Or maybe it is a 10-year itch.

What we are passing through now, from the general election last March to this citizenship for sale issue convince me that, 10 years after joining the EU, it is daily becoming clearer that we joined under the wrong pretences. Our convictions are skin deep and we are easily deflected and tempted to look elsewhere.

Let’s face it: when 11 years ago we voted in the referendum to join the EU, the clinching argument was that of money. We were promised tons and tons of money from the munificent EU. When on 8 December 2002 Alfred Sant dared suggest that the funds coming our way from the EU would be just a trickle, he was laughed out of town.

In fact, funds, massive dollops of them, did come. What we spent them on depended on the EU rules and our ability and decisions. We spent most of them on the roads up north and on travel opportunities for students.

But now the funds have run out. Malta was a net recipient of EU funds as long as it remained among the poor countries. But what with the inclusion of even poorer countries and with Malta’s economy growing, Malta is now beyond being a net receiver and on its way to become a net contributor.

If we joined to get money, there is now no reason to stay.

So when the present government, led by people who were against joining the EU in the first place, tried to get money from other sources, from China or elsewhere, and then, through this IIP scheme through people coming from outside the EU, many did not see, still do not see, anything amiss.

Of course, like a marriage, there can be ties and consequences which cannot be undone so easily. It is not that so far no member state has left the union, but also we are now part of the eurozone, our currency is the euro and we also sit around tables (Council, Ecofin, ECB etc) where important decisions are taken (even if with a very small share in most decision-taking).

But the romance has gone out of the enthusiasm of joining the Union. When Labour accepted the verdict of the 2003 referendum, as confirmed by the subsequent election and blue flags started appearing at PL meetings that hollowed out the previous enthusiasm for joining, the impression was that our country had taken a huge step forward.

Let me put it in a different way. Whatever the hopes were that by joining the EU our situation was to be immediately and sensibly upgraded, the reality of the past years has shown that to be a pipe-dream.

Our economy may have grown but that was thanks to our hard work and some good decisions. Some roads have been done up but others are still in the terrible state they have always been in. And while our economy grew, our average wages did not grow commensurably – in fact, Malta, along with Germany, had the lowest wage increases in the EU. While some sectors like financial services and online gaming took off, the rest of the national economy, based mostly on government employment (which proportionately increased over the years with the creation of so many authorities) and on industry remained mostly static (look at the cemeteries of factories in the industrial estates).

Our ministers and prime minister trudged dutifully to Brussels, at a huge cost to their health, but we were always taken for granted, side players in the big game, almost ball boys rather than players. The attractiveness of taking our place at the Council palled.

So when last March’s election came round, the previous administration, the successor of that which had brought Malta in, had nothing much to offer except more years of this. Joe Muscat, for better or for worse, offered far more. The people in their thousands plumped for him.

Whether from conviction or from experience, Dr Muscat believes there are greater opportunities outside the EU than inside. So he has moved Malta to the periphery of the EU spurred by events that anger the Maltese like the many boat loads of asylum seekers and the lack of demonstrable solidarity by the other EU members.

This anger and derision have now been crystallised by IIP.

There is however another strand to this. Malta has become not just a post-Catholic country but also a country where ethics and morality have become ruled by expediency.

The meaning of the shock, anger and disdain spewed against Malta in the debate in the European Parliament on Wednesday show sheer incredulity at the lack of moral or ethical standards which should inculcate respect for one’s citizenship status and which should have avoided turning it into a cash cow with no regard whatsoever of the consequences on the other countries.

Malta and its present leaders have found a chink in the EU armour that can prove to be lethal to the self-idea of the Union. If giving a passport is a national right, then the entire superstructure of countries coming together in a Union is undermined. It is useless having a single currency and a single market (though much remains to be completed) if a single country, and the smallest one at that, can effectively defy it.

Whether the Commission can now overturn this and shut the stable after the Maltese horse has bolted remains to be seen. It will take ages for the legal staff to get their act together and get the approval of the other member states and meanwhile Malta will be raking in the shekels and laughing its head off.

This is not to say that the Commission is toothless or ineffective in its powers. It has had experience dealing with troublesome countries, from Greece to Hungary, from Austria itself and today the Commission carries far more clout than it had in the past. But in this case it is still not clear if the Commission can initiate disciplinary proceedings against Malta.

It thus remains for the Maltese themselves to decide whether they really want to be members of the Union; what is the point of being an EU member state (except for passing quickly at passport control), what is the whole point of subscribing to the entire corpus (or acquis communautaire) of EU legislation, of feeling in solidarity with the other countries in the Union.

Or going on our own as the events of the 1970s and 1980s made us believe we could. We have even distorted our not so recent past – Mitna ghall-barrani, they sang in Gensna, whereas World War II was not a war ‘tal-barrani’ but a war against Fascism and Nazism. If we cannot understand that, our perception of everything else is skewed.

This government tackled IIP wrongly and badly – suffice to say Parliament passed the bill and the President signed it just two hours before the government suspended it and removed key parts of it. Then there were other consultations and further amendments.

The defence mounted in Strasbourg ranged from the pathetic (“Don’t pick on us – we’re small”) to calling those Maltese calling for its removal traitors.

Yet a vast chunk of Maltese have yet to understand and be bothered by all the noise that has been raised. There was also a lot of misinformation thrown around and the mass media maybe treated the whole issue superficially.

Unless we understand why we are in the EU and decide that once again we want to stay in the EU, that it is not for money or to get them to take in the asylum seekers and that we want to remain there, our standing remains shaky.

As I said in the title, if it were a marriage, it would have been annulled (not divorce, for that is a different issue) by now, for it is patently clear it was made under false pretences. But again, as in a marriage, the couple have to find a renewed reason to stay together, time and again, rather than stay together because 10 years ago they tied the knot.

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