“If I were Italian,” Margaret Thatcher once remarked, having just been outfoxed by the infinitely cunning Giulio Andreotti, “I wouldn’t mind being ruled by Brussels.”
Many Maltese who voted for EU membership in 2003 didn’t mind our politicians being ruled – or, at least, overruled – by Brussels, either. As far as they were concerned, any power transferred from Malta to Brussels made membership more attractive.
Now that the Union is once more inviting an open discussion of its future, it’s worth revisiting a couple of futures we envisioned a generation ago.
Not the least of the ironies of 17 years of membership is that, while many of those who voted against membership now see it as a good thing, many of those who championed membership now publicly proclaim they feel let down by the European Commission and Parliament.
The twin change in sentiment is no coincidence. The referendum on EU membership was sharp-fought but there was one assumption that was broadly shared by voters on both sides of the divide. The assumption turned out to be wrong, pleasing some and displeasing others.
Those who wanted to stay out believed that “Brussels” would represent a new form of colonialism, bossing us on what we could and couldn’t do. A version of that view was shared by a segment of voters who wanted to join the EU precisely for that reason.
Despite what they were told by the politicians urging a Yes vote – that member-ship would preserve our sovereignty over our own affairs – they voted for membership in the belief that it would free them of the shackles of Maltese politics.
The alarmist warnings from Alfred Sant’s Labour Party did not come true. The promise of a tailor-made partnership deal with the EU sounded glib then and, after the grinding Brexit negotiations, looks like pure fantasy now.
Malta has done well out of membership. Under Lawrence Gonzi, new economic sectors were developed. Malta was obviously hit by the global Great Recession of 2008 but the Central Bank’s own figures show that, by 2010, the economy was well on the path to recovery.
EU membership made too many – crooks and their victims – feel safe
Part of the reason was that Sant’s general idea – of using our laws to weave and duck tactically to exploit EU rules – could be deployed within the EU (indeed, more effectively). Membership could be exploited as a commodity for non-members – from corporate tax to passport sales.
It was not just an exploitation of legal loopholes. We have also exploited the consultative and formally egalitarian nature of the EU, which makes it slow to deliberate and act, out of concern for dialogue and precedent.
The EU’s indecisiveness and consultative nature are flip sides of the same coin. In 2003, Labour was wrong about the EU’s overbearing political nature. A decade later, Joseph Muscat could exploit what he knew about the process to fight off the Commission’s first attempt to block his passport sales. And, as a former MEP, he knew the extent to which he could afford to ignore the European Parliament.
It’s this indecisiveness and the proper concern for national competence that have disappointed a significant segment of Maltese who voted for membership. They always fondly thought that, despite everything they were told or could have learned for themselves, EU membership would limit the abuses of Maltese politicians and, indeed, overrule them even in matters where the Commission and the EP have no competence.
It was a powerful illusion. It led many voters to think that, having joined the EU, we could do away with caring about politics. We’d still have general elections, of course, but people could vote, abstain, change partisan allegiance, without it making much difference since, in the end, EU membership would limit the abuses of Maltese politicians.
It was an illusion stemming from several causes. One was that, for many people, the memory of how Maltese politics could go badly wrong was fading. Whatever else you say about the quarter-century of almost uninterrupted government by the Nationalist Party, it was a period of unprecedented political stability.
Next, the idea of how politics could fail was too narrow. Even today, many of the government’s critics speak of the country “going back to the 1980s”. No, it’s not. It’s failing in a different way and in an entirely different world.
Finally, there was a lot of justified anger against the PN. Post-1996, it was always ready to bubble up. Within a year of the euphoria following the victory of the EU referendum vote, thanks to PN leadership, the party was punished at the first EP elections.
This anger may have been justified but it fed a fantasy that politics, in itself, was the country’s illness, which could be cured by technocracy or by waving a magic wand and setting up an instant, new electoral force. But some issues are irreducibly political, you need political parties to resolve them and it takes at least a generation (with lots of luck) to build a new political force.
The fantasies are still alive. The illusion of the EU as overruler is in every complaint that it should have “intervened” on passport sales, or corruption and so on. The illusion of the EU as safety net is there in the belief that, no matter the sleaze, it’s not dangerous.
The illusion of technocracy as cure-all is there every time someone fondly imagines that a political party can split and return as an electoral force within five years. Or that its split would encourage a similar break-up in its opponent when, in fact, the prospect of permanent government encourages cohesion to share in the spoils.
EU membership made too many – crooks and their victims – feel safe.
Safety bred complacency.
Complacency bred recklessness.