Freedom is not an empty space

In his 1972 masterpiece La Libertà, the Italian singer-songwriter Giorgio Gaber dismantled the modern obsession with “freedom from”. He argued that we often mistake liberty for the mere absence of constraints – a sort of vacuum where we can exist without being bothered. But as Gaber dryly observed, “La libertà non è star sopra un albero / non è neanche il volo di un moscone.” (Freedom is not sitting atop a tree/ Nor is it the flight of a blowfly). It sounds better in Italian, but then, everything does.

Today, as we navigate a world defined by shifting hegemonies and local fractures, Gaber’s warning feels less like a song and more like a diagnosis: freedom is not a space; freedom is participation.

The first threat to this participation is the chilling return of superpower imperialism.

On the global stage, liberty is increasingly treated as a commodity to be exported or a border to be defended.

Whether through economic coercion or kinetic warfare, the freedom offered by global powers often looks like a choice between two different brands of compliance.

In this imperial vacuum, we have retreated into a passive liberty.

We are free only in the sense that we are permitted to buzz within the partisan, digital and economic frameworks provided for us, so long as we do not challenge the architecture itself.

We have become the blowflies of the modern age, mistaking the vastness of the digital cage for the open sky.

This global passivity finds its mirror in our local anxieties.

In Malta, the suffocating grip of tribal politics has reduced freedom to a zero-sum game of ‘us versus them’.

Here, participation is no longer about the collective good or the pursuit of truth; it is about the fortification of the party identity.

We become spectators of our own governance, shouting from the sidelines- Omar Grech

We have perfected the art of the cheerleader while letting the muscles of the citizen atrophy.

Gaber described aptly the persons we have become “who hold the right to cast a vote… Yet spend a lifetime delegating. And in the act of being led… Have found their own new liberty”.

This local tribalism is a microcosm of the broader European populist turn. Across the continent, freedom is increasingly defined by exclusion – the height of a wall or the purity of a passport.

By retreating into the tribe, we satisfy a primitive urge for belonging, but we sacrifice the messy, expansive participation that Gaber insisted was the only true form of liberty. We have traded the exhausting, noble difficulty of being independent citizens for the narrow, numbing comfort of being followers.

The cost of this trade is the slow death of the public square. When we stop engaging in the difficult work of building a society together, we don’t become freer; we simply become more isolated. We become spectators of our own governance, shouting from the sidelines while the mechanisms of power – be they in Valletta, Brussels, or Washington –turn without us.

True liberty requires us to step down from the tree of detached observation, leave the comfort of the tribal camp, and enter the fray. It is not an abstract right to be granted by a state or a superpower; it is an action to be performed daily.

It holds true of individuals, communities and nation-states. Without the anchor of communal responsibility, our cry for freedom becomes a demand for total detachment – the right to exist in the world without being responsible to it.

We find our predicament echoed in the words of Shakespeare’s most famous cynic, who demanded a liberty that was as vast as the atmosphere, yet just as untethered to the earth:

“I must have liberty

Withal, as large a charter as the wind,

To blow on whom I please.” – As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7.

Was Shakespeare referring to some contemporaneous presidents or prime ministers? 

Omar Grech is an associate professor of international law at the University of Malta.