Joseph Muscat’s ambition to make Malta the “Best in Europe” seems to have been thwarted by reality. Let us consider a few examples.
According to the most recent Worldwide Governance Indicators issued by the World Bank, Malta has experienced a veritable free fall in freedom of expression and accountability – the worst showing in 10 years. There has been a downward trend since 2014. The implications are clear.
In the meantime, air pollution in Malta is the fourth worst in the European Union. According to EU officials, pollution accounts for 80 per cent of premature deaths as it causes lung disease and cancer and possibly Alzheimer’s disease.
So not only are we not even remotely the best in Europe, but we are heading towards the opposite end of the spectrum. And we might end up kicked out of civilisation. Let me explain by giving an example that illustrates the uncivilised mentality regulating the Best Country in Europe. Enemalta announced last Thursday that it would suspend the supply in certain parts of Ħaż-Żebbuġ from 8am to 2:30pm. Seems civilised enough, except that they cut it at 7:30am... oblivious to the hassle and problems they created to unsuspecting citizens. Are the Maltese bound to live with it? No, particularly when they were promised that their country would become the Best in Europe.
The Best in Europe is turning out to mean also an influx of foreign workers who swell the demand for housing and everyday necessities while exerting inordinate pressure on the infrastructure and resources as well as the social fabric and native culture of the country.
The Best in Europe is turning out to mean a dystopian cosmopolitan city-state, saddled with the ugliness of the megalopolis – haphazard urbanisation, overdevelopment, social decline – and lacking the beauty of the European metropolis, which essentially boils down to the pleasures of the mind. Malta is not becoming another Paris, London or Rome, where you find high-level theatre, shops selling unusual but interesting stuff, inspired architecture and well-kept public parks, but a jaded copy of some urban agglomeration in China or South America.
The Best in Europe is not even becoming another Venice, because Venice is a place from which the inhabitants can from time to time escape to find refuge and solace in their holdings in the hinterland away from the humid and densely occupied lagoon city.
The Best in Europe is quickly degenerating into a hotchpotch of overdevelopment and shoddy urban planning and barely-integrated migrants who have no roots here and possibly do not intend to ever settle here.
Is this racist talk? No. Race has nothing to do it. This is demographics and sustainability. The physical and social environment is being threatened by a human deluge, by the wave of immigrants – irrespective of whether their skin colour is black, white, or whatever. The facts are that there simply is no space. And the country’s culture is not urban, but “semi-urban” if not even provincial. Dr Muscat thinks that a 55 per cent majority gives him the same right as an 80 per cent majority to transform the soul of the country beyond recognition. This is simply not the case. There is no physical space for his project, and there is no mental space either. He can try to change the latter, but it’s difficult to increase the former, even if he were to push forward his land reclamation agenda. He might wish to buy Pantelleria – as an intellectual recently proposed – but, like Grand Master Pinto before him (who wanted to annex Corsica), he might find this to be but a chimera.
The influx of foreigners is worrying all those who have a good head on their shoulders. Not only those who can see that the overexploitation of the environment will, sooner or later, sound the death knell of the territory. But also those who see clear threats to the culture of the people inhabiting the territory.
In his speech during the opening ceremony of the academic year, the Magnificent Rector of the University of Malta (the real one in Msida, not the fake one in Bormla) expressed the thoughts of many Maltese who have not been blinded by the gleam of the Best in Europe hype. He clearly stated that all foreigners who come to work in Malta should learn Maltese. The Professor is right. I for one am fed up of having to switch to English when I’m ordering food in a restaurant. When I’m in Malta, since I’m Maltese I want to feel at home. We all want to feel at home in Malta. Not only at restaurants – but everywhere. This is why the Magnificent Rector is right. He’s talking about a deep psychological need: to feel at home when you’re in your homeland. The foreigner has to adapt; we don’t have to adapt to foreigners.
