There are authors whose work tends to become personal to us as their readers, especially in terms of how we read them and how in turn they attract our attention. I say, “read them” (rather than just “reading their books”) because here these authors’ work becomes synonymous with “them” and by implication it has something to do with “us”. Although one may or may not know these authors personally, through their work they partake of one’s personal engagement with a world which, as one gets older, tends to become, not without a sense of paradox, strangely narrower the more it evenly expands.

Storying ourselves

I have known Alfred Sant since I can remember being engaged in Maltese politics. Having said that, I cannot claim to have known Dr Sant well except in my youthful dealings with the politics of the 1980s. A decade and a half his junior, I confess to have always felt intimidated by his towering intellect. Then he was already a Boston and Harvard graduate, educated in Europe, where he worked and gained substantial experience as a political operative.

Those of us who have followed his work over decades would agree that in Sant’s politics one could take one’s own measure. I remember how back in the 1980s we “crossed swords” with him about “the left in the Labour Movement”, which I then felt was being squeezed out of the Labour Party. In return he patiently obliged with our impatience (I say “our” because I was not the only “young leftie” who felt like that) and he even spent time in conversation on the press with us.

I must apologise for forcing readers to go down memory lane with me. But given the nature of Sant’ latest book, Fehmiet u Għarfien, it is difficult for anyone who closely followed Maltese politics since the 1980s not to locate oneself while reading it, especially where he offers substantial historical perspectives on how Maltese politics shaped his thoughts. This is particularly tangible when he writes about Eddie Fenech Adami and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, where I could not help thinking: “So that’s what was happening” or “OK, now I understand why he was taking this and that position,” and “I wish I could then understand better the situation and what was going on backstage”.

However, as I read Sant’s book, I also found that some of the “instincts” we had then, including the rise of violence on both sides of Maltese tribalism, were neither whataboutist nor reductive or simplistic. Then, some of us found ourselves distanced from the MLP, while we could never find a home in the PN, let alone believe anything that it stood for. That was vindicated by how subsequent Nationalist governments sustained a political agenda that veered to the right (as expected), even when it bragged over its centrist narrative. Like its allies in Europe, Fenech Adami’s Nationalists managed to open wide markets to the powerful while sustaining a modicum of social provision which came thanks to this legacy. It’s a logic with which we have become all too familiar, even with Labour governments, except for Sant’s short-lived premiership.

Sant’s political will

This is not to say we then fully understood what was going on. But reading Sant’s book, now I feel somewhat reassured that while age and inexperience could not protect us from a degree of naïveté, we were also lucky to engage with the likes of Sant, Charles Miceli, and others who, in their often contrasting views, were quietly working hard (often against the grain) to keep the Labour Movement in some shape, while recognising openly that there were many mistakes, mishaps and disasters, many of which were self-inflicted while others were successfully baited by a sharp and efficient Nationalist Party machine. What we get from Sant is a dispassionate account that makes no excuses for those in Labour (of whom he would subsequently get rid of) while holding nothing back from his sharp analysis of leaders like Eddie Fenech Adami, whose political beatification is not simply postponed but totally ruled out by Sant’s assessment of history.

This also puts his own leadership in some perspective. I would be the first to say that in many ways, even when we disagreed with Sant, he represented a political will which kept us working within a wider political sphere that you could call “the left”, at times when often Sant’s own Labour Party began to appear too centrist and compromising. That’s when some of us became increasingly critical to the extent of moving on the verge of leaving before finding ourselves booted out of Il-Maċina.

That such thoughts emerge when reading Sant’s Fehmiet u għarfien attest to the fact that Sant’s politics had substance and where, as we begin to reflect on the PL today, we realise that rather than built upon (as claimed by Joseph Muscat’s crew, whose claims on Santian credentials are well-known), his legacy has been frankly plundered.

On this I have written in the past, and even when I tended to disagree with Sant as a young militant, I would now argue that his political vision was sustained on a longue durée which would have changed Malta for good (and the good) had his premiership lasted. Ultimately, it was one of those missed opportunities which fate has a tendency of inflicting upon politics – a fate which I find not that dissimilar to British Labour with John Smith’s untimely passing back in 1994, which soon gave way to Tony Blair who likewise plundered Smith’s legacy. (And I say so knowing well that both Sant and Muscat often used the image and mantra of Blair’s “New Labour” politics).

(Re)living history

Love him or loathe him (and there are those who seem to do so with some relish, though such words don’t really suit any commentary on Sant’s work), Sant’s thoughts and knowledge could only be ignored at one’s own expense — if, of course, one cares about Maltese politics. This is because what he offers is not just his experience, sharp commentary and analysis, but a benchmark on how to engage with Maltese and European history.

