<i>Bongu Malta Ewropea!</i>

Malta woke up yesterday morning after a very bright new day had dawned - the first day of Malta as a fully-fledged member of the European Union.

We have come a long way from Bongu Malta Socjalista days, when Malta became party to a secret treaty with Kim Il-Sung's North Korea and what was left of our University conferred honorary degrees to what was left of dictatorship in Europe, the likes of Madame Ceausescu.

Our Prime Minister does not need to prove his mettle or our country's worth by visiting Pyongyang to be greeted by some 200-strong male Korean choir singing "Ma taghmlu xejn mal-Perit Mintoff" in Maltese. He just attends EU meetings where Malta is at par with another 24 sovereign European states: old friends, old enemies and even our old colonial power.

For this is the real political significance of Malta's EU membership.

Many young people today, of course, do not see it this way. I don't blame them. As a young boy, I never quite understood what my mother used to say about her wartime experiences, as I had not lived through them. Yet today's European Union is also a response to so many centuries of European infighting: a bold move by the EU's founding fathers - Schuman, Adenauer and De Gasperi - who believed that the different European peoples could make a better living if they were to co-operate in peace rather than trying to subdue each other by war.

For those of my age, for whom the cold war was a "constant" state of affairs and who remember all the Mintoff antics that made Malta the laughing-stock of Europe and of the free world, Malta's EU membership has another significance. More so as Malta has joined the EU together with eight countries that were on the other side of the now defunct Iron Curtain.

As a young student, way back in 1966, two years after Malta attained political independence, I wanted to know what there was on the other side of the curtain. Seeing is believing, I thought. So with two friends, I made my way to Vienna and then somehow travelled through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and then back home via Greece - a veritably bold enterprise in those days. The most vivid recollection I still have to this day comes from travelling by boat down the Danube from Vienna to Budapest.

This trip meant that the boat had to pass through that part of the river where the Danube also served as the Czech frontier - my first glimpse of the Iron Curtain. Incredibly, I did see an "iron curtain" that was hardly metaphoric. The river bank on the Czech side had a barbed-wire fence along it and every so often there was a rudimentary timber watch tower with a machine-gun armed sentry at the top, just like one sees in films depicting concentration camps. It did not take me too long to decide on which side I was!

Today this trip down the Danube can be made by any Maltese citizen without a passport, let alone the visas and the countless filling up of forms of those days. Communism has been wiped off the European map by the onslaught of history egged on by man's yearning for the freedom that is rightfully his as a human being.

Malta's entry into the EU has been delayed by some curious accidents of history but our joining the EU with the first batch of countries from what was the Warsaw Pact area is, perhaps unwittingly, also an interesting irony of fate.

The past is now dead and buried, but never to be forgotten. Malta looks forward to a new chapter of its chequered history when it will be sharing the 'European' dream with so many other peoples, all looking forward to live in peace and improve their quality of life and their standard of living - the economic significance of Malta's EU membership. For the European Union speaks of solidarity and practises it by aiding those countries and those regions that are relatively backward so that they might make it to a better level in a much shorter time than they could possibly do on their own.

Some days ago, I was talking to a friend who wanted to know how I see Malta's future relations with the European Union. I replied that there is no such thing. We cannot have 'relations' (in the strict sense of the word) with the European Union for the very simple reason that we are part of the EU. We will continue to have relations with the other member states of the EU, albeit in a very different way and within very different parameters than hitherto, but that is something else.

Will we live to realise that Malta's EU membership was another important watershed in our history? That is the same question that was made when we became independent 40 years ago. There were then the uncertainties but also the expectations that there are today. In spite of all the stupid things that happened and the mistakes made in these 40 years, today nobody doubts that it was the right step to take.

I firmly believe that this will also be the case with our EU membership, more so, as at the end of the day, it will actually depend on us whether EU membership will prove the boon that many are expecting it to be.

Michael Falzon, a former minister, is a Nationalist Party candidate for the European Parliament.