Malta has been greylisted. It should have known that this would happen. If Iceland was greylisted in 2019, why did the Maltese authorities believe that they would fare any better, given the depth and breadth of the financial misconduct that has permeated the economy and the highest echelons of the government and the police in recent years?
The Maltese government must now stop any disingenuous whining and get to work. It cannot seriously claim to wake up today to the fact that Malta is a small country.
Malta is a small country today, it was a small country yesterday and it will remain a small country tomorrow.
A beginners’ course in international relations will tell you that international politics is a game led by the large and rich powers of this world. To complain about this fact is as useful as complaining about being short rather than tall or the other way around. You live with it.
And you do the best of it.
In international politics, living with it means forging alliances and, yes, behaving according to rules that you have not always set yourself. However, and this is to be remembered, small states and microstates are usually the greatest promoters of international laws and rules for they would simply not exist without them and their citizens would be eternally at peril in their absence.
Living with it does not mean believing that you are too small to need a systematic foreign policy and too small not to have to follow the rules. For this is the curious contradiction in some of the statements made by the Maltese government: Malta is so small that it can do what it wants because it does not matter in the larger scheme of things.
If Iceland was greylisted in 2019, why did Malta believe it would fare any better?- Anna Khakee
It can behave like a child in the company of adults. As a result, it behaves as if there was no such thing as wrongdoing: the problem, it has signalled time and again, is not the wrongdoing but being caught and “outed internationally” for it.
Doing the best of it means trying to influence where you can. Small states have sometimes managed to change the rules of international politics. But they have always done so referring to concepts of what is morally right.
To somehow claim that you want to behave criminally because others behave criminally is not going to sway any argument.
To say that small island states need particular support because of their precarious geographical position can do so. To say that small EU states have particular problems that need attention likewise.
For that you need to build alliances. And for alliances to work, you will need to be seen as, yes, an adult and, yes, as an honourable country.
The Maltese government has clearly failed on both counts: in forging alliances and in following the rules. This is a grave mistake.
If Malta wants to be part of the community of states, and a player on the European or broader international scene, it must now start to act strategically and fully in accordance with national, European and international law.
Otherwise, it will end up isolated or in rather unrecommendable company, which is not going to lead to longer- term prosperity or well-being for its citizens.
If it wants to form part of the community of states, it must stop its little-brother whining.
It must act like an adult and also treat the Maltese population as thinking adults, not electoral fodder that can be manipulated by blaming the big bad foreigner.
Anna Khakee, senior lecturer, Department of International Relations, University of Malta