Sant has a gift (which is sometimes seen as a curse), in that he is dispassionate (or at least he appears to be so) in how he presents his interpretation of political history. You are at liberty to disagree, and he would rebut your argument, often with a degree of logic and sometimes with what appears to be an uncompromising style, even when this should not be read as being in anyway arrogant or rude. (“Jiddispjaċini, imma l-argument tiegħek ma jikkonvinċinix” [“I am sorry, but your argument does not convince me”], is one of his killer replies.)

Rather, Sant presents us with a mature invitation to engage with Malta’s contemporary and modern political history with a high degree of commitment. I happen to share with him an impatience with the laziness by which often, many members of the Maltese commentariat tend to approach politics. He has no time for easy conjecture. Likewise, he is equally wary of rhetorical statement. Sant is generous in his thinking and highly dedicated to his work. Some took umbrage on his running successfully as an MEP. But looking back at how he exercised that role, we know that it was nothing short of being principled, efficient and professional in its no non-sense approach. As he recently declared his “retirement”, I hope that this will give him the time and energy to continue to write and fill in the blanks by which Maltese history is often rendered victim of a “common sense” that merely reflects how our tribal indulgences failed us all.

Dark times

We live in dark times. Here I appropriate Hannah Arendt’s use of this phrase openly because this is also a time that requires us to be almost brutal with understanding what is actually happening. This is not an invitation to see what we’d like to see happening. Rather, this is where we must dismiss the passive reception of all manner of “post-truth” gimmicks and recognise that even in history we cannot simply find parallels to sit on and pontificate about (which is all too tempting to do).

Alfred Sant has a lot to say about this. One may well disagree with his analysis. I find it difficult to simply explain things through the economy, just as I also recognise that the irrational elements which often seize politics cannot find response in passionate assumptions and political slogans – and this applies to the left, which has its track record of delusional disasters. But perhaps, as Sant argues, we need to be far clearer and at the very best we should agree on how we could then move on and as we take stock of our disagreements.

I draw the reader’s attention with a quote from his book, which is as much sobering as it remains challenging, especially to a Maltese political class which unfortunately continues to let us down in many ways. Speaking about events that emerged in the first decade of this century, which he characterises as “highlighted by terrorism and immigration, but also consequent on the 2008 economic and financial recession,” Sant argues that this “put paid to” the vision of a tolerant Europe. Asking whether this blind belief was an illusion, he argues that “the implications of tolerance; the beliefs about social cohesion within a framework of cultural diversity; the claims about freedom of speech and belief; pluralism as a way of life, have become contested. Yet along with other assumptions, they had ended up being taken for granted as characteristic features of the ‘modern’ European ethos.” (p. 27)

Those who simply cast Sant as some “Eurosceptic” who is against anything to do with Europe or the EU, will simply read this through their prejudiced spectacles. But in effect Sant is looking at a far wider horizon than his detractors ever cared to entertain. “One reaction to such contestation could have been: we were here before, what’s new? But that has been precisely the problem. Many Europeans assumed they would never get back here again. They now fear the recurrence of conditions that would replicate fascism. They blame extremist nationalism and populism for the surge of resistance to the multicultural society that has developed in Europe.” (p. 27)

Sant’s lesson

Sant’s lesson is that one cannot simply reduce a situation to “what happened in the past” or to some formulaic interpretation that would fit, in identitarian manner, in one’s ideological assumptions. Rather, Sant argues that “these ‘isms’ are themselves responses to arising phenomena. They do not cause the latter but are caused by them.” (p. 27)

On this point, I’d say that Sant shows, time and again, how he is not beholden to ideological assumptions, but has learnt the lessons of history to dig deeper and never offer any lazy or “common sense” explanation to what appears to be a comfortable and widely accepted audience.

Those who regard Sant as being rigid or intransigent are as wrong as those who dismiss him as a functionalist pragmatist. I admit that, in my youth, I have had been prone to apportion Sant’s approach to functionalist politics. This was partly prompted by how he appeared to be allergic to the kind of discourse in which we grew up experiencing Maltese politics. He often appeared to be too mechanistic to those of us who were partly exercised by a Mintoffian approach to ideas of social justice and equality.

Reading this book, one clearly realises that he has consistently sought to sustain clean governance and a functioning society that would have delivered a long-lasting legacy of social justice and equality. His politics entertained nothing of the high-flown and arm-waving theatrics which, as Malta’s recent history confirms, has deprived us from the strength and acumen of a sustained and fulfilled government led by Alfred Sant.

I say this not out of displaced nostalgia. Nor out of some inclination to please Sant or anyone else. Rather, I say so because even when Sant might not agree, politics depend, like everything else, on historical contingency which is never short of its cruelty. This cruelty is meted to all of us who would have been far better served by reason rather than the tribal acrimony and nonsense which continue to plague Maltese politics to this day. I also have no doubt that Sant’s lessons were never learnt, especially by the same Labour Party that he once reformed and led. Is he to be blamed? I don’t think so.

Main photo: Eric Vidal/EU