“ALL that concerns the Mediterranean is of the deepest interest to civilised man,” wrote Edward Forbes, a 19th-century naturalist. Europe’s great sea will loom large as Malta, the European Union’s smallest member, takes up the rotating presidency of its Council of Ministers for the first half of 2017. That is fitting, for the Mediterranean has defined the destiny of this speck south of Sicily. The Great Siege Road, which runs along the northern edge of Valletta, Malta’s handsome capital, recalls the island’s repulsion of Ottoman invaders in 1565, an act of defiance that resonated across Christian Europe. A covetous Napoleon said conquering the strategically located island was “worth any price”. Centuries later a bull-headed Maltese prime minister shoehorned a chapter on Mediterranean security into the Helsinki Accords, a cold-war compact between the West and the Soviet bloc.
Yet Malta’s fellow Europeans have not always been so interested in the Mediterranean. The accession of Malta and Cyprus to the EU in 2004 marked the end of the club’s expansion in the region. An ill-fated “European Neighbourhood Policy” failed to draw the littoral states to the east and...Continue reading
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