Foreword [Secular reflections : on a nation's anomaly]

Abstract

George Orwell had claimed that one of the reasons he writes is the 'historical impulse' which creates 'the desire to see things as they are and find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity. Malta's 60th year anniversary of its Independence from the United Kingdom, presents a timely opportunity to reformulate a critical reflection of who we are as a nation. Are we still a nationless state, as Godfrey Baldacchino probed two years before E. U. accession? Are we a nation of contradictions, in Sartre's sense that we manifest an ineludible tension between individual freedoms and collective responsibility? Are we ambivalent Europeans, as Mitchell (2002) coined it, with an ''ambivalent self-identity that is simultaneously self-aggrandising and self-deprecatory"?