The historian Yuval Harari asserts that the next huge political issue will be whether we will choose the global or the local. As he puts it, we will have to choose between uniting humanity and nationalisms. Not left or right anymore.
I have always thought of myself as an internationalist communitarian in contrast to a nationalistic individualist. Consequently, I support endeavours such as the United Nations and the EU.
With all its history and shortcomings, Christianity has one aspect in its multidimensional arrangement that is very interesting to the political scholar. Christianity is basically an internationalist and communitarian movement. It had its holy wars, infighting and schisms but it spread and survived. It evolved. It became more reformist, through Western Protestantism, and, concurrently, it remained more conventional, through Eastern Orthodoxy.
What is interesting from a political perspective is its ability to influence the fate of mankind. Consider concepts like human rights, healthcare, public education and the common good. At the basis of this endurance is its aptitude to decentralise its activities using subsidiarity as its ordinary administrative tool and solidarity as an extraordinary tool.
So, while I concur with Harari about the next human challenge, I believe the fate of humanity will be decided by politicians who can understand the importance of how ‘glocality’ works. Hence, having communities deciding their common good within a framework of an even wider common good. As I state in my book Reflections about the Common Good, politics ultimately ought to aim towards this common good.
Now, socialism is normally associated with ‘class struggle’ and not with the common good. Yet, Robert Blatchford was an English patriot and a socialist who preached cooperation for the common good. He was also a man who understood that politics was about people actively making their own culture and sense of identity. He summed up his politics with the comment: “we were Britons first and Socialists next.”
In Malta, Labour has been historically and factually wary of internationalism, seeing it mainly as foreign interference. It now acknowledges formally the necessity of internationalism but with latent and, sometimes, ostensible reluctance. On the contrary, the PN, from Eddie Fenech Adami onwards, was always more open to the rest of the world.
In Britain, socialism was inseparable from love of country. In Malta as well, Mintoffianism had a nationalistic tang. Similarly, Roger Scruton’s conservatism translated itself into the common life and inheritance that belongs to the people and which grows out of everyday life. Not in internationalism. Home meant customs, lifestyles, language, neighbourhoods and landscapes.
However, it also meant generations which have been, and, those to come, the history of a country and the collective memories of its citizens.
The PN was always more open to the world- Alan Xuereb
Scruton argued that the binding principle of society is born in the ordinary life of friendship, family, community and love of place. He believed the market has a destructive effect on human settlement. He saw global capitalism as a “kind of brigandage in which costs are transferred to future generations for the sake of rewards here and now”.
This concept of ‘rights of future generations’ is also a rights-based argument against abortion. I see a philosophical contradiction between the fact that we all agree to protect the rights of the unconceived but then disagree about the protection of the rights of the already conceived.
Labour in Britain built its history organising working people to defend the integrity of their family life, to struggle for fair wages and a decent home and to create a better future for their children. It was an aspirational type of politics about bread and butter issues.
Paradoxically, in Malta, Labour has a superstructure purporting to be social-democratic but its current ideological core is insular, focused quasi-exclusively on urban overdevelopment and consumerist super-individualism. A sort of inbreeding capitalist consumerism. This worked initially but took its toll on Malta’s reputation and on its soul.
Indeed, Labour’s obsession with selling Malta’s essential assets and the commodification of identity is neither socialist nor nationalistic. It is simply soulless insular capitalism.