OAR@UM Collection:https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/284092024-03-29T15:24:21Z2024-03-29T15:24:21ZFrom generals to generals : aborted insurrection, painful resurrectionFrendo, Henryhttps://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/286212018-04-03T01:22:09Z1989-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: From generals to generals : aborted insurrection, painful resurrection
Authors: Frendo, Henry
Abstract: The sense of belonging to a religio-centric community has cradled patriotism and nationhood in modem times. The church was not only imperium in imperio in a wide sense; it was also to some extent a manifestation of the individual, of the particular, of the geographical environment. This cradling of patriotism by the institutional church was felt even in the Near East where Islam being a theocratic blueprint allowed less scope for it, yet scholars such as Rourani have argued that it is out of the religiousumma that the sense of a secular nationhood emerged. In situations where the ecclesia and imperium are likely to be at odds, distinctions become easier and more formative. We have observed how it is wrong to conceive of the Rising of the Priests as an exclusively ecclesiastical occurrence. We emphasised the patriotic and political quality of the discourse that was being used, or indeed of the actions that were taken or contemplated from the accession of La Valette (indeed from the very arrival of the Order, which the Maltese nobility had reason to resent and to oppose), right down to the last days of the Order when Rompesch gave in the towel before entering the ring.
The selection of references to 'il Popolo Maltese', to 'i Maltesi', and 'povera Malta' bring home to us how already in the early seventeenth century we had an embryonic nationalism. It was not the Jacobins who invented Mikiel Anton Vassalli's genius either for Malta as 'nazione' or for Maltese speakers as 'veri nazionali', although Vassalli's standpoint marks a note-worthy evolution in the sketching of nationality rights and self-image. Vassalli's 'patrie' was, initially at least, the French one; but as he traced his own origins and his own inner language, as it were, he found in Malteseness a virginity that badly needed awakening and testing. His patriotism thus begins to take on a Maltese tinge. The influence of an idealistic abstraction - the revolutionary vision - is never far away. In the opening paragraph to his Lexicon Melitense-Latino-Italum, published in Rome in 1796, he deliberately calls his introductory address "ALLA NAZIONE MALTESE'. The first word is a rallying cry reverberating from the squares of Paris rather than of Zebbug: "CONCITTADINI'. And, all too typically in our history, everything is in Italian - not, of course, in Maltese!1989-01-01T00:00:00ZThe machismo cult : Malta's independence in contemporary politicsFrendo, Henryhttps://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/286202018-04-03T01:22:04Z1989-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: The machismo cult : Malta's independence in contemporary politics
Authors: Frendo, Henry
Abstract: Independence is not made in one day; but there is a day when it is obtained.
Like most ex-colonies, Malta since 1965 had celebrated 21 September as her National Day. A measure of consensus had been reached in Parliament at the time that Dr. Giorgio Borg Olivier headed Malta's (Nationalist) Government. A quarter of a century later, Malta's statehood is itself beginning to have a history. In this - especially after 1971 - the very acquisition of independence has been turned into an acrimonious partisan issue between the main contending political parties, although the argument that questions how far Malta became independent in 1964 remains fundamentally a political rather than a constitutional one.
'Independence', 'freedom' and indeed 'national' days have assumed an unenviable (and unique) history of their own. Independence Day was eliminated as a national day and even as a public holiday by the Mintoff - led Malta Labour Party (MLP) following its assumption of office in 1971. After using the pre-independence national day of 8 September (1565/1945) temporarily as a stop-gap, national day became 13 December (1974) when Malta was declared a republic - no longer a constitutional monarchy as it had been since independence. But this day was itself replaced by another, that of 31 March (1979) marking the expiry of a new military agreement with the former colonial power, Britain, concluded in 1972. When in May 1987 the Partit Nazzjonaiista (PN) were returned after sixteen years in opposition, the government would have wished to rehabilitate Independence Day; equally it sought "reconciliation' in an island that had become more internally polarized than ever. In view of the impossibility of reaching consensus about restoring Independence Day to its former status, in March 1989 it was agreed to do without a National Day as such and instead to have no less than five (5) days designated as "national" feasts, these to include 21 September 1964, 13 December 1974 and 31 March 1979. The first of these to be commemorated under this new agreement, 31 March, ended in a terrible fracas during which, inter alia, the Commander of the Maltese Armed Forces was assaulted on the dias by well-known MLP supporters as he was about to take the salute. Thus the meaning attributed to words - 'freedom' itself, for one - begs many a definition. Nationalistic rhetoric abounds in what appears to have become a machismo bout: 'whatever you can do I can do better'.
