Parliamentary Assembly

Mr President, I thank you for your kind words about my government, my country and myself.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen,

“Membership of the Council of Europe has been to my country like returning home after a long absence.”

Those were the words with which my predecessor, the first Prime Minister of newly-sovereign Malta, began his first address to this Assembly on 4 May 1965. In his development of the theme of “the homecoming”, Dr Borg-Olivier touched upon two aspects of it which have become today, twenty-five years later, even more central to our concerns – namely “taking account of all opportunities for better relations between Eastern and Western Europe” and the “Mediterranean dimension of Europe”.

It is clearly incumbent upon me today to revisit these topics in the light of the historic changes that are now occurring. I am most happy that a significant and symbolic moment in the inaugural process of what increasingly promises to be a new era of co-operation between the former giant rivals of the West and the East has come to have the name of Malta associated with it; just as in 1945, Yalta, for good rhyme and reason, had come to be associated with the systematisation of Europe into two separate and opposed spheres of influence.

But before doing so, allow me, Mr President, in this silver jubilee year of Malta’s membership of the Council of Europe, to reaffirm very strongly my predecessor’s statement linking Malta’s regaining of sovereign status with the perception of our belonging to Europe. “Here,” Dr Borg-Olivier said in the Council of Europe, “we feel truly at home, joined with other members of the family who share our basic concepts and philosophy.”

If, on the one hand, a Maltese patriot like Dr Borg-Olivier felt so thoroughly at home here, in Strasbourg, at the seat of the Council of Europe, and equally chez soi, metaphorically speaking, in any cultural milieu or social manifestation that was typically or unmistakably European, so too, on the other hand, visitors to Malta from most parts of Europe easily find themselves at home in our island, and this partly because of the heritage of the Knights of St John.

Thus, the participants of an expert group in one of the baroque itineraries organised by the Council of Europe asked themselves what was the identifying feature of baroque Malta, and their answer was its possession in a small space of the full range of different national expressions and variations of the baroque style found throughout Europe, from the central European to the Portuguese.

The presence in Malta of the characteristic national artistic dialects of a Europe-wide figurative language is partly due no doubt to the Europe-wide origin of the order usually referred to as that of the Knights of Malta.

The leading European experts who each found a spark of his own country and national culture in the microcosm of our island also remarked that the peculiar identifying mark of the art produced by the vernacular Maltese artists was its synthetic, rather than eclectic, fusion into a coherent whole of the original elements of the imported inspiration from each European cultural milieu.

Their creative re-arrangement of signs of pan-European origin transmits to visitors from Europe a similar feeling of “at homeness” as is felt by the Maltese visitor to any genuine foyer of European culture.

This silver jubilee year of our membership of this Council has been marked by our application for full membership of the European Community, which we hope will further seal and strengthen our participation in the building of the new Europe of the future, stretching from the Arctic to the Mediterranean no less than from the Atlantic to the Urals.

However, the prospect of full membership of the Community in no way diminishes, but rather enhances, our appreciation of, and commitment to, the specific tasks of this Council. Indeed, we believe that these specific tasks have assumed an even greater importance with the development of the Community.

Mr President, in the first place I would like to emphasise the role of the Council in the field of social policy, typified by its establishment of the European Social Charter. There is, I suspect, a not inconsiderable danger that social policy gets overshadowed and disrupted by the necessary attention the Community has to devote to economic and political issues. There has, indeed, been much talk in recent years of a crisis of the welfare state in Europe. However, this crisis seems to be a reflection not only, or even primarily, of concepts of welfare, but also, and perhaps even more, of the crisis of the nation state.

Likewise, the plentiful talk of a transition from the welfare state to a welfare society seems to reflect the realisation that the nation state’s role is being reduced not only by the establishment of more effective supranational or international institutions but by the growing stature of non-state social institutions and other voluntary groups. Some of these groupings are also international, and they include not only philanthropic and religious associations, but also, alas, mafia-type networks.

