The eurozone is now free of the tensions that tormented it just a few years ago. Acute crises seem to have become a thing of the past. In their majority, its economies are registering positive outcomes. To be sure, they could have been doing better. Still, their performance is acceptable.

However, this overall picture could be misleading – and not just because the Greek fever could overnight become unbearable.

The leading problem remains an ever increasing divergence between economies in the zone which are performing well and those others which are losing out. The split – if you like, between north and south – is still there. Nothing in current outturns will help to bridge it; actually the contrary is happening.

The political and monetary leadership remains focussed on the message that the glass is half full. One can hardly blame them for this. If they did otherwise, the glass would soon empty. However if we fail to consider the other half that is empty, that would also happen.

***

Air Malta

It is not just the company’s workers and employees who, increasingly anxious, keep asking: Quo Vadis Air Malta?

So do all those who believe that we need a national airline to serve as a tool by which to underpin incoming tourism.

The siren voices of pro-business ideology tell us: do not worry;in the absence of the company, other enterprises will emerge. They will compete to drive inbound tourism forward ina big way according to the profits they register.

Not so: as soon as those profits decline, private sector companies will simply retreat. They won’t bother to keep working for the generation of new tourism inflows.

Over the years, as has happened elsewhere, we have lost the touch of how to run state enterprises: the principles according to which they should function, which market disciplines they need to observe, which aims should be set for them.

Europe-wide, the neo-liberal ideology has been adopted in the name of efficiency. It is preventing countries from mobilizing their national resources in order to give direction to economic activity. It is an ideology that benefitted from the misuse of a previous“left-wing” one and has spread on the back of it – by which some countries seemed to be held back from ensuring that state enterprises are managed with a prudence that would have enabled them to operate effectively in competitive markets.

***

Moral conviction

When one reaches a certain age, as I have, one accedes to the privilege of smiling at certain changes in society that one witnesses. These do not follow only from some change in the way by which we consider each other or each other’s behaviour.

I couldn’t help smiling recently when reading through a report about a case of alleged corruption. Its author reached his conclusions on the basis of a “moral conviction”.

I remembered – after all, this was not so long ago – how learned voices quickly expressed their total disdain when I expressed a – moral and “intimate” – conviction about another case. It was much more serious than the one that was published recently, and was based on more significant pointers as evidence.

As seasons change, so do evaluations: according to the waltz of which shadows?