Europe, a shameful spectacle

Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni has become a victim of the contradictions characterising right-wing thinking on migration. Basically there can be little solidarity on migration between governments elected on a hardline anti-immigration ticket.

While as minister of the Italian republic, Maroni expects France to accept Tunisian economic migrants who were granted temporary protection by Italy, his Northern League leader Umberto Bossi stood aloof arguing that immigrants should simply not be accepted in the first place. Basically Maroni is asking Sarkozy not to behave like Bossi.

At the same time, while Italy expects France to allow Tunisian economic migrants cross its borders, it has sent back a boat of 170 asylum seekers to Malta after these were rescued by the Maltese near Lampedusa. Ironically after weeks of crying wolf on the impending biblical exodus, Italy found itself unprepared when the boats started arriving. The political degeneration is exposed by a startling comparison. Back in 1999 during the Kosovo crisis Italy was able to accommodate 30,000 immigrants from the Balkans without blaming the rest of Europe for its predicament.

Malta's government also finds itself betrayed by centre-right governments who seem to be the least keen on sharing responsibility for migrants. The lesson from this farce is that the worse enemies of solidarity mechanisms are those who pride themselves on defending the national interest at the cost of all other considerations.

Ironically on immigration, Malta's worst enemies are many of Simon Busuttil's colleagues in the European centre-right. The only consolation is that this puts him in the right place, preaching to those most in need of conversion. But it says a lot on the degeneration of the European model at the hands of right-wing governments.

Finally faced with epochal changes in North Africa, no European statesman has come up with a vision which gives hopes of integration in a common Mediterranean economy to the budding democracies in North Africa. Opening up the economies of these countries to European markets while instituting common social, environmental and democratic standards should be the priority of the EU.

While Sarkozy should be praised for saving Benghazi from annihilation in the hands of Gaddafi's brutal hordes (a resolve which did not characterize isolationist Germany), his opposition to Turkey's membership in the EU exposes his lack of vision and the contradiction of those who speak of universal values while still harking back to the petty nationalism and fossilised identities of the past. Perhaps he was right man in the right moment to stop a genocide from happening. But what's next?

All this shows the need of more and not for less Europe. And perhaps a yearning for something even bigger than Europe. This Europe of centre-right governments jostling for their own national solutions has failed us, both as Maltese and Europeans. Yet I suspect that the way things are going will lead to an even greater division between cosmopolitans whose cultural capital empowers them to look beyond the narrow confines of the nation state and the narrow minded victims of myopia.