Volodymyr Zelensky has signalled that the war in Ukraine may be approaching its negotiated endgame. Let’s hope a just settlement comes soon. But let’s also hope that a rapid conclusion to the war doesn’t allow us to bury the neutrality issue without rational discussion.

We don’t need more years of oscillation between silence and hot air. We need clarity about what neutrality is, what it’s for and whether we want it. We need to discuss the costs of both keeping it and dropping it.

States don’t become neutral to preserve clean hands in war. They do it for their security. Historically, some European states became neutral when war was prevalent. They’d have been amazed to see us discussing dropping neutrality because war has broken out.

In the past, small neutral states knew that war might not spare them. But they also had good reason to fear the peace that followed wars.

They hoped neutrality would protect them from being carved up as part of peace negotiations among larger states. Neutrality helps give a distinct juridical identity to a state and its borders. It’s something for us to keep in mind.

Neutrality only makes sense in relation to its purpose, which, in turn, needs to be grounded in a strategy to help us survive in the world as it really is. The discussions about Malta’s neutrality are messed up because they’re divorced from purpose and strategy.

Instead of asking whether neutrality is compromising us, we should be asking if our behaviour is compromising our neutrality by, say, profiteering off war and conflict in selling access to Russians and small arms to Libya.

We should be able to state what our neutrality is for in a credible, articulate way. But we’re not. The lack of fluency about our own neutrality is perhaps why it’s hard to come by a book on neutrality in contemporary Europe that even mentions Malta.

There are several reasons why we’re not fluent. The constitution doesn’t help. It links neutrality to a strategic and moral purpose, an active commitment to peace but in a way that’s divorced from the contemporary world.

Then, two of our national feasts are associated with war. Those stories are powerfully bound up with national identity in ways that neutrality is not. Such feasts are celebrated in national liturgies. Neutrality is passed over in polite silence.

We’ve been neutral for roughly 40 years. The original plan – to ensure our military security by having our neutrality guaranteed by four states – failed. Since then, we’ve been winging it.

Up till 1987, our claims to be neutral couldn’t be taken at face value. A secret deal with North Korea? Giving Libya advance warning of an air strike by the US?

After 1987, neutrality was enshrined in the constitution at just about the same time when the reasons for its then relevance began to recede into the background.

The lines between war and peace, combatants and non-combatants, right and wrong in armed conflict have all become blurred- Ranier Fsadni

Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya became deradicalised and sought to welcome Euro-American investment. The 1988 Lockerbie bombing didn’t have implications for our neutrality.

Above all, the Cold War was coming to an end. As soon as it did, the constitution’s language became anachronistic. More importantly, the unipolar world made few demands on neutrality, barring debates on narrow issues, such as participation in the Partnership for Peace.

Across the southern Mediterranean, with the exception of Syria, Arab countries entered the orbit of the Pax Americana, including Libya and Algeria, in Malta’s region.

The wars that arose didn’t oblige us to think hard to articulate neutrality for changing times. The invasion of Iraq was contested even in non-neutral European countries. The constitution doesn’t demand neutrality in conflicts against terror organisations, like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The 2011 intervention in Libya was authorised by a UN Security Council resolution and so raised no constitutional difficulty.

These conditions help us understand why Maltese politicians became used to passing over neutrality in silence, without extensive reflection. There was no need.

Today, however, there are conditions which are obliging us to think hard because there are no easy answers.

First, there’s the re-emergence of a multipolar world. It’s an open question whether Russia’s invasion was prompted by imperial ambition or, rather, economic and demographic weakness. Either way, Russia is once more helping to define Europe’s identity.

The invasion has permitted the European Union, for the first time, to promote its enlargement (by admitting Ukraine) in the context of war and by defining itself against an enemy. The new rhetoric is raising new questions about the purpose of neutrality.

Then there’s the rise of China. Its actions, just like those of the US, impinge directly on Malta. The rivalry of these two powers, both longstanding partners of Malta, returns the question of neutrality to the foreground.

Finally, the lines between war and peace, combatants and non-combatants, right and wrong in armed conflict have all become blurred. Instead of war, we have “targeted killings”, “collateral damage” and “incidental harm”. Armed conflict is permanent and the battlefield is the globe.

The blurred lines are bound to keep raising questions: for some, about the point of Malta’s neutrality; for others, about the legitimacy of becoming involved in this or that “programme of cooperation”. The future of war raises hard questions for both sides.

We can’t resolve these issues by winging it, sloganeering or pretending the way forward is transparently obvious when the world is opaque. We need long-term thinking, foreign policy convergence between the two political parties of government and, above all, statesmen.