Is this xenophobia? Of course not! Foreigners are more than welcome. But their numbers have to reflect the accommodation capacity of the territory and they have to adapt to our culture, not the other way round.
On top of that, let’s stop deluding ourselves that we are really a functioning bilingual country. We are the Best Deluded Country in Europe. Just consider that there are British universities which do not take it for granted that Maltese students have the linguistic wherewithal to study in Britain. I recently had a look at the website of a mid-ranking English university and its English language requirements: “If you want to study for a degree from a UK university, and English is not your first language, you will need to take an English language test to prove that your English is of a sufficiently high standard.”
So far, so good. But read on: “You don’t need to prove your knowledge of English if you’re a national of, or if you have completed a qualification equivalent to a UK degree in, any of these countries: Antigua and Barbuda; Australia; the Bahamas; Barbados; Belize; Canada; Dominica; Grenada; Guyana; Ireland; Jamaica; New Zealand; St Kitts and Nevis; St Lucia; St Vincent and the Grenadines; Trinidad and Tobago; UK; USA.”
Jamaicans – whose patois is made up of phrases like Inna di morrows and Weh yuh ah seh – don’t need to prove their standard of English but the Maltese do. Am I blaming the UK system? No. Because the British are right. The Maltese can speak no language properly – we’ve become a nation of Salvatores from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Maltese is degenerating; Malta’s English is, not to put too fine a point on it, idiosyncratic; Malta’s Italian is vucumprà-like (no idea of the polite form and its nuances, for instance). French and German are positively exotic if not even esoteric... and so on.
The implications of what the Magnificent Rector said are clear, at least to me. Instead of making things worse by tolerating foreign workers who speak English as they mishear or mislearnt it, let’s get the foreigners to learn Maltese and let’s try to save the language. Saving the language means saving the culture (the two are intimately intertwined). By saving language and culture, we can manage to keep Malta the home of the Maltese and avoid finding ourselves strangers in our own (strange) land.
But there’s more to it. The Rector’s idea would also bring about an indirect beneficial consequence: learning Maltese would be a sort of screening process – if a foreign worker is intelligent enough to learn Maltese, then the country would be benefitting from the influx of intellectually high-net-worth individuals.
My Personal Library (24)
Last Wednesday, a dear friend of mine, a Frenchman, passed away. He was a doctor of medicine, a man of culture, an old-school gentleman, a connoisseur of cigars and wines and a lover of golf and Scottish kilts and clans, a devoted husband and a proud father, a traditionalist with whom I have had many wonderful conversations. Dr Thierry Schaedgen, a Lorrainer, was preoccupied with European civilisation and its decay, the barbarisation of sexual mores (like, for instance, the use of abortion as a contraceptive method), the rise of the Extreme Right and the risks it poses to democracy and freedom... He urged me to buy books by one of his favourite authors, the French Jew Éric Zemmour, which I did – and though I promised him I would read them and we would discuss them, I kept postponing, mostly because I’m a very slow reader in French and I’m always short on time.
One of Zemmour’s novels, Petit Frère, deals with the breakdown of a neighbourhood in Paris’ 19th arrondissement when a young Jewish DJ is murdered by an Arab childhood friend. The book’s blurb reads thus, “What the narrator discovers goes beyond a racist murder or a crime of passion: it’s the decomposition of a neighbourhood subjected to increasingly more violent tensions, the ethnic conflicts which gnaw at French society, the lies of politicians, and the impostures of the intellectual elite”.
Dear Thierry, how I would have liked to discuss this novel with you! It’s still on the shelf, waiting for its turn to be read. I will now read it in your honour. But, if you will allow me one last instance of sincerity, the book I really would have liked to read was your Memoirs about which you spoke so many times but which I am sure you never found the time to write. Those Memoirs would have been the repository of your spirit, the spirit of a good man, a gentle soul, a generous doctor, a genuine friend who left too young, too soon. Adieu, mon ami!