Salvino Busuttil reviews Henry Frendo’s latest work – Europe and Empire: Culture, Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean
Warmly dedicated to the late and much missed Dennis Vella, this magnum opus of some 900 pages will long remain a definitive contribution to Maltese inter-war history. Thoroughly researched, Europe and Empire is a magnificent tour de force by Malta’s leading professional historian, Henry Frendo. Having already regaled us with Party Politics in a Fortress Colony: the Maltese Experience, the author after reviewing in an introductory chapter, the British Empire in its Mediterranean setting, ably identifies the main elements constituting the Maltese identity before and during the British presence.
What makes Frendo’s approach unique is that he manages, with superb mastery, to interpret the vicissitudes of Malta’s story through different, sometimes complementary, sometimes differing, perspectives, but ultimately converging, as only a seasoned historian can, on a holistic assessment of Malta’s culture. That Frendo has succeeded through a brilliant hermeneutical exercise to convey the essential quiddity of being a modern “Maltese” through British, Italian, Egyptian, Australian and, yes, even Vatican eyes, is an achievement of rare scholarship and gifted intuition.
Apart from the wealth of material that the author was able to trace and evaluate in many hitherto ‘virgin’ sources, he enriches his account with a fascinating background, at once historical and prophetic, on “Trends and Tensions in the Mediterranean, 1704-1964” on “The North in the South” evoking, in the post-world war two aftermath, the growing intrusion from the ‘far’ north-west, the United States, and from the ‘far’ north- east, the then Soviet Union. Like the British, the French and the Ottomans in earlier centuries, these newer ‘empires, tried to prise the Mediterranean from its millennial ‘Mediterraneite’ lording it over, as military potentates, not just over the sea but over its riparian states informally (through master-client relationships) but no less efficiently colonising their people, subjugating their leaders. Indeed, in the concluding part of this first chapter, Frendo projects recent North African events and the migration phenomenon in their historical as well as contemporary context.
One of the intriguing facets of this hefty volume is the considerable importance given to language in the making of nationhood, a characteristic of the Maltese experience, an analysis which is not confined to the scholarly second chapter but is almost a leitmotif in various parts of this work. Transposing the celebrated ‘language question’ of the 1920s and 1930s to present-day Malta, Frendo realises that “in retrospect and optimistically, given the historical resilience and latter-day flourishing of Maltese among the now independent islanders, the ‘language question’ may be seen as a part of their growing up, until Malta came of age; but never as a monolingual nation”. Interestingly, it is also the same constatation that Joseph M. Brincat reached in Maltese and other Languages (another monumental publication by Midsea 2011.
Following an incisive treatment of Nerik Mizzi’s formative period and of Manwel Dimech’s exile “nailed to an African shore not so much for his anti-colonial nationalism or socialist agitation but rather for his suspected anticlerical, evangelical sympathies”, Frendo deftly analyses, in chapter 7, what he terms “the early resonances of the ‘new Italy’” in Maltese politics, covering the 1922-1924 biennium. Arguing that “the newfound ardent nationalism in Italy could not have failed to warm the hearts of those who had supported italianita through thick and thin and who had suffered for that at the hands of the British and their local supporters and henchmen”, laying the ground for the armoury of politics and religion in Lord Strickland’s ambiguous forays on crown and mitre.
What to my mind is an unusual ‘perspective’ is the one where the author produces hitherto unpublished material on the Australian attitude to Strickland’s antics in Malta. The Anglo-Maltese governor of three Australian states had made some friends and several enemies on the sub-continent, some papers there suggesting “that his ‘high standard of character’” aroused official antagonism’.
Frendo reviews concisely the constitutional breakdowns in Cyprus and Malta in the late 1930s which shared, in his view, “the same predicament: a total breakdown of their hard-won constitutional order and instead rule by colonial diktat”...
