Prime Minister Robert Abela’s remarks about Roberta Metsola promoting the European Council’s decision to increase its defence spending has brought back a sudden interest in Malta’s constitutional neutrality.

Very strangely, he described it as “warmongering”, when investing in Europe’s territorial and political security has nothing to do with “fomenting war” and everything to do with ensuring peace.

For one thing, wars are of two general kinds: aggressive, like Russia’s present war in the Ukraine, and defensive, like the Ukraine’s fight to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity from Russia’s aggression.

Aggressive wars are unjust; they violate international law and are immoral. Wars of self-defence are just and legally legitimate.

Warmongers promote the first kind, and this is obviously not true of Metsola and the European Council.

Both, however, recognise that preventing war and preserving peace requires ensuring the security of member states against expansionist threats like Russia’s. And that this requires them to have a collective mili­tary capability sufficiently strong to deter them, which is obtained by investing in an appropriate defence budget.

It is incredible that the prime minister should confuse this thinking with warmongering. It is more incredible that he should vote for the Council’s resolution nonetheless and justify it on the grounds that he was guaranteed respect for Malta’s neutrality and non-alignment in return. Malta’s neutrality was never at issue.

Last February, Switzerland, arguably Europe’s most consistently neutral State, announced an increase in its military spending by 19% over the next four years. It justified it as insurance against a world grown increasingly dangerous and an uncertain geopolitical situation.

It didn’t seem to occur to Abela that voting for the resol­ution effectively made him party to it. Thereby, by his own token, he is also a warmonger.

But my concern here is not the prime minister’s needless embarrassment but with the principle of neutrality, which he defends so strenuously and which I think is fundamentally flawed and supported by three myths.

The overriding problem with neutrality generally is that it does not discriminate between just and unjust wars. A neutral State, by definition, is committed to impartiality and equidistance between parties in conflict by treating them the same; aggressor and victim in an aggressive war.

It offers no aid, political, military, or humanitarian to one party that it doesn’t offer to the other, otherwise it forfeits its status. 

The prime minister seems convinced, as are many other Maltese, that this stance favours peace. I don’t think it does or, at least, the kind of peace one should favour.

Maltese neutrality in our constitution is about “actively pursuing peace, security and social progress among all nations”. It thereby identifies Malta’s neutrality as active and imposes an obligation on the Maltese State to actively pursue these aims, that are laudable in themselves.

But they are not achieved by non-alignment, that is, by adopting a principled equi­distance between conflicting states where the war is an aggressive one and involves human rights abuses, the destruction of cities and the death and suffering of innocent civilian populations, as is currently happening in Ukraine and Gaza.

Peace is not an unqualified good, any more than war is an unqualified evil. There is a ‘just peace’ just as there is a ‘just war’. And it is not acquired with brute force, or by appeasing an aggressor State, namely by allowing it to profit from its aggression.

Hence, the Ukraine’s justified refusal of any peace that would permit Russia to retain the territory it has won illegally. A peace not justly obtained is neither just nor enduring. In short, to have any value, neutrality must be able to contribute to a just peace that truly produces security and social progress. And it doesn’t do that.

The problem with neutrality is that it does not discriminate between just and unjust wars- Kenneth Wain

The first neutralist myth is that impartiality and non-alignment is taking no position at all in a conflict. For being neutral is clearly choosing a position.

Moreover, in an aggressive war, it favours the aggressor State over the victim by encouraging its impunity, namely its non-accountability for its acts.

An example from everyday life where it regards persons illustrates the point.

You observe a mugger or bully, an aggressor, attacking an innocent victim in the street. You choose not to intervene, turn your back on the incident and look on or walk away, with the excuse that you want to stay out of it, uninvolved.

But your impartiality plain­ly encourages the aggressor’s confidence that he can get away with his assault, that is, it directly encourages his attack on the victim to continue. Decent people would find your neutrality in this case morally repulsive.

The same is true with states; staying impartial instead of intervening in the victim’s defence to the best of one’s ability favours the aggressor and encourages the aggression to continue. Hence, the second neutralist myth: that neutrality is morally right.

For, standing aside and allowing an unlawful aggression against a person or State to persist cannot be morally superior to intervening on the victim’s behalf, by using force, military means, if necessary, if one has the power to do it.

Indeed, in the sense that one’s impartiality facilitates the aggression against the victim, it renders one complicit with it. Nor does not intervening to defend a neighbour or stranger from aggression in one’s street or neighbourhood contribute to its peace; unless it is produced Mafia-style by submitting to the criminal violence and intimidation of the bully. 

The qualification to one’s moral duty to intervene in such situations is the morally legitimate one of self-protection. Nobody ‒ person or State ‒ is morally required to risk one’s own destruction or grievous harm to save or protect another. Otherwise, one is morally obliged to defend and protect the victim. 

The third neutralist myth is the belief that staying neutral protects one’s security. It may in the short term. But history is replete with examples when it doesn’t.

An aggressor will never be deterred from invading a neutral country by its self-declared neutrality, if it is in its strategic interest to do so – remember Hitler declaring Belgium’s neutrality constitution “a piece of paper”.

Ukraine tried to protect itself with promises of neutrality until the Russians annexed Crimea in 2014. Russia’s message ultimately drove it, and Sweden and Finland too, into the arms of NATO.

Dom Mintoff well understood the fragility of Malta’s constitutional neutrality and wanted it guaranteed by foreign powers.

Today, we have more solid protection for our security and prosperity with our EU membership. And the collective investment of the member states in their military security is automatically in ours too.

Supporting it is an enlightened choice, not an act of warmongering.

Kenneth Wain is a philosopher and emeritus professor.