Malta and the EU through the Maltese satirical lens

Abstract

The European Union is commonly understood through its treaties and institutions, yet across its member states its meaning is just as powerfully shaped by the laughter, irony, and satirical humour that emerge in response to the experience of integration. These dynamics become particularly striking in Malta, where a fiercely bipartisan polity confronts a supranational project that begins to reconfigure the contours of its political imagination. This dissertation contends that satire, long dismissed as marginal entertainment, can in fact constitute one of Malta’s revealing archives of Europeanisation. In a country where partisanship shapes identity, and political memory is intensely personal, the satirist’s line becomes a lens through which hopes, anxieties, and resentments towards the EU are crystallised with a clarity that formal discourse rarely achieves. In light of the limited scholarly engagement with Maltese political cartoons on the European Union, this research investigates how these satirical images can narrate Malta’s changing relationship with the EU. Using a qualitative, historically grounded methodology that combines archival research and interpretive visual analysis, it advances two guiding research questions concerning the narrative frames through which satire positions Malta within the Union, and the ways these representations evolve across key junctures – from the accession process to subsequent policy debates. What the analysis brings into focus is a satirical landscape that shifts between vulnerability, defiance, and ironic complicitly. This shifting dynamic becomes particularly evident in preaccession cartoons, which portray Malta as suspended between longing and apprehension, and later intensifies in representations that foreground the frictions of membership through themes in hunting, migration, and economic reforms, where supranational authority rubs sharply against local sensitivities. This dissertation demonstrates that satire is not peripheral to political understanding, but central, operating as a parallel form of public reasoning that registers what citizens feel before it takes shape in formal political expression. By foregrounding satire as a diagnostic lens, this dissertation offers an original contribution to political communication and cultural analysis. It shows that to understand how Malta sees the European Union, one must attend not only to official declarations, but also to the jokes told in their shadow.