Consequently, Mr President, at a very successful European conference on social policy which the Maltese Government in conjunction with the Council of Europe hosted in Malta, I decided to put to the assembled experts from all over Europe, including also the Eastern countries, the following blunt question:

“When Europe, or at least the European Community, achieves the maximum economic unity, by the magic year 1992 or whenever, without having however attained political unity, except minimally, what will happen to social policy? Can the social ideals that have inspired Europe over the past years survive the consolidation of a common market, without any common political authority?”

The Community was set up on an economic basis. No political centre with anything like a state-like authority has emerged, despite the increasing pressures and moves towards greater co-operation in the political sphere.

Social problems, with culture and human rights, are on the other hand the main areas of competence of the Council of Europe. Here, innovative proposals for institution building at a European level more extensive than the Community are being made, such as those suggested by Mr Havel concerning European security on the one hand, and what might be called the Helsinki cluster of issues on the other.

I ask: Is it possible to envisage that the Council of Europe develop some novel form of institutional framework to assist its member countries to generate a coherent social policy?

The form would have to be, in the first place, appropriate to a continent moving towards an integrated economic market, but with as yet no central political authority. Secondly, it would have to take into account the fact that, individually, European nations are seeking to transform themselves from welfare states into welfare societies – that is, to recognise that the state is only one leading actor in social development and welfare provision, and that a whole cast of other actors needs to be involved.

Thirdly, as social provision is conditioned by economic possibilities and the economic situation of any state today is conditioned by international factors, the new institutional framework should cater for the fact that no social policy can any longer be effectively fashioned by any state in total autonomy of the other states with which it is somehow linked.

Putting those three considerations together, it follows that, at the European level, a social policy could not be effectively fashioned by an institution such as a small committee of state representatives. It clearly requires a much more flexible and comprehensive network of participants. An original institutional formula needs to be found for social solidarity to be genuinely embodied across the European continent. It cannot be done by the ordinary means of international legislation, but it should be conceived in such a way that the experience of both Western and Eastern and Northern and Southern European countries is pooled.

I suggest that the promotion of such an instrument for social policy would be an excellent way for the Council of Europe to celebrate the end of the forty-four year long post-Yalta period, the end of a world polarised by two strange foci: the dollar, and materialist dialectics.

The work of the Council of Europe has not been a negligible factor in overcoming the bonds of this division. But, as I have already hinted in speaking of a Europe stretching not only from the Atlantic to the Urals but also from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, and as current events hardly allow us to forget, there is also a division across the North-South axis which threatens to worsen instead of heal in the coming years, which future historians might well decide to label the “post-Malta” period.

Even if it wished, Europe could hardly afford to blinker its eyes to what is happening on its neighbouring southern shores. It is being called on to conjure up a new future simultaneously on its southern and on its eastern flanks. Neither can be neglected.

This is not the place and moment for me to dwell at any length on the most immediately threatening situation in the Gulf. I will only mention the suffering that it is causing not only to those directly involved in the area, but also to all those others who, like Malta, had friendly and prosperous relations with both Iraq and Kuwait. Iraq was fast becoming an important trading partner of ours; Kuwait contributed investment to our infrastructural development projects.

There is a bitterness which creeps even into the observation – in itself quite thrilling – of the hardly precedented concord attained between the arch rivals of yesterday, at superpower level, on this issue, when one thinks of the depth of the plight which is the occasion of this consensus.

The Maltese sense of solidarity with European and United Nations judgments and decisions will unhesitatingly sustain the relatively heavy sacrifices required of us, and we will carry out any positive action that might contribute to diminishing immediate hardships and present dangers.

But, even while the critical moments are being lived through, our attention cannot be totally switched off from the whole gamut of background issues: from that of the role of oil in the complex economic relationships between the oil-producing and the oil-consuming countries of both the developed and the developing world, to the related questions of choices of sources of energy with their environmental and political as well as economic dimensions; from the other burning problems of the Middle East, Palestine and Israel, Lebanon and Cyprus, to the more general topics of the common heritage of mankind, of extra-territorial spaces and the possible transcendence of those factors which lead men to forget that they belong to one and the same human species.

