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In a few words - alas, too few to do justice to this subject – the author commemorates, as this beautiful medal is also intended to do, an event which is undoubtedly the greatest one in Malta's modern history: the achievement of independence. In doing so, he begs forgiveness if he seems to overindulge in the use of the first person singular. But, to some extent this is unavoidable given that the events running up to Independence he had the good fortune of being right at the forefront and literally in the thick of it all. ; peer-reviewed

Much water has passed under the bridge since Malta became an independent and sovereign state on 21st September 1964, but its essentially Westminster-style Constitution has survived with often minor amendments and changes to respond to certain circumstances as these arose. Such amendments have been largely the result of electoral quirks which needed a remedy, but some have also been political and seminal. ; non peer-reviewed

The end of empire was rarely a neat or seamless process. Elements of empire often persisted despite the severance of formal constitutional ties. This was particularly so in the case of Malta which maintained strong financial and military links with Britain long after formal independence in 1964. Attempts to effect the decolonisation of Malta through integration with Britain in the 1950s gave way to more conventional constitution-making by the early 1960s. British attempts to retain imperial interests beyond the end of formal empire were answered by Maltese determination to secure financial and other benefits as a quid pro quo for tolerating close ties with the former imperial power. By the early 1970s, however, Britain wearied of the demands placed upon it by the importunate Maltese, preferring instead to try and pass responsibility for supporting Malta onto its NATO allies. ; peer-reviewed

Malta is the smallest member of the European Union. Strategically located, the nation has been under successive invasions and domination of several other European nations. Given the strategic location of the nation, recurring fears of invasion have dominated Malta, hence the need for concerted collective watchfulness under a supreme command. Governance was centralized, however, localities have distinct identities before any democratic norm could be institutionalized in their service. This article discusses Malta and the slow maturation of its local government. It discusses Malta's move towards devolvement, delegation, and regionalization; all of which have been trivial issues within the formation of the political system of the nation. Although the delegation of political powers in Malta was trivial, they nevertheless contributed to the service delivery agenda, especially as councils have been entrusted with the enacting as well as with the enforcement of their own by-laws. Despite the limitations and deficiencies circumscribed by the lack of critical mass, local governments in Malta have worked reasonably well and moved at a steady pace. This has crystallized local identities in a secular sense and hurried the pace of infrastructure works. It has also dented the notion and practice of over-centralized government. Keeping abreast with the changing times and with the new responsibilities as an EU member, Malta has been working for reforms. ; peer-reviewed

Also includes Appendixes, Index and a note on sources used. ; 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). ; peer-reviewed

In our mental agenda for this work, set out in the previous pages, we asked what the relationship of history to politics was and what the history of freedom in Malta was. Let us begin with the former, which may be easier to size up. One can probably distinguish, if not too precisely, between what for our purposes we shall describe as a Nineteenth Century image, and a more recent Twentieth Century image of Maltese history. Both these pictures of the past are influenced by politics (that is by the condition of power, powerlessness or power-seeking, policy making and decisiontaking with regard to the sharing of such resources as existed). At the risk of much generalisation, one is tempted to take this distinction further still and to postulate that whereas in the first variant of popular historiography, Maltese leaders were concerned with portraying themselves mainly to others, in the second one, they were more concerned with impressing their own kind. The change in packaging is largely the consequence of markedly different political conditions. Whereas in the earlier phase, Malta was a foreign possession struggling in the face of insuperable odds to win for herself a measure of respect and credibility as the territory of a people with historical characteristics that could lead the owner to grant some measure of internal freedom, in the second phase this hurdle had in principle been slowly overcome, the franchise was greatly and eventually completely extended, and indeed independence from the occupier ceased to be an overriding preoccupation. Instead, it was the people themselves, i.e. the electorate who were in principle the sovereign, who became the consumers of popular historiography. The all-important difference here was that whereas previously there was an 'us' and 'them' that was fairly (although never all too easily) identified, subsequently, and increasingly, it was 'us' to 'ourslves' and, one might add, on our own as well. If earlier there were two presences that needed to be convinced - the foreign, generally itself in harness, and the local, generally caught in unfulfilled aspirations now there was increasingly only one audience, the local one. Although resident ambassadors of other countries sent home their assessment reports of what these Maltese were up to, it was basically they (Maltese) who said what they liked about others and, indeed, about themselves as well. ; peer-reviewed

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! ; peer-reviewed

Includes author's preface. ; 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'. ; peer-reviewed

PH.D.CLASSICS ; Joining a vibrant area within Classical Reception that explores the role of Classics and classical learning in a colonial environment, this thesis situates Classics in the educational and political history of Malta during the British era (1800-1979). While making use of a varied range of published, archival, and oral sources, it traces the history of Latin and Greek as academic subjects, primarily at the University of Malta, but also at other teaching institutions, in an island where Latin was essentially the domain of the Catholic Church. Both the bio-bibliographical account of the scholarly protagonists, and the analysis of the development of classical curricula and teaching methodologies, serve to fit Classics in the history of Maltese pedagogy within the socio-political framework of the times. Within this educational context, the study also seeks to investigate the interaction between Classics and politics in a period fraught with growing sentiments of nationalism and the struggle for a cultural identity. Encased as Latin was in the religio-cultural notions of Italianità, this thesis argues that seldom if ever did Classics in Malta manage to produce a real and explicit effect outside the purely educational environment. The situation provides a unique and interesting study in Classical Reception and the rise of modern nationalism in a small Mediterranean island with a long history. ; N/A

