The choice we gave up

Twenty-three years ago, the argument over EU membership was, whatever else it was, an argument about choice. Malta stood at a fork, and everyone knew it. We would decide whether to align our economy and our society with Europe’s, or not. People disagreed about which road to take. Nobody disagreed that a road was being chosen.

Today, unremarkably, opinions have shifted. What is remarkable is how much of our politics now proceeds as though there is no road left to choose. There is only the one we are already on. We may choose only to travel faster or slower.

Consider the strange reversal in how we now see our relationship with Europe. Economically, we used to want to catch up. Now, we are told – with league tables pointed out to us – that we have overtaken Europe: our growth rate, our employment figures, our GDP-per-capita comparisons are wheeled out not as modest achievements but as proof of a superior model, one Europe might do well to copy. (Indeed, as prime minister Joseph Muscat once did offer Malta as a model to follow for the European Socialists.)

Culturally, the reversal runs the other way. Once, Europe stood for openness, and joining it meant modernising. Now a good many Maltese fear we are simply following Europe down a road we didn’t choose – losing, rather than finding, a country, as migration and rapid demographic change reshape a small island faster than most of its residents can absorb.

Put the two together: something odd emerges. On the economy, we tell ourselves we are leading. On culture, we tell ourselves we are unwillingly following. But, in both cases, the same conviction underwrites the argument: that there is no real alternative.

Growth must continue on its current trajectory because “there is no alternative” to tourism at this scale, construction at this pace, a population rising toward some number that Vision 2050 does not discuss. And cultural change, likewise, is treated as an unstoppable tide. It is arrestable only by some hard swerve nobody is proposing.

Agency has gone missing from both halves of the national conversation.

This is also the real story of Maltese electoral politics. Labour keeps winning by making a narrow, disciplined argument: whatever you dislike about the present model, changing course now would be reckless and the PN lacks the experience to manage the risk. It is an argument about competence and it has worked repeatedly.

But the PN’s attacks have landed too – recovering votes and persuading even others who could not, however, bring themselves to vote for it. The PN’s arguments focus on institutions – on whether public services can keep pace with the money flowing through the country, on whether decisions are made democratically or simply announced, on whether the gains are shared or, rather, the profits privatised while the costs are socialised.

The question voters increasingly ask isn’t simply whether Malta is richer. It’s whether Malta still governs its own future, or is merely administering an outcome decided elsewhere, by market forces or cronies or sheer momentum.

The question voters ask isn’t simply whether Malta is richer. It’s whether Malta still governs its own future- Ranier Fsadni

The claim that Malta has found a genuinely superior economic model deserves more scepticism than it gets. Spain, Ireland and Blair’s Britain all lived through long booms in which growth seemed to vindicate every political choice attached to it. Each, in hindsight, had built its boom on assumptions – property inflation, cheap credit, unusually favourable global conditions – that eventually gave way.

Malta may prove the exception. But “our GDP is growing” is not, by itself, an argument for exceptionalism. It is only a fact. The real question is whether the current growth is building something durable or simply postponing a reckoning.

Nor is this an argument for choosing quality of life over prosperity. The two are not opposed camps requiring a pledge of allegiance. Falling affluence corrodes democracies but failing democracies eventually corrode economies too.

An economy needs the same things a society does: trust, functioning institutions and residents – Maltese and foreign-born alike – who feel some stake in the place. Without a sense of shared destiny, there is no cohesion.

A country that treats its thousands of foreign workers as inputs, rather than workers and neighbours with dignity, dehumanises itself, not just the people it exploits. It undermines its own social cohesion.

Health, education, security and welfare are not consumption items competing with growth for the same euro. They are what makes growth organic rather than extractive. It is the difference between a real country, something to love, and a gold mine, something to exploit.

Two small, telling examples.

Tourism was once a way of introducing the world to Malta. It has become a project of reorganising Malta around the world’s visitors. Our lives need to navigate around over-intensive tourism – and not just restaurant tables in the street, either.

Yet, the numbers cannot be questioned without the questioner being accused of doubting the economy itself – at least to go by the tourism minister’s objections to an editorial in this newspaper.

Then, there are population projections.

The finance minister projects a population of 800,000 by 2040 on current trends. The prime minister offers no real answer, rational or otherwise – except denial. When a question goes not just unanswered but uncountenanced, it usually means the honest answer is unwelcome. The finance minister tactfully says he has nothing more to add.

Democracies rarely lose confidence all at once, at the ballot box. They lose it gradually, when questions become taboos and trade-offs become things that are simply not discussed.

Malta’s task now is not to pick a side between growth and identity. It is to remember that both were always meant to be choices – and to start making them again.