It’s both understandable and strange that Robert Abela felt he had to tell the General Assembly of the United Nations that Malta’s neutrality does not mean we’re indifferent to other nations’ suffering.
It’s understandable given all the moral pressure and attempts at neutrality-shaming. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky tried it when he addressed our parliament. Our own national debate has blurred the distinction between moral neutrality, which has nothing to do with our constitution, and our political-military neutrality, which does.
But it’s also strange. If neutrality is so wayward and past its time, why did Zelensky himself say he was ready to agree to Ukraine’s neutrality (before the Istanbul round of negotiations in March last year)?
Those talks collapsed and, now, neutrality is off the table. But that’s beside the point. The moral critics of neutrality attack it on principle. The political critics attack it as an anachronism. But Ukraine, the very victim of the war that, we’re told, has made neutrality irrelevant, found it neither immoral on principle nor out of date in practice.
Zelensky offered his country’s neutrality and, less than a month later, cast doubt on ours. He did both for the same reason: to pursue Ukraine’s national interest, or, at least, his understanding of it.
We, however, debate neutrality in the name of our national specialty: fact-free realism.
Our fact-free realists tell us that war has made neutrality useless. No, it’s peace that makes neutrality lose its raison d’être. Neutrality was devised for a Europe riven by war every generation.
The realists say neutrality won’t protect you against bad actors. No one, not even 19th-century Europe, ever believed otherwise for a moment.
Neutrality was part of a larger strategy. It does not preclude a defence agreement.
Mention a defence agreement and you risk being told that you’re a free-rider. Or that Europe’s patience might run out. Never mind that neutrality can be of value to non-neutral States.
It’s entirely possible that we can’t give it any contemporary value. But that’s a conclusion you arrive at, not something you dismissively assert to cut discussion short. The self-styled realists are rationalising as furiously as the late Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, who gave neutrality a bad name because he made it mean whatever supported the course of action he favoured for other reasons.
The critics don’t like neutrality, to begin with, so they look for reasons to justify their dislike. Or else they borrow the answer being given by the European Union’s eastern and Nordic border States, without bothering that the question raised by the southern border is necessarily different.
There was a time when we began with the question before proceeding with the answer. Whatever you make of his answer, at least back in the 1970s Dom Mintoff began with the question: what was in Malta’s self-interest given the cold war in the Mediterranean and the growing radicalisation on the southern shore?
Neutrality was constitutionalised only two years before the cold war ended. Its wording was unwise because the cold war language was instantly anachronistic. But, surprisingly, Maltese neutrality turned out to be of value, even to non-neutral countries, in a unipolar world.
What made it so were specific regional circumstances. Growing US dominance coincided with the launch of the Barcelona Process, an ambitious Euro-Med strategic partnership between the EU and the southern Mediterranean.
Our fact-free realists tell us that war has made neutrality useless. No, it’s peace that makes neutrality lose its raison d’être- Ranier Fsadni
Liberal multilateralism increased both opportunity and mistrust (in part because both the US and the EU drove hard bargains with weaker negotiators). US dominance – which sometimes included joint military exercises with southern Mediterranean States – made hold-outs like Libya and Syria jittery and barely managing internal crises. The opportunities of the Euro-Med process both brought discussants together but also sometimes brought tensions to the fore.
Malta sometimes served as a neutral meeting point when the southern Mediterranean partners couldn’t agree on another place. On other occasions, we spoke up on issues that were sensitive to them. Our neutrality didn’t work miracles but it wasn’t pointless and it served Malta well.
Those days are over. It’s a different Mediterranean now. Tensions are building up over competing claims over exclusive economic zones, with Turkey becoming a major regional actor. Russia, trying to manage its decline, needs ports in countries like Syria and Libya.
Under US auspices, Israel and the Gulf States have better relations and Israeli developers are buying up more properties in Jordan. The Gulf States are developing social media apps that their intelligence services can control while intervening in Libya and Tunisia to keep democracy at bay – a democratic Arab State is a threat to their legitimacy.
Just beneath Malta, it’s not only Libya that’s unstable. So is Tunisia. As for Egypt, if the polar ice-cap continues to melt at present rates, and an all-year Arctic shipping route becomes possible, the Suez Canal could be out of business within 15 years.
That is the unstable world we need to contemplate to decide whether continuing neutrality is good, bad or indifferent. We need to think in terms of multi-variable scenarios.
It’s unlikely the world will be fundamentally the same as now in six years, when the last six have seen Donald Trump elected US president, Brexit, COVID-19, the Ukraine war and free speech under threat from right and left.
It’s also unlikely the EU will absorb up to eight new member States and simultaneously become more integrated and harmonised. Paradoxically, a larger EU might make greater harmonisation both more desirable and less probable, if enlargement brings with it a populist reaction.
Debating neutrality shouldn’t be discussion of a fetish – whether it’s the totem of those who can’t bear to see it go or the shibboleth of those who regard its removal as self-validation. Fact-free discussion is the last thing that will guarantee our security.