In this volume on Maltese political development, Professor Henry Frendo has compiled, edited, introduced and annotated an anthology of texts – Letters, editorials, speeches, inquiries, despatches, conferences, broadcasts – in French, Italian, English and Maltese, with reference to the period of the French and of the British occupations – an era covering over 166 years. In presenting the first such documentary history of Malta, he traces events from the Maltese popular insurrection of September 1798 to the origins of Maltese statehood in September 1964 and Malta's membership of the Council of Europe. In his writings since 1970 on party politics, colonial nationalism, language and identity, the mass media, migrants and refugees, one of Frendo's primary concerns has been the relationship of culture to politics, especially in the 'British' Mediterranean. A former daily newspaper editor, a UN diplomat in different countries, and since 1988 Professor of History at the University of malta, Henry Frendo has been an international visitor in the U.S.A and in Germany, a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford, a Guest Lecturer at Florence, a consultant to the Australian National University, a Salzburg Fellow and a Guest Professor at Augsburg. ; peer-reviewed

This paper provides a brief outline of the legislative development of first and second generation human rights and fundamental freedoms from the British period to post-independent Malta, with particular focus on the period 1953 to 2008. Human rights and fundamental freedoms as we know them today have been codified after WW H. Since then various declarations and conventions incorporating human rights and fundamental freedoms have come to the fore on an international, regional and national level. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948 and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950 - the first soft law and the second hard law immediately come to mind. Nevertheless, in so far as Malta is concerned, we can trace our human rights history back to the Declaration of Rights of the Inhabitants of the Islands of Malta and Gozo of 15 June 1802 - a declaration which is reminiscent of similar declarations proclaimed during the late eighteenth century such as the American Bill of Rights of 25 September 1789 and the French Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen of 26 August 1789 and, very much earlier, the English Magna Carta of 15 June 1215. What is of historical relevance of the 1802 Maltese Declaration is that it was drawn up by the Maltese themselves - it was our first autochthonous human rights instrument which was not granted to us by a foreign colonial power who ruled Malta over time as were subsequent instruments such as the human rights and fundamental freedoms provisions in the 1959 Maltese Constitution, the 1961 Blood Constitution and the current 1964 Constitution of Malta, all three Constitutions being handed down to the Maltese by the sovereign British colonial ruler. ; peer-reviewed

With one major and a couple of minor episodes, the exceptional archaeological heritage of the Maltese islands has been the exclusive domain of British archaeologists since the archipelago came under British rule in 1802: Themistokles Zammit a distinguished Maltese doctor, dominated the archaeological scene during the first three decades of the 20th c., and then a German scholar (Albert Mayr) and an Italian a{chaeologist (Luigi Maria U goHni) made some inroads but were never allowed to conduct excavations. Throughout the long colonial period (1802-1964), the British government never made an effort to set up the necessary local mechanism for training curators of the island's archaeological heritage. It was only in 1939 that J. B. Ward Perkins was appointed professor of archaeology at the then Royal University of Malta, presumably with the intention of starting such a process of transfer of expertise. But that was not to be, since Ward Perkins' appointment had to be abandoned because of the War. In this scenario, and against the pre-independence political background of the early 1960s, the concession by the Maltese government to an Italian archaeological rnissione from the university of Rome and the Universita Cattolica di Milano to conduct monumental excavations on three major sites was an ideological (religious and culturat as well as political) statement by the ruling Nationalist Party. The mission conducted 8 annual archaeological campaigns employing tens of local workmen, again, however, without the training of local archaeologists as part of their remit. The final campaign took place in 1970, on the eve of the return to government of the Labour Party, which had a quite different ideological agenda' ; peer-reviewed

Like Mazzini, a kindred spirit and mentor, Garibaldi is not just a personality: he is a symbol, a movement, an inspiration, an identity tag. In commemoration of the bicentenary of his birth, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura and the University of Malta jointly hosted a fitting conference (which I had the honour to chair and address) entitled Garibaldi e it Risorgimento. Garibaldi's contribution to Italian unification has to be seen on an international no less than a 'national' canvas, especially in Europe from the Austrian borders to the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond, as Professor Sergio La Salvia showed. There were also internal differences within the Risorgimento movement itself; moderates and democrats, monarchists and republicans, clericals and anticlericals, with Garibaldi falling in between two stools as he eventually 'converted', for pragmatic purposes; from republican to monarchist. There were countless variables in diplomacy and war, the onetime 'liberal' Pio Nono and the Papacy, the shifting role of France, Austria and Naples, the various states and principalities, and particularly Britain, a constitutional monarchy which supported the movement partly for its own ends, but which was also a country whose social and political institutions - parliament, suffrage, education - were much admired by the rebels. ; peer-reviewed