In recent years the cross is also being used for more sinister purposes by some right-wing groups. The cross would symbolise who we are and, if national identity is characterised in the essentialist terms described above, may legitimately be used only by people who belong to our group and not by others. In the case of the ‘Maltese people’ one such symbol, arguably the most prominent, is the eight-pointed Maltese cross ‘ a cross made from four straight lined pointed arrowheads, meeting at their points, with the ends of the arms consisting of indented ‘v’s’’. The heterogeneity, the similarity to other groups, and the changes that inevitably occur to the group’s customs, are normally dismissed or regarded as secondary in contrast to some supposed common and permanent basic set features and properties.Ī group’s ‘national identity’ is frequently represented by symbols.
Mizzi believed that one of the tasks of his political movement was to defend Maltese identity against the threats constituted by things like the teaching of English in school, the use of English and Maltese languages in Law Courts, and cultural and social mingling between locals and the British. In speaking of Maltese identity, such an approach was applied by Enrico Mizzi, one of the founding fathers of local Conservative Nationalism, who monolithically conceived it in terms like ‘geography, race, history, traditions and religion’. The presence of ‘others’ in close geographical and social proximity, a presence which would likely encourage mixing and interaction with these others, is thought to be a threat to the group’s integrity, virtue and its very nature. Failure to possess such features would exclude from membership in the group. Many Nationalist and Conservative interpretations of the idea of the ‘national identity’ tend to consider this in monolithic and changeless terms in terms of features and characteristics that members of the group have always had and by virtue of which they belong to the group in question.
How the emblem of debauched foreign aristocracy became the ultimate symbol of Maltese identity.īy Michael Grech Illustration by Isles of the Left
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