Europe without straitjacket

One recurring theme in this column is that history is on nobody's side. I said this on February 2 of last year. I dedicated to it the last two pieces of 2009. History is on nobody's side. If anything, history proved that Nikita Khrushchev was evidently wrong when, in 1956, he asserted that history was on his side, warning the US and its allies that the Soviet Union and its own allies would bury them.

History proved that Francis Fukuyama was also evidently wrong when, in 1989, he announced that the ideology the so-called "West" claims to stand for, would now preside over the burial of all other world-views that dared contest its moral and factual supremacy. The Return Of History And The End Of Dreams (2008), the title of the 2008 book by none less than a signatory of the 1998 New American Century Project, Robert Kagan, says it all. Palfrey's question to Ned in le Carré's 1989 The Russia House: "So is it ending or beginning?" says more.

What about our own Joe Friggieri's 1994 assertion that history was on the side of the winners of the 1987 and 1992 elections? That the Nationalist's absence from government in 1971-1987 had been an aberrant but temporary deviation from the true course of our history, a history that begins in Europe and is destined to return to it? That the PN represented more or less the same Geist that in Fukuyama's view expressed the non plus ultra of history? Was Prof. Friggieri wrong?

Well, if Fukuyama today were to read what my old friend Joe wrote in 1994 he would certainly advise him to thread more carefully. The first decade of the 21st century broke the spell of ideological constructs of our making. One such construct is that of the one true course of history. History has no one true course, which enables us to interpret events as predetermined stages along the way or as temporary departures from or inevitable returns to the one way.

Paradoxically, in the same 1994 text where Prof. Friggieri attempts to situate the PN in the universal scheme of things - thus anointing Eddie Fenech Adami's 1987-1992 and 1992-1996 Administrations as governments by the Grace of History ruling by virtue of a Historical Right (modes of legitimation akin to the Grace of God and the Divine Right of Kings) - he also introduces his readers to Lyotard's notion of "metanarrative". The grand narrative Prof. Friggieri invokes, and therein lies the paradox, is the typical "metanarrative apparatus of legitimation" dismissed by Lyotard and post-modern philosophy as an obsolete and increasingly ineffective tool with which ruling groups endeavour to create consensus for their own power.

At the national elections after the publication of Prof. Friggieri's article, 136,360 voters - as against 124,864 - were evidently unconvinced that the PN was the Geist of history incarnate. You may of course insist that an increasing number of citizens (3,068 more than in 1992) were too stupid to understand that tolerating Nationalist arrogance (it had, you will recall, reached intolerable levels) was an acceptable price to pay for the satisfaction of being ruled by a party that had history on its side.

Specific political outcomes, however, can only be satisfactorily explained in terms of concrete events and processes, not of abstract transcendental grand narratives. Only concrete analyses can explain why the PN won a majority of votes in 1966, 1981, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2003, 2008, and why the MLP obtained majorities in 1971, 1976 and 1996. Why the PN's percentage of votes has been decreasing and that of the MLP increasing (1998 PN 51.81, MLP 46.97; 2003 PN 51.79, MLP 47.51; 2008 PN 49.34, MLP 48.79). Only a concrete analysis can explain why Joseph Muscat's party won 54.77 per cent of valid first-count votes and Lawrence Gonzi's 40.49 at the 2009 European elections.

Prof. Friggieri seals his 1994 narrative with an idyllic idea of Europe. His idea - indeed most of the ideas of Europe that in those years we hurled at each other like rocks - remind me of Orham Pamuk's essay Where Is Europe? "For people like me," he writes, "who live on the edge of Europe [...], Europe has figured always as a dream, a vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared; a goal to achieve or a danger." Warning us that in the periphery of Europe (where the "first rule [...] is that everyone must take a side") one tends not to refer to the real Europe but to one's idea or "dream" of Europe, Pamuk argues that the "Europe that figures in all such propositions is a place of all-or-nothing."

Some will object that whereas the Nobel laureate lives on the outside of sthe edge of Europe, lucky we live on the inside. That although we joined the EU six years ago, we have always belonged to that culture that lies on the right (Christian ?) side of the bastion that separates us from the "other" world. It is thanks to these that "walls" are possible. They are, I suspect, the same good souls who were scandalised at my suggestion that some of the more strident advocates of EU membership had a strikingly Levantine idea (as "place of all-or-nothing") of the real Europe that I (and Joe) love. They are the same ones who are scandalised when the real Europe refuses to be straitjacketed by their provincial idea of it. Hopefully, these too will one day free themselves and become real Europeans.

Dr Vella blogs at watersbroken.wordpress.com.