One of my favourite books which I read and reread often is ‘In Retrospect’ where US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara reflects on the tragedy of Vietnam and lessons learned from it. He writes: "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
It took him 30 years to admit this, but at least he had the decency and courage to do it. "I'm very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I've made errors … People don't want to admit they made mistakes. This is true of the Catholic Church, it's true of companies, it's true of non-governmental organizations and it's certainly true of political bodies."
What strikes me most in McNamara’s tormented confession and analysis is this insight: “Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of Vietnam’s history, culture, and politics, plus the personalities and habits of its leaders.”
Foreign ministers and their advisors should have the humility to take this advice and take time to learn about the history, culture, politics of the countries that they deal with and try to understand the habits and personalities of the political leaders they meet. If we need interpreters to help us understand each other’s languages, how much more we need to understand each other’s culture, history and reality?
Last year, President George Vella started an excellent initiative about understanding each other’s realities by holding a cultural symposium to explore and better discover the relations that Malta has with France. He intends holding others about our relationship with other countries. Such symposia reach their aim if they go beyond celebrating links between countries and delve into each other’s realities to get to know each other better.
I started my very short intervention at the Malta-France symposium by quoting Jean Quintin: “There are many troglodytes in Malta. They dig caves and these are their homes.”
It is significant that the earliest known and extensive description of Malta was written by 33-year-old Jean Quintin born in Autun, France in 1500. For a time this rare original eyewitness account influenced a lot of literature about Malta. The encounter between France and Malta in some form or other goes back at least 930 years. Over the last nine centuries, the relationship between our two countries ebbed and flowed with the tide of the history of the Mediterranean region and beyond.
A proper, sober, realistic and comprehensive assessment of the history of Maltese-French relations, without beautifying them or demonising them, has still to be carried out.
As formidable French historians like Fernand Braudel and Marc Bloch teach us through their works, historical interpretation and analysis are always ‘works in progress’. New discoveries and new analytical methods continue to evolve, helping us to have a fuller understanding of where we are coming from.
We have a complex Maltese cultural identity which is dynamic and continues to evolve, coming from a multi-layered millennial historical experience. We have been formed, and continue to be formed, through our encounters with different civilizations and cultures from different neighbouring and more distant countries.
We are open because we are at peace with our history. The more we understand our past, including our relations with France, the more we will be better equipped to live and thrive in today’s and tomorrow’s complex and diverse world, where we have all become each other’s neighbours.
If we are to survive as a planet, we must find ways of understanding each other and living together. We can only understand each other if we know each other’s history, culture and geography, to enable us to be empathetic and put ourselves in each other’s skins.
Outsized role of small islands
A fine Spanish diplomat Juan Gonzalez Barba recently told me: “We need European leaders with a deep sense and understanding of our continental history. Such a knowledge must perforce include a candid reckoning of the outsized role European islands have played in our history.”
“After all, our mythical beginning starts with the rape of a Phoenician princess by Zeus, who took Europe to Crete, a geographical crucible as Malta is. Before the invention of the railway, islands and ports along the continental coast and the biggest navigable rivers were the communication nodes.”
“Malta has been, since her foundation, such a node, and what you so aptly write about the relations with France could be written about those with Spain, with the Italian principalities and kingdoms, with the Ottoman empire and so on.”
A survey carried out last year about how the Maltese see their country’s role in the world, shows that most of our people have a very realistic assessment of what a small country like us can do: while obviously not an influencer in global affairs, we are not totally insignificant either.
Four out of five see that despite our smallness, we have a role to play in the Mediterranean for peace and cooperation. The same amount consider neutrality as very important or important, and to use it to have good relations with as many countries as possible. An equal amount also says how important it is to play an active role in the European Union.
Most of our people see, as complementary, our role in the Mediterranean as a neutral member state of the European Union working for peace and cooperation, promoting mediation and negotiation and a peaceful resolution of disputes.
Having no hidden agendas and no hard power to threaten others with, we can tell others to remember that most of today’s issues and challenges in the world, whatever the size of the country involved, can only be addressed and solved by finding ways to cooperate together for our common survival. The alternative is collective suicide.
'This is the way the world ends', T. S. Eliot tells us at the end of his 1925 poem, 'The Hollow Men': 'not with a bang but a whimper.'
There is no need to destroy the planet with an apocalyptic nuclear bang. It is enough to end it with a whimper through a slow death by not together addressing the multiple global issues of the climate crisis and the complicated transition to a sustainable world powered by clean renewable energy.