How did we become who we are? There are 284 inhabited islands in the Mediterranean. We are unique. We should do all we can to remain so. Cyprus and Malta are the only two sovereign island states in the Mediterranean. Thousands of other islands are uninhabited and belong to mainland Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania, Greece, Türkiye, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

We are very different from Cyprus although both of us are island states and members of the European Union.

Cyprus is still divided between the part where the Greek Cypriots live in a state recognised by nearly all the countries in the world and the other part where the Turkish Cypriots live in an entity recognised only by Türkiye. Cyprus has been divided for 50 years. So far, all attempts to resolve this issue have failed.

But Cyprus has another serious problem which constrains and diminishes its independence and sovereignty. Cyprus is very different from us as we have a constitution where we declare ourselves neutral, belonging to no military alliance and not allowing any foreign military bases.

Our experience shows that our independence, sovereignty, democracy and neutrality are intertwined and cannot exist without one another.

In Cyprus, the United Kingdom has two ‘sovereign’ military bases: in Akrotiri and Dhekelia; ‘sovereign’ in the sense that they are considered to be British territory and the British government decides how to use them in military operations in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East (as some believe they have been used in the genocide in Gaza) without being accountable to the Cypriot government.

Coming into our own

As British subjects of the British Empire, we were definitely not considered equal to British citizens. Even in Malta itself, the Maltese were paid lower wages for the same work done by British citizens here.

Our land did not belong to us. For example, just to build a pipeline to supply my village, Mellieħa with water from Binġemma in 1912, the War Department had to give its go- ahead for the use of land. The military needs of the Empire were obviously much more important than water for drinking and hygiene of a small village.

When Dom Mintoff proposed the integration of Malta with the United Kingdom, he wanted the Maltese to have equal political, social and economic rights as the British. He made this condition: like you or without you.

We started coming into our own when we were able to take decisions ourselves for the good of our people, instead of being dictated to by our colonisers.

Independence and sovereignty are not achieved once and for all. They have to be nurtured and developed as they can easily be lost even as we wave our national flag, sing our national anthem and salute our national head of state.

Independence and sovereignty have to be nurtured and developed as they can easily be lost- Evarist Bartolo

The biggest obstacle small island states face in their path to self-reliant nationhood is the mindset of the elite. In many former colonies, the elite are often incapable of thinking for themselves and leading their nations in their people’s interest.

Apart from its centrality, Malta had a deep all-weather port. Without our Grand Harbour, we would never have become a nation state. We would have been another Lampedusa.

Our geography has helped us to attain nationhood. If we were Majorca, would Spain have let us go? If we were Corsica, would France have allowed us to become an independent island state? If we were Pantelleria, would we have become sovereign?

The same goes for all the other 282 islands in the Mediterranean controlled from the mainland.

The history of the Mediterranean, with its diversity and as a space contested by different powers competing for hegemony and influence, also helped to form us. A country is built from within and from what its people do or fail to do. But it is also formed by its encounters with other people. Islamic rule gave us our Maltese language that saved us from being swallowed up by those who dominated us in the last 1,000 years.

Reverting to pre-1530?

The Order of St John set us on the road to statehood, independence and sovereignty because it ran Malta from within Malta and had to build its administrative, political, economic and military infrastructure and decision-making process in Malta itself.

Malta became a centre of regional power instead of being some scattered rocks below Sicily, remote fiefdoms run from Sicily or the mainland on both sides of the Mediterranean.

The donation by Emperor Charles V of Malta to the Order of St John was a unique project of settler colonialism, which, thankfully, did not include the displacement and extermination of the local population.

The British Empire saved us from being colonised by neighbouring Mediterranean empires that would have found us easier to control and absorb.

With the introduction of a world language like English, we were not swallowed up by Italian. At the same time Italianitá in Malta saved us from becoming a little Britain. Most of all, we could build our complex identity because the Order of St John did not prohibit us from using our language, unlike those in Andalusia, after the Arabs were expelled, who were not allowed to keep on speaking a variant of Arabic and were forced to speak Spanish.

The British Empire supported the introduction of Maltese as an official language to weaken the status of Italian. Those, who colonised us and wanted us to be a poor imitation of themselves, ended up paradoxically helping us to become ourselves.

But most of all, Malta has been built by the vision, commitment, resilience, hard work and suffering of our people at every level and from every field and all the sides of the political spectrum.

We must not betray our people and allow our country to go back to being a modern version of how we were before the arrival of the Order of St John in 1530 – the periphery of the periphery.

Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.