So we celebrated 10 years of EU membership this week.

For all the organisers’ efforts, there was an abysmal difference between then and now.

The fireworks may have been better now, considering that the Mayday eve doubled as part of the fireworks festival. And the light show etc.

Otherwise, there is no comparison between the feelings shared on that night by the thousands who flocked to the Waterfront and those who, this time, turned up to watch the fireworks.

The event has had its entire significance hollowed out. Ten years ago there was the spirit of adventure, a significant step in the history of the nation. This time, there was the sad and tawdry spectacle of an administration which culpably (and none more than the man now at its head) missed out of making accession to the EU a bipartisan event.

Having missed out on the day that really mattered, they could only come up with a pale, superficial, imitation. Much as their predecessors tried to drum up enthusiasm when the Brits were leaving as a pale contorted imitation of Independence Day on which they too had missed out. Must be in their genes, their DNA – to miss out on the historical days and then spend years trying to create a pale imitation.

The glitz surrounding the night now could not cover up the fact that it was a manufactured event, any enthusiasm, if there was any, fake and surreal.

There was precious little, as far as I could see, in the way of analysis and appraisal. The documentaries I happened to see on TVM were distorted views of reality, either inscribing EU membership in a long struggle for freedom in which the declaration of the Republic and the end of British military presence featured, or else downgrading EU membership by the many faults of the successive PN administrations.

So, how have these 10 years been? Did Malta achieve in these 10 years what the crowds on the Valletta Waterfront dreamt of on that night? I remember meeting some people who are related to me that night and they told me, rather shamefacedly, they were there “for the sake of our children”. Independently, if that were indeed possible, of who was governing this country, have these 10 years been better for us and for our children?

Even today, I am hard pressed to say they were. Our GDP may have shot up, but it probably would have done so even had we stayed out. Our GDP compared with the EU average has risen so much that we are no longer receivers of EU funds, but that was because the later inclusion of countries infinitely poorer than us has made us seem richer than we really are.

There are so many EU and international scales of comparison that are daily being churned out by Eurostat and the like, and they tell us more about ourselves than we would get to know otherwise. The resulting figures do not make for pleasant reading.

There are all sorts of European and international benchmarks as regards literacy, children’s educational attainments and the like, and time and again we emerge near the bottom of the European pile. We are close to the top, inversely, when it comes to the percentage of school-leaving age children who opt out of the system.

We have been like that for decades and not much improvement has been registered. Meanwhile, we have changed governments, ministers of education, educational systems and all, and we are changing them again now, but the figures do not seem to be getting any better.

And that’s only with regard to education.

The EU is also strong on the environment, has strict laws and benchmarks, and something called 2020 benchmarks to which we have subscribed. And yet, it is true that on 1 May 2004 we stopped depositing our rubbish at Maghtab and since then we have been toiling at turning a possible time bomb with all sorts of toxic gases into a garden and we are not there yet. Yet, at the same time, we are still using, far beyond what we have committed ourselves to doing, the Marsa power station.

Beyond the EU benchmarks, the past 10 years have seen the spread of building and construction go on and on, under different administrations. There can be no doubt now that the present one is even more inclined to listen to the developers than the environmental NGOs and more and more of our declining ODZ land is being gobbled up under one excuse or another. We now have even more empty apartments than we had 10 years ago, we have continued (actually increased) to import cars so that at times it is more worthwhile to walk than to drive.

On to weightier subjects. I have no doubt that what was in Eddie Fenech Adami’s mind, when he committed his party to EU membership, was to posit a counterweight to possible dictatorships and to strengthen democracy.

Even here, I have my doubts. I see the frenzied and paroxysmal approach to elections we have, and I sincerely doubt how a country that has voting records on a Ceausescu level can be called democratic, how a country where dying people are trundled out to vote, where people are jetted in for almost free just to vote when they do not live here, where people sell their votes to the highest bidder, where the voting system systematically and radically excludes any possible third party, can be called democratic.

Our two big parties, though they are full of well-meaning people, seem to have no remedy for this long-standing and radical fault.

It used to be said that EU membership would strengthen the rule of law, but then we were already in the Council of Europe, subject to the fundamental Bill of Human Rights and the court that enforces that. And with us in the COE there is, just to give an example, Russia, and look what’s happening there.

We have gone up and down with our participatory democracy, up with the European Parliament and the rest of the European institutions and down with local councils et al. And yet, has participatory democracy increased as a result or has it just got complicated?

There remain two other areas where 10 years ago we thought EU membership would have made the difference. One is the question of EU funds, although the proper accounting system still has to conclude whether we really did gain with EU membership, everything considered, or whether we have ended up as net contributors rather than net receivers.

Anyway, future analysis will most certainly tell us we spent most of these EU funds on roads which, given the EU rules, had to be spent on just one road, the Ten-T one, which ended up building beautiful roads in the far north and neglecting the difficult nodes. Apart from the almost total neglect of the other problematic areas that lie far away from the Ten-T road.

Joining the EU has also meant, after a lag of just four years, joining the euro which we joined at the start of the most stressed year in recent history – 2008. No one seems to have spared a thought for our good fortune in joining the EU and the euro when we did, certainly not this government which campaigned against and which repeatedly gives proof of not having really understood the implications.

The fact that we did better than the EU average speaks volumes about the ability of the Maltese and the perspicacity of those who were leading them. Again, we seem to have no idea what abysses we avoided and we seem to think we can do it again anytime. The fact that we have attracted some high-flyers does not seem, to many, to be all that important and the result of hard work.

Imagine if we joined and then were absorbed in the tsunami that hit Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy. Would there have been fireworks to celebrate the first 10 years if that happened?

Nor do we seem to understand that an EU that finally, and still in a patchwork manner, seems to have solved its ills is important good news for us all.

For that and all this, what was necessary was not more fireworks than we already have but far more hard work than we have put in.

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