Two schools of Maltese neutrality

As the neutrality debate picks up again, there are two questions that are doing most of the buzzing between my ears. For Malta to embrace neutrality, does it need to know between whom, exactly, it is neutral? And what school of neutrality should we belong to - the Keep Your Head Down school or the Be Prepared to Stick Your Neck Out for Peace school?

A word about why these questions arise now. Malta's neutrality is not in question. The only senior politician in Malta who has publicly wondered if neutrality is still relevant is John Dalli, and he was speaking in a personal capacity. No, these questions arise now because a number of Labour politicians are signalling that they are prepared to engage in a discussion of Maltese neutrality that would reformulate its meaning in a way that brought it out of its Cold War deep-freeze.

First José Herrera and John Attard Montalto suggested, very carefully, that they were prepared to concede that the constitutional provisions on neutrality might have anachronistic elements. Now Evarist Bartolo is saying that not only is EU membership not a threat to Malta's neutrality - as the MLP had argued before April 12 - but that our neutrality is good for the EU.

Given these signals, the argument should be taken forward. Maltese neutrality arose in the context of the Cold War balance of power in the Mediterranean. What can neutrality mean in a globalised world? There is nothing in the Mediterranean today that can be plausibly called a balance of power.

Some advocates of Maltese neutrality panic at this suggestion and go on to make wild claims about balances of power that exist only in fantasy. Is the Mediterranean a place where there is a balance of power between the West and the Islamic world? No.

The Islamic world is not an alliance, nor by any stretch of the imagination is it a single political entity. It is plural, diverse, and contradictory. It has no clear border that cuts it off from the West - you will have heard about the statistics that show that there are more Muslims than Methodists (Margaret Thatcher's church) in the UK and how in a few years there might well be more mosques than churches in the Netherlands.

But perhaps the Mediterranean marks a balance of power between the North and the South in the Mediterranean. What balance? The power is almost all on the side of the North. The imbalance of power is such that the South is fragmented, not an alliance. And in a way the power has no single name: it is largely capitalist not military power, using the names of multinational companies and business families, based in the South.

But none of the above means that Maltese neutrality makes no sense. It simply means that we have to think a lot harder about the emerging shape of our region. The thinking we have to do will probably engage two schools of thought.

The Keep Your Head Down school argues that Malta should do nothing that attracts hostile attention to it. If this school had to issue a printed T-shirt, its motto would read: I'm all right, Jack. Just engage in trade, goes its argument, and argue for peace, which is good for business.

Implications: keep warships away, because they attract terrorists and terrorists scare tourists. But also, whatever you do, do not do anything serious about securing regional peace - because real prospects for peace tend to attract terrorist acts, too, as the Israelis and Palestinians know too well.

As its name suggests, the Be Prepared to Stick Your Neck Out for Peace school will have none of this. Its T-shirt has Gandhi's face on it and like Gandhi it is prepared to take a beating once in a while.

It takes the constitutional commitment to a pro-active peace-making seriously. But it accepts the implications. Nato minesweepers are good for peace, even if they belong to a military alliance: no point in turning them away from our harbours. Hosting an important conference on peace risks attracting nasty people who want to blow it up.

I doubt many politicians in Malta are fully paid-up members of either school. Most tend to borrow arguments from both schools. But they borrow without squaring up to the implications of either school. It is time they did, if we want to take the neutrality discussion forward.