There is one benefit of EU membership that is not reaching our shores. Joining the EU should have introduced a higher political outlook – in other words, we should become less insular, less partisan and we should have started to debate our place in today’s EU, as well as the future of Europe. But nothing of the sort is happening. As a result Maltese politics is as petty as it ever was and worse.

But then, we did join the EU for the wrong reasons. Yes, the vast majority voted “Yes” for purely economic reasons. The perception that prevailed then is that we are small and by joining this “club” our economic woes would be over. This perception still prevails today, even if more are realising this is not how it works.

Back in 2003, telling people that this is not an “economic club” but a “political union” meant nothing at all. For many, the alternative void created by the PN seemed far worse than any harm EU membership could ever inflict.

The United States of Europe

So we joined a Union that aims to become a United States of Europe, yet we are still largely unaware of this fact. It’s as if this not-so-hidden agenda is some nightmare concocted by eurosceptic conspiracy theorists. And yet this agenda is a documented fact, and it has a voice that rises like a tide at times of optimism, and ebbs the moment things go wrong – such as when the French and the Dutch rejected the EU Constitution.

So it is only at high tide that we read such statements like that of Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who said in a euphoric moment in June 2004, “The Constitution is the capstone of a European Federal State.”

As early as 1931, before the 1950s inception of the United States of Europe, one of the earliest Union saints, Arthur Salter, had emphasised that “the United States of Europe must be a political reality or it cannot be an economic one”.

There is no lack of famous quotes on the subject. And each generation of prime ministers and heads of state embraces the EU momentum because that is what political safety decrees. They call it “Political Correctness”.

Meanwhile, the Maltese project their national debate on purely partisan lines, which makes it an insular version of the grand political debate. Maltese politics is facing the past rather than the future. Indeed it seeks a continuity of the past that is thought to reflect the future. Yet we enter a new and very different era that presents us with new threats and challenges.

Too complex to debate

The EU is a complex subject to debate – so no one debates it. Meanwhile, we are being hoodwinked into accepting a rejected EU Constitution that prevails over the Maltese Constitution, with hardly a whisper, let alone a debate.

So what? So what if the EU is fast becoming a United States of Europe. Yeah, so what? We don’t know what this means so it can only mean a better life. Who needs independence anyway? One even wonders why, throughout the ages, so many people where slaughtered in wars of independence.

Indeed, like democracy, independence is hard to gain, but so easy to lose.

No doubt, the freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and labour across the EU has its benefits; mostly (and in a holistic sense) it tends to unify peoples in a socially organic way. Here, unification is not forced upon them. Yet as the member States lose control over the regulation of that freedom of movement, then they also lose their democratic control over their own country. That country becomes a part of a Union that is governed not by a democracy, but by a non-elected political centre. The Constitution is not the beginning of this process, but its culmination.

But times seem to be changing across the EU. There is a growing popular opposition to a centralised EU State because more people are realising what this higher level of government is all about. More are realising that the EU is all about creating a United States of Europe (called EU, of course) where all 450 million citizens can be controlled by a political centre. And when people look at the prospects of today’s USA, their distaste grows, especially when they see what a centralised federal government can do, how its military-industrial complex can grow to rule the land and wage infinite wars, how its hugely layered government can suck the citizens dry, and how its federal agents never seem to stop multiplying and infiltrating the social structure.

The new era

This is the era we enter today. And the Maltese need to realise that a more centralised EU only means that our island-State will grow less and less influential

and, relatively speaking, economically less developed. Moreover, we are, security-wise, more vulnerable now as an EU-frontier State, than when we were genuinely

neutral and generally respected as such.

These are crucial times. The political leaders across Europe are still riding the EU crest, and as the wave falters, they seek ways to lift it up. Even our own Gonzi, mediocre as he seems on EU affairs, just sings the EU song as if this were the way it should be.

According to this philosophy, who are we to sing another song? We’re just lucky to be in the Union in the first place!

It is indeed a sad time to be Maltese. The EU slowly dismantles the nation State in all but symbols, and we take pride in being a part of this charade. What’s worse, we do not even see the need to debate any aspect of the future of Europe. It’s as if: ‘Oh, the future of Europe? Whatever they decide, we’re on!’

If we want to be a part of the Union, we need to participate in the so-called “Debate on the Future of Europe”. And we need to start from the very beginning.

Abolishing the nation state

Altiero Spinelli, another Union saint, wrote in 1941: “The problem which must be solved is the final abolition of the division of Europe into sovereign national States. Without this, any progress will be appearance only.”

Here is where the debate can start. For in this context, times have changed and it is now clear to many people in Europe that the present democracies must be preserved; that a Union made up of diverse (hence free) States sharing their borders and their democracies, is better than a Union controlled by a political centre camouflaged by pseudo-federal structures.

So you see, it is no accident that Malta’s political debate remains so petty. The take-over is largely “invisible”.

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Sharon Ellul Bonici is a Labour Party candidate currently working in the European Parliament in the political field.