The economic milieu of pre World War II Malta is largely concentrated, by the author, on the British Naval Dockyard and the depression which, subsequent to a short period of relative well being in the mid-1920s, engulfed the island as it spread from the United States to Europe and beyond. Here, Frendo relies, perhaps too strongly, on banking data rather than on a wider interpretation of the overall economic performance. At the same time, as I have myself experienced, financial statistics for the inter-war period are flimsy.
As the volume is essentially a gathering of different essays rather than a sequential exercise, it entertains us as well with absorbing vignettes of “the fear of a war over Malta in 1935”, with the subsequent clampdown on ‘disloyalty’ in Malta: 1936-1940’ (chapter 17), a massive and well-documented arraignment against the colonial masters which was to lead to the repulsive exile of alleged ‘quislings’ who were in fact “not criminals, not spies... They were victims... They were honest men with the courage of their convictions; and it was those convictions that convicted them” (Stewart Perowne, as quoted by the author). Indeed, the whole tragedy of deportation, ‘prison to exile without charge’ (chapter 18) is minutely and expertly documented, as is the Borg Pisani saga (with a final worrying query if the hanged ‘irredentist’ artist is now, for the Maltese, a ghost).
Frendo contributes to this work a professional historian’s insight into the effects of World War II on Malta, thus preparing, as it were, the backdrop for post-war Maltese society, claiming that the “intangible consequences were more penetrating than the tangible ones: insecurity, disorientation, fear, uncertainty, dependence, hunger and suffering, and propaganda”.
The author’s valedictory tour de force reveals the “culture of dependent fear: decolonising the mind, reclaiming history and the future of identity”, ending, rather ominously, with the contention (borrowed, and so acknowledged, by Frendo from J. Tomlinson’s Cultural imperialism: a critical introduction) that in societies marked by “uncertainty, dissent, or active struggle over national or regional identity... ‘distant imaginings’ (thereof) may become foregrounded in consciousness...”
While some may feel that, as Frendo concedes, “in today’s political climate, at first sight such concerns may appear remote or even irrelevant”, yet, as the author urges, we should undertake “a careful reading of the lines, and in between them, (as it) may give some pause to those who think so”.
Indeed, now that Malta has attained its major political and constitutional objectives, what is the future that beckons? In the early 1970s, our official advisers left us with that open question, bereft of vision. Thankfully, we have been visited, and we are today independent citizens enjoying a Euro- Mediterranean ambience, at once peripheral and insular, yet still politically strategic and culturally continental (with some British hues).
Are we merging into a European society that is searching for roots which it has long abandoned, or, while embracing our times, do we still cultivate the tubers that allowed our flowering into responsible nationhood ?
We may have to wait for Frendo’s next volume.
(Henry Frendo: Europe and Empire – Culture, Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean – Midseabooks, Malta, 2012)
Professor Busuttil is the co-founder and first president (with Anthony Callus, the late secretary-general of CMTU) of the Malta Council of the European Movement as well as (with Fr Peter Serracino Inglott) of the European Documentation and Research Centre. He promoted Malta’s belonging to Europe since Independence. At the Council of Europe, he was elected for six years to the first Independent Committee on the European Social Charter. In Strasbourg he served as Malta’s representative on a number of Commissions notably on culture and on the environment. He was also President of the European Conference of Economics Professors.
Establishing the Department of Economics at the University of Malta, where he was the Dean of Arts for a number of years, Professor Busuttil was subsequently appointed UN Adviser to the Prime Minister of the Bahamas (whose first development plan he drew up and later to that of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Director of the Malta Development Corporation, and chairman of a wide number of voluntary organisations, he also led the Division of the Socio-cultural Environment at UNESCO and later headed the UN Mediterranean Action Plan. From 1998 to 2005, he was Malta’s Ambassador to France and Portugal. Currently, he advises the Minister for Foreign Affairs on international issues. President of the Fondation de Malte, he is chairman or director of a number of local and foreign international institutions.