We’re used to our leaders strutting, smirking and then caving before someone of substance they can’t ignore. Joseph Muscat squirmed before the BBC; Evarist Bartolo cowered before Deutsche Welle. And, only last week, our great leaders simpered like awed schoolboys in the presence of Ukraine’s war president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The embarrassing spectacle in parliament has triggered a lot of commentary. Unfortunately, some of it is as sloppy as the speeches.
Despite everything you may have heard, it wasn’t wrong for the speaker to refer to Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine as a conflict. The difference between Zelensky and our leaders isn’t that he’s a statesman and they’re not. Nothing he said undermines the case for Malta’s neutrality.
All wars are conflicts. International law speaks only of ‘armed conflict’, even when it means war. Reporting on Ukraine, press agencies alternate between referring to ‘war’ and ‘conflict’. Calling the Ukraine war a conflict doesn’t in itself pander to Vladimir Putin, who wants it called a military operation.
It’s what else you say that matters. Anġlu Farrugia was outrageous in offering banal advice to a man who Russian special forces want to kill. Zelensky already is energetically exploring avenues of dialogue. No wonder he gave Farrugia a stinging reply.
Had he thought it would hurt his larger goal, however, he’d have bitten his tongue. Unlike our leaders, Zelensky knew exactly what he wanted out of the event.
He had a strategy and executed it intelligently.
He needed to extract something from a country with more ties to Russia than Ukraine. Malta couldn’t offer much and, in any case, today has a name for crass opportunism.
A week later, we’re still talking about Zelensky. Mission accomplished. Our leaders offered him only candyfloss but he won public sympathy. For the sanctions on Russia to last, Zelensky needs European publics to feel that their economic sacrifices are worth enduring.
Zelensky shone, our leaders quacked. Remember, he’s no statesman. The war has transformed him into an authentic hero but, up to last year, he wasn’t exactly a paragon of noble leadership.
The country he inherited in 2019 was a byword for corruption. Late last year, The Guardian reported he seemed little different from his predecessors. EU auditors said Ukraine still showed signs of widespread rot and state capture. Zelensky’s persons of trust attracted the attention of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The Pandora Papers, examined by the International Consortium of International Journalists, showed he has or had undeclared shares in a sprawling network of offshore companies.
It is this man, not Superman, who embarrassed our leaders. It’s not because he’s a professional actor and they are only hams. Nor did he have conclusive arguments. The appeal to our WWII experience was rhetorically clever but it has little to do with the price of eggs.
It’s eight decades later, we’re an independent micro-state now, the balance of threats has changed and we’re better placed to judge if neutrality suits us.
Compared with him, our leaders sounded like amateurs on karaoke night- Ranier Fsadni
He shone because we saw a man with a concrete grasp of his country’s strategic needs and a readiness to rise to the occasion. For a man who’s meeting world leaders and taking life-and-death decisions, the brief meeting with our parliament was a sideshow. Zelensky couldn’t have had high hopes. He still put everything into it.
Compared with him, our leaders sounded like amateurs on karaoke night.
Only the day before, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, declared it would take decades for Ukraine to achieve EU membership. But that didn’t stop Bernard Grech from promising the PN’s support and sounding hollow.
Robert Abela’s words were just as empty. Nothing he said was meaningful, including the reference to neutrality.
That’s not because neutrality is in itself outdated, morally insipid and a coward’s refuge. Those assessments are as glib as our leaders’ speeches.
Neutrality hasn’t prevented a single neutral European country from sanctioning Russia. Zelensky himself has offered neutrality as part of a peace settlement. Austria, Switzerland and Ireland show no signs of wanting to revise their respective versions of neutrality.
Finland and Sweden have decided to ditch it. Finland’s neutrality was always pragmatic. It stopped being practical the moment Putin made it look like appeasement by declaring that Finland had to be neutral because he said so.
Sweden’s neutrality was more ideological but it depended on Finland’s status. If Finland joins NATO alone, Sweden becomes more vulnerable on its maritime border with Russia. So out goes a neutrality that had served its purpose well for 200 years.
It’s this kind of concrete thinking that we need to do. Let’s not get carried away by the latest enthusiasm for being on ‘the right side of history’.
Maltese neutrality is sui generis. Its relevance is disputed because of why and how it’s written in our constitution. Its stated values are couched in the anachronistic language of the first Cold War, inadequate for our age of the second Cold War. For many, it’s not a value at all but a price paid for democracy 35 years ago.
Our neutrality is not obviously outdated, as developments in our own neighbourhood show. However, it’s certainly time to rethink it, alongside alternatives.
For that we need leaders capable of driving a process of strategic geopolitical thinking. The shocking revelation of parliament’s meeting with Zelensky was the spectacle of national leaders who are out of their depth and don’t even know it.