malta’s neutrality? There’s an easy way to find out.
To negotiate means to find a way through or around an obstacle; it is to obtain something in the face of initial resistance. It requires some back and forth. Is Abela ready to tell us that there was resistance from some quarters before he obtained what he demanded?
Names, please. Dark insinuations count for nothing when so much of your record has the odour of mendacity.
If, however, all Abela did was ask for a written clarification, which was given readily, then there was no negotiation. And he’s a hypocrite.
So what’s new? A display of political hypocrisy is all in a day’s work for many politicians. It’s just a passing storm in a teacup in Lilliput. More serious is the willingness to trade strategic vision and statesmanship for short-term electoral advantage.
An increase in EU defence spending is not, in itself, evidence of warmongering. On the contrary, if the EU becomes less dependent on the US for its defence, it becomes more capable of resisting participation in US military adventures that are not in the EU’s own interests.
That has to be in neutral Malta’s interests, even if we don’t participate in military operations ourselves.
There’s more. It’s naive to think that, down the road, there won’t be pressure on Malta to revise its constitution’s qualified pacifism – even if Malta’s participation in European military operations would be largely symbolic, given our size.
Abela’s charades on neutrality have a price. For electoral advantage, he suggests the opposition isn’t committed to it. But that actually weakens Malta’s hand in any (real) future negotiations with the other European partners. The appearance of internal division always does.
Result: the great leader portrays himself as the champion of Maltese neutrality, against the fifth columnists within, but undermines the position of future Maltese governments, perhaps even his own.
I doubt this is only a matter of a personal lack of strategic focus and statesmanship. The problem is more pervasive.
Take the open letter, published some weeks ago, criticising the possibility of Malta’s military participation in manoeuvres in the Red Sea. The operation, undertaken in the wake of Yemen’s Houthi attacks on international shipping, was criticised as violating Malta’s neutrality.
The letter was signed by people from across the NGO world. But the signature that should have raised eyebrows was that of a former president of the republic, Marie Louise Coleiro Preca.
The letter got our neutrality all wrong. We are neutral between states; the Houthis are a movement, not a State. Neutrality doesn’t come into it.
More importantly, Houthi fire has hit Malta-flagged shipping. Our neutrality doesn’t prevent us from acting in self-defence.
There are intricate legal issues here. One is Malta could be held liable for not doing all it can to protect ships that fly its flag. Another is that, even if there is no legal liability, not being seen to do enough could have an impact on our shipping register. Ship owners would have good reason to prefer states more ready to flex muscle.
(True, arguments can still be made against participating. It’s not legally certain the right of self-defence extends to commercial interests. But this argument has nothing to do with neutrality; it affects all states.)
Despite all this, a former president, who spent five years charged with protecting the constitution, got constitutional neutrality all wrong. More than wrong. She displays no sense of the issues lying just beneath the surface of the neutrality clause.
If the government replied to this open letter, clarifying the issues and defending its stance, I must have missed it.
Once more, I don’t think this is an issue of purely personal failing. It’s institutional. Our discourse about neutrality is powered by charades and posturing. We do not have an agreed set of articulated doctrines of what it means in today’s world – although it should not be difficult to spell them out and get bipartisan long-term agreement.
And, when the opportunity arises to clarify even a specific issue, it’s missed. It could be because we are institutionally incapable of giving a well-thought answer. More likely, it was just inconvenient to draw attention to criticism from representatives of Labour’s old left, when Abela needs those voters to go to the polls in June.
In short, when it matters, neutrality is not clarified. When it doesn’t matter, a charade of a defence of neutrality is staged, even though that play-acting might weaken Malta’s long-term ability to defend its neutrality.
No surprise there. When you lack a sense of State, when everything is calculated in terms of the next election and the damage you can inflict on your adversary, you are bound to undermine the State itself.
When you lack a sense of State, when everything is calculated in terms of the next election and the damage you can inflict on your adversary, you are bound to undermine the State itself