This week’s meeting of the European Council has come and gone and carried with it the mountain of hype with which it was surrounded.

The Prime Minister was said – I do not know if this originated from him or otherwise – to be ready to stage a walkout if he was not satisfied with the conclusions. The Leader of the Opposition came out within minutes of the summit’s conclusions, saying that they represented a regression because Malta was not even mentioned in them.

It has been quite a while since we had such a to-do about a summit. I am reminded of the December 2002 summit in beleaguered Copenhagen at which the package of funds was assigned to Malta and other applicant countries. The next day we had a jubilant Eddie Fenech Adami rejoicing over the amount, Alfred Sant quibbling that it all amounted to a paltry €1 million after all, Labour’s Super One holding a dreary singing contest and PN’s NET on one of those fund-raising efforts – all triumphant and opulent.

The situation is now reversed: the focus is no longer on money but on immigration, and while the Prime Minister has expressed satisfaction at the outcome the Opposition has pooh-poohed it.

Next year, along with the 50th anniversary of Independence, we will also celebrate 10 years since accession to the EU. I think the time has come for our relations with the EU to be reviewed – although I do not think this will happen.

My point today is that, over these last 10 years – and even before – our relations with the EU have been, and are, based on a deep misunderstanding of the EU and what those relations should be.

From the PN’s point of view, even before accession – and, more importantly, before the referendum – the accent was about the funds that were coming to us. This was the whole point of the December 2002 hype: first, the niggardly EU kept counting its pennies and refusing to give us what we believed was our due. Then there was the late-night wait, the crunch of meetings (along with the Poles) and then the rushing and running to find a hugely elated Eddie and RCC telling us how they had got the EU to cough up more and more money.

Labour was sidelined and its misery was exacerbated by the fact that it showed just how bothered it was. (The same was to happen on the eve of accession, as the rest of Malta trooped down to Grand Harbour to celebrate.)

Money was never the aim of our membership of the EU. It helped very much in the run-up to the referendum but, again, Labour lost the plot and hence the referendum.

The jury is still out as to whether Malta has received as much by way of funding as it was promised. Further analysis is needed to see what that funding was used for. My impression is that the bulk of it was used on the upgrading of roads in the north of the country. That the money was used on these roads was due to EU rules on what is called the Ten-T road, the main road in Malta, but could not be used to upgrade the other roads or sorting out the many snarl-ups – especially in the middle of the island – where so many traffic jams occur.

I am not downplaying the EU funding, especially the elements of it that relate specifically for education and agriculture. The point is, however, that this funding is on the way out. The new financing period will still see Malta benefiting from EU funds but on a diminished scale. Malta is no longer a net beneficiary, but a net contributor. Which means, basically, that if we joined the EU for the money, then we might as well leave.

Now we come to the second over-arching reason for people to be interested in the EU: the migration crisis.

I still cannot understand whether we would get more, or fewer people arriving on our shores, had we not joined the EU. Given that the vast majority of them had no intention of coming to Malta, and arrived here by accident, would this still have been the case if Malta was not a member of the EU?

On the other hand, I admit that the EU rules – more than the simple rules of humanity – then hinder us in what we do after we have saved these unfortunates from a watery grave. It is quite possible, however, that the other international treaties to which Malta is a signatory would require much the same thing as that insisted upon by the EU.

But tackling immigration is by no means the raison d’être of our membership. Looking to the EU to find other countries with whom to share our burden, as the country has been led to believe following the PL’s insistence these last few years, may have been grounded in the legality of EU membership, but it is neither what the EU is there for, nor the reason for which the peoples of Europe are members.

Look around you, for heaven’s sake. There is simply no other country in Europe whose people are so EU-fixated, for whatever reason. For many years under the PN, the EU was the mainstay of PN support and the PL was hostile. Then came a conversion of sorts and the PL started to act as pro-EU. But along came the recognition that it was up to the EU to help Malta carry the burden of the asylum seekers. Again, the EU does offer some help, but it does not exist for that reason.

Deep down, we have always looked on the EU to see what it could give us. Or – to put it plainly – what we could get out of it.

The result is massive frustration all around.

We did get all that funding from the EU, but much of it has been squandered on roads we did not really want. We have had funding for schools which was a good thing. But some big producers swallowed up the funds for agriculture and the ordinary farmer got next to nothing and even saw subsidies disappear. We have seen local councils receive EU funds for all sorts of glory ventures obtained by dint of rural funds. We have a fully-fledged museum in Gozo created this way and a sacristy in Qormi similarly refurnished.

The people of Malta were promised a definite upgrading in the quality of life but, nine years after accession, there has been some improvement but not to the extent that it has affected the quality of life of the vast majority of people. In the same way that the majority of the roads, untouched by EU funds, have remained mostly the same, so too we have had growth in our GDP, but that was on the back of financial services and online gaming and not through the upgraded contribution of the vast majority of the workforce. The industrial estates lie full of unused and derelict factories.

As a result of this week’s Council meeting, the government will be hard at work to depict it as a massive victory for Joseph Muscat. The Opposition is already hard at work to depict it as a let-down, a damp squid.

The Muscat walkout threat has now been postponed until December. Come December, we will see what happens. With this week’s events in focus, just as the addition of three paragraphs was described in terms of a victory in a great naval battle, so too maybe a word added here or there in December will be portrayed as a signal victory by the Great Leader who took on the mighty EU much in the tracks of his predecessor of sainted memory.

After the meeting, I looked and looked for coverage of the conclusions on many foreign news websites and I found none even remotely interested (except for one lone Finnish journalist) in Malta’s plight. They were all more interested in the spy story. I did not find a single Italian website that ran the story in the manner familiar to us. I do not read Greek but would wager their point of view is not ours, either.

We have to do what we have to do, as long as it is honourable and humane. Otherwise, we must defend our national interest rather than squabbling among ourselves over such an issue.

The peoples of Europe are very unlike us. They are in the EU because they want to be there, because they feel Europeans, they are Europeans. We have not made that choice yet. The peoples of Europe have subscribed to the European project. We have not.

Ten years after accession, we are not even sure that we made the right choice.

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