Indeed, it may even be that a deeper probing, with longer-term perspectives, into the subsoil of our more visible problems will yield truer solutions than if we concentrated solely on what occupied the front pages of our newspapers; just as President Havel explained to this Council how it was the keeping in focus of visions of a distant horizon that kept hope alive for a long time in his heart and that of his fellow prisoners, until the hour struck when radical change became possible. It is in this spirit and light that we might just now take a new look at the old Mediterranean world, the ancient cradle of our European culture.

Mr President, as you know, at present the majority of the people of the Mediterranean are European. In a few years’ time two-thirds will be inhabitants of the southern and eastern Muslim areas. There is occurring, moreover, a big shift of population from the rural to the urban areas. Pressures are rising to explosive degrees. As it has been put, Europe cannot respond merely by establishing a picket line along its frontiers.

The only hopeful action and option is exporting the chances of prosperity. This option will not, of course, be achieved by entertaining unrealistic dreams based on obsolete political concepts. It can be done only by inventing new means of co-operation, new kinds of networking arrangements, new forms of mutually profitable undertakings. These should involve private enterprise, working together with states and international organisations. Primacy should be given to scientific, technological and cultural initiatives, and that is why this option falls within the area of main concern of this Council.

Malta in its way, I am convinced, could play a particular role in this process. We have shown ourselves ready and able to contribute to the setting up of pan-Mediterranean functional networks of co-operation. The “functional” approach was adopted by the founding fathers of the European Community in the conviction that it would ultimately lead to political union, but this would be an unrealistic and perhaps undesirable dream for the Mediterranean as a whole. It is, however, by no means implicit in the setting up of networks of functional institutions. It can easily be excluded in the setting up of sea-based functionally specific institutions for cooperation between the European and the other societies bordering the Mediterranean.

The setting up need not be oriented towards the creation or magnification of any super-state. They would be justified just for their own sake. They can also be successfully set up despite the persistence of sharp political disagreements. In saying this, I do not intend, of course, to discount the tragedy of existing conflicts or to show indifference towards their urgent resolution.

I am merely drawing attention to the evidence of experience. It has, in fact, been possible to set up Mediterranean regional institutions, such as the Regional Marine Pollution Emergency Response Centre, established in Malta under the terms of the Barcelona Convention and with the participation of all Mediterranean countries – including both Libya and Israel – except for Albania, which may also no longer be determined to stay out. Such institutions are no handicap to any state, and are advantageous to all.

Moreover, because they are sea-centred, they do not rival or duplicate any European Community or other multinational institution; they constitute a complementary outreach. Indeed, it may well be the case that they prove themselves to be both a major contribution to the groundwork for the overcoming of the conflicts which still bedevil the region, as well as for the construction of a new pattern of Euro-Mediterranean relations.

The history of Euro-Mediterranean relations has been a curiously alternating sequence of periods of intense dialogue and periods of lax follow-ups. At present, proposals are being made in various international forums, such as the proposal to set up a Mediterranean-centred version of the Helsinki process and mechanisms or even of a Mediterranean council or forum for regular and systematic discussions of problems and projects common to both the European and the non-European littoral countries.

Probably any means that are at all likely to increase communication and understanding in the area should be welcome. It may also be, however, that initiatives in the areas which are among those of particular concern to the Council of Europe – social development and culture – are likely to be the most fruitful.

To conclude, Mr President, Malta feels sufficiently at home in Europe and confident in its European identity that it has no hesitation in offering itself as a base or outpost for any initiative of dialogue and co-operation that it may be thought profitable to pursue in this respect.

I hope that the results will be as favourable in the perspective of the sustainable development of Europe and the world as has been our experience recently in hosting dialogue meetings.

Perhaps – and I say this with vivid memories of the background scenes to the Malta Summit – the sun will shine with its normal brightness in our part of the world. (Applause)