Review of Brian Meeks' The Coup Clock Clicks (original) (raw)

SIXTEEN UNFORTUNATE STRUCTURAL 'LESSONS' FROM 'AN ASSASSINATION FORETOLD'

The assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia presents us a number of important 'lessons' that bear intense reflection and introspection by all of us. The following is my modest contribution and analysis. 1. How small-scale societies (and particularly islands) have an inbuilt conservative tendency, based upon a conscious culture of isolation and localised exceptionalism, to adopt a denial of recognition of certain local cultural features, especially when faced massive structural change. 2. Why commitment to smaller groups (such as family and political party) is historically greater and far more visceral than to civil society, and (in Malta's case), is partly due to Catholicism and neo-colonialism that persists in local culture. 3. Small, island-state, economies tend to take advantage of gaps or disjunctures in the international flow and regulation of legal and illicit capital to create particular economic niches for themselves, but in the process render themselves particularly vulnerable to semi-legal, and outright illegal flows of global capital. These can range from offering preferential tax-breaks to global companies, the hawking of passports in Arab Bazaars, gaming (i.e taking advantage of losers' addictions), the setting-up of shell companies and Banks, the parking of funds by neighbouring dictators and their families, and the laundering of international criminal money. This phenomenon is not particular to small states; Malta and other small EU states have nestled under the protective resistance of heavyweights in the EU, such as pre-Brexit UK, to jointly resist EU tax harmonisation. But given their minute size and un-diversified economies, their dependency on these comparative advantages may be much greater and more compromising. The State depends upon them to generate external income thus alleviating the tax burden and distributing largesse and patronage, the tightly-knit and 'intricated' administrative and political elite may be more easily and effectively compromised, and public opinion may not have the autonomy, political sophistication, and effectiveness found in larger more diversified polities to express disquiet about the social effects and implications of national economic policy. 4. The consequent changes in the local economic structure renders the State a new active and complicit economic agent, initiating novel, complicated, previously uncharted, sources of wealth that create new hidden alliances of local politics, facilitating administrative personnel, and local and international capital. Such alliances are difficult to scrutinise by their very fluid, camouflaged, nature, and to dislodge because of the immense economic interests involved. 5. Because of a local historical culture of " living off the crumbs of a rich man's table " (from legalised piracy in the early modern world, to entrepôt trade and military expenditure in the 19th-20th centuries, to preferential tax rates to multinational companies, the sale of passports, and eGaming, in contemporary times), Maltese society perceives this as merely the continuation of a 'traditional' economic culture. Thus packaged, it is sold to the public by the Patrimonial state, traditionally relying on party-controlled patronage to boost populism fed by a traditional culture of dependency. Yet the apparent continuities disguise discontinuities. There are four major differences between the new economic and political formation and the traditional one: (i) the resources involved are now varied, immense, and liquid, merely changing their instrumental vehicles, (ii) they are almost completely externally generated, transiting locally to other destinations, (iii) their administration, packaging and funnelling, are immensely complex, scrutinisable only by specialist bodies, and largely invisible to the public, and (iv) new shadowy, inscrutable, alliances by new elites have emerged to manage, repackage, conceal, and benefit from, such liquid circuits.