If someone had told me six months ago that I was to be the Ambassador of France to Malta, I would have told him he was mad. In fact, I have devoted all my energies to my books, and have never imagined a different life. Appointed Ambassador, however, by Bernard Kouchner and Nicolas Sarkozy, I arrived in Valletta on 23 July and presented my credentials to President Fenech-Adami on 18 September, happy to be able to greet this President, who is also a fervent European.

Here I am, then, for several years a resident of this archipelago, whose every town, every monument, every coastal indentation bears witness to a history that was intense. Malta is the nodal point of our Interior Sea, an island where men of adventure, convictions and courage have always met. Courage and the spirit of conviction and adventure: we all need them today. Fukuyama was quite wrong when he announced the end of history. Not only does history remain still alive, exciting and monstrous all at once, but also it seems, since Fukuyama and not without a certain irony, to have accelerated its pace as never before since the birth of mankind.

We are experiencing a time of uncertainty and threats in which reality disguises itself sometimes behind a mask of dangerous unrealities. The earth has shrunk, the remote no longer exists, the nearby and the familiar have changed their faces, humanity has become mortal (since Hiroshima), weapons of mass destruction are offered almost openly for sale, and borders are uncertain. It is complicated to build upon this world of shifting sands; and it becomes more and more difficult to answer the question posed by Nietzsche: “Where can I feel at home?”

No one had expected this time of metamorphoses. We Europeans have long since succumbed to our privileges. We were citizens of an old continent that had borne its ordeals. We had turned the page on European civil wars, and lived comfortably while still enjoying the dividends of an ancient history. For several years it had become evident that this comfort was not without illusion or abdication. Contaminated by the nihilism that ravaged our countries, we questioned our ideals, our history and our origins, and ourselves and renounced without realising it “our secular will not to give in”. During this time, new powers hurled themselves fiercely into the future without a moment’s thought, and old powers, aware of the threats facing them, tightened their bonds to the sources of their strength. Each new jolt of history posed the risk of wrenching us out of our good old, comfortable armchair.

We cannot say that we were not warned of the many new dangers that threaten the planet. The airplanes of 11 September brilliantly demonstrated the criminal madness of the Islamic fundamentalists and their hatred of the Jewish people. The spectacle of the Twin Towers, smashed and collapsing in fire and dust, played out on the screens of the entire world the symbolic death of New York. With the fall of those two towers, the whole city seemed fallen from the heaven where its inhabitants dwelt, loved and worked, to return at a stroke to the silence of the earth. The fire of Troy which burned on still, but on the other side of the Atlantic: that was the novelty. Later, the Iraq war revealed the democratic delirium of a nation that ignored its scholars, well-versed in the affairs of the Orient, to put its legendary courage at the service of lies and crime, and thrust between the Tigris and the Euphrates the sword of human rights into Iraqi flesh, which it considered too impure. As my friend Salah Stétié, the old Phoenician poet, puts it, Christ, who is as much of the Orient as of the Occident, has withdrawn from a region where men armed with apocalyptic technology seek in fire and blood the truth of times to come, their warlike dreams having long since emancipated themselves from justice in the name of falsified histories. It is possible to imagine how these conflicts could intersect and coagulate. All the Orient and all of Africa against all the Occident. All the poor against all the rich. This summer again, war has returned to prowl the soil of Europe. The human genius still works in equal shares in a history destined as much to creation as to destruction.

For us Europeans there are possible an action and a thought on a level that is properly ours, on condition of no longer living with eyes fixed on our Parisian, Roman or Berlin navels, and to turn without fear toward the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean has been the great matrix of France, Italy, Spain and all of Europe, to which it transmitted a body of enduring values: Jewish deism, Platonic philosophy, Christian revolution, Roman tradition, knowledge of Arabism, Abrahamic vocation: our identity and our universalism. In other words, it taught us in the course of time to give and to transmit, to pose questions about ourselves, without Manicheism (thanks to St Augustine), to evolve in different mental universes. We need this experience and this knowledge in order to face the uncertainties of the future. We must provide for the worst.

The Mediterranean pulls us far from the dry Europe which was formerly that of the Communists and Fascists, now become, in a soft, pacified and prosperous way, that of technocrats, the heavy industry of the media and a common currency. When Europe looks with confidence anew toward the Mediterranean, it retrieves a part of itself, and begins to efface several centuries of misunderstandings. Only a policy and principles common to both shores can restore to us the unity and power, which today we lack. It is under the mantle of this recovered unity that we shall all be able, anew, to feel at home.

Daniel Rondeau is a writer and Ambassador of France to Malta