Description: Includes author's preface.1989-01-01T00:00:00ZThe last lap : independence and freedomFrendo, Henryhttps://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/286172018-04-03T01:22:11Z1989-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: The last lap : independence and freedom
Authors: Frendo, Henry
Abstract: The title of this chapter really says it all: what mattered most in attaining independence was that this ushered in experimental years of internal freedom. Many ex-colonies - too many - obtained independence and became unfit to live in, producing refugees by the thousand. That certainly did not happen in Borg Olivier's Malta.1 By 1969 emigration reached rock bottom, return migration grew, settlers came to Malta from overseas. The economy boomed, creating problems of a different kind in its wake. But these were not so much problems of freedom as of economic well-being and learning to live together and to pull through: there was no repression whatsoever. On the contrary the MLP criticism (and a popular joke) was this: tghajjatx ghax tqajjem il-gvem! Government became rather inconspicuous, unobtrusive, intruding only perhaps by a certain apathy, as well as increasingly a lagging commitment on the part of Borg Olivier's ageing team, especially after 1969. Borg Olivier himself, having attained independence, was no longer at his prime, and his unfortunate private and family foibles did nothing to enhance his delivery. In spite of all that, the election result in 1971 was a very close shave indeed. The Nationalist Party, in government since 1962, did not even have a daily newspaper until 1970, on the eve of the election! By contrast the GWU daily L-Orizzont, started in 1962, and other pro-MLP organs lambasted the Borg Olivier administration constantly, and frequently enough, mercilessly. 1970 also saw the use of the GWU strike as a full-scale political weapon when dockyard workers were ordered to strike for months, disrupting the island's major industry mainly on the issue of flexibility. (This ceased to be such an issue when the government changed).
Description: Also includes Appendixes, Index and a note on sources used.1989-01-01T00:00:00ZCollaboration and resistance : a nationalist movement on deckFrendo, Henryhttps://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/286062018-04-03T01:22:06Z1989-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Collaboration and resistance : a nationalist movement on deck
Authors: Frendo, Henry
Abstract: The title of this chapter introduces us to various new developments that begin to characterise a national history from the 1870s onwards. It is a complicated period, the study of which has not been widely diffused; many Maltese even today harbour impressions and prejudices that linger on from colonial times. Yet it is an immensely formative period, pregnant with life-signs and with problems for the future. Looking back, we can identify courage and optimism in the birth of a home-grown nationalist movement to resist imperialism and colonialism as practised in Malta; but equally we can see much pessimism and collaboration which rendered this already difficult task - a nationalist resistance - still more difficult. Robinson and others have argued convincingly that it is ridiculous to try to understand imperialism as an entirely foreign body, thrown onto the subjected like a cloak; it certainly was not so in Malta where the cloak was woven and fashioned out into many a dress and often enough worn with pride, shown off as a mark of superiority, of acceptability or of survival. The underlying additional difficulty in the case of Malta - as this writer has shown extensively in other writings - was that the island had a strategic importance which, in the British perception, could barely allow it to breathe let along to spring into an independent existence. Having been independent for a quarter-of-a-century now, today's Malta may look back upon independence as a foregone conclusion, an inevitable development, an assumption wrapped up in history. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was no easy assumption of inevitability in the Maltese mind and still less so in the British one. It is only now that we may be approaching the time to draft conclusions.1989-01-01T00:00:00Z