We are people, not pawns

Malta’s population, estimated at 545,405 people at mid-year, is equivalent to 0.01% of the total world population of eight billion. Our GDP of around €24 billion is a miniscule fragment of the world GDP reaching €115 trillion.

With our total military expenditure of €95 million we would not be able to buy half an intercontinental ballistic missile, which costs £214 million per missile.

We are one of the smallest states in the world. Small states should not accept to be defined by those who consider them an unnecessary nuisance, “damned dots”, not “real” states, and expected to behave and do as they are told, destined as they are to be on the losing end of geopolitics.

In The Success of Small States in International Relations – Mice that Roar?, published last November, Godfrey Baldacchino writes that “small players are made to think and believe that they are anomalies, quirks in the international system…”

Small states should not accept the imposed inferiority, miniaturisation, boundaries and limitations that others set for them.

Small states also tend to suffer from a ‘colonial hangover’, especially when their elites are what Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul calls “mimic men”. In The Mimic Men, written five years after his country gained independence in 1962, Naipaul explores the psychological and cultural effects of colonialism on postcolonial societies. He argues that people from postcolonial societies need to unlearn mimicry and learn to think for themselves, to become themselves and stop seeing themselves through the eyes of their former colonisers.

In my first speech to foreign ambassadors accredited to Malta soon after my appointment as foreign minister in 2020 I mentioned that, as education minister, I had to deal with the harmful issue of bullying in our schools. I told them I was aware that there is also bullying among nations. I augured collaboration in the spirit of mutual respect, dignity and sovereignty.

I feel I built a good working relationship with all the foreign diplomats serving in our country. In most cases, I found them to be respectful. But some did cross the line and wanted to dictate what we should do, as if we were their colonies.

Such instances lead me to agree with what India’s Foreign Minister Subramanyam Jaishankar said over a month ago at the Munich Security Conference: “If I were to look at what Western ambassadors do in India, if my ambassadors did a fraction of that in your own country, you would all be up in arms. I think there are double standards here.”

A new multipolar world

I also agree with what China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi told CNN on March 7 while addressing a news conference in Beijing: “There are more than 190 countries in the world. Should everyone stress ‘my country first’ and obsess over a position of strength, the law of the jungle would reign again, smaller and weaker countries would bear the brunt first, and international norms and order would take a body blow… A big country should honour its international obligations and fulfil its due responsibilities. It should not put selfish interests before principles, still less should it wield the power to bully the weak.”

Small states also tend to suffer from a ‘colonial hangover’- Evarist Bartolo

I remember distinctly when much bigger countries tried to coerce us into submitting to their orders by threatening to withdraw their investments from Malta, tell their ships registered under the Maltese flag to seek another jurisdiction and imposing sanctions through international institutions that they controlled. Such bullying is unacceptable and is euphemistically called ‘using leverage to obtain a desired outcome’.

The so-called ‘soft power of public democracy’ is also used to make smaller and weaker countries follow paths that are not in their national interest. The information coming out of Washington shows how, under the Biden administration, the US State Department and USAID were involved in 180 countries, including Malta, financing media and non-governmental organisations.

The Integrated Country Strategy (2022-2024) declared that Mission Goal 1 of the US in Malta is to have “A Western-aligned Malta... to enhance American influence and advantage in the highly competitive central Mediterranean… to partner with Maltese law enforcement, mili­tary, and security services, to enhance cooperation we continue to build our military cooperation relationship and the creation and training of a Maltese Special Operations capability interoperable with NATO...”

This Mission Goal 1 to have a “Western-aligned Malta” is declared openly without any respect and consideration whatsoever that this goes against our constitution, which declares that “Malta is a neutral state actively pursuing peace, security and social progress among all nations by adhering to a policy of non-alignment and refusing to participate in any military alliance”.

Will the new US Integrated Country Strategy for Malta change under the Trump administration, now that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has acknowledged the end of US global dominance?

On January 30 he said: “So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China, and to some extent, Russia...”

In ‘The National Interest’ of August 11, 2018 (‘Why Small States Matter to Big Powers’), James Jay Carafano, of the American Heritage Foundation, writes: “Little nations are not sand to be ground between the great wheels of major powers. They are made up of people, not pawns. Citizens in small states have the same hopes, aspirations and natural rights as those in world powers. These people have every reason to expect and demand a life of freedom, peace and prosperity.”

He thinks that America should “Avoid Us-or-Them-ism… The goal is not to get countries to take sides but to engage and help them act consistently with their own interests…”

Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.