From Mosta to Melbourne: Why Malta insists citizenship is love, not luxury

Citizenship is not a commodity. It’s a commitment.
A Maltese reflection on what it really means to belong

By 8 a.m. on any given Sunday, the square outside Mosta basilica smells of incense, espresso and the last wisps of qassatat cooling in paper bags. Inside, old women recite the rosary in Maltese so thick with dialect it could be another language; outside, Nigerian nurses queue for communion while British retirees compare notes on village festa schedules. No one is photographing the scene for a passport brochure, yet this is citizenship in action—messy, audible, alive.

Malta knows better than most how quickly the word “citizen” can be reduced to a transaction. The Individual Investor Programme (IIP), phased out in 2020, sold the concept for €650,000 plus property and bonds. Government coffers swelled, but so did cynicism. Café arguments from Valletta to Gżira still echo: did we trade identity for tarmac and tall buildings? When passports become commodities, the unspoken fear is that belonging can be bought by people who will never learn the difference between ħobż and ħabs.

Yet citizenship is not a golden envelope stuffed with due-diligence certificates; it is the quiet decision to stand in that Mosta queue and mouth the responses even when you mispronounce “Qaddis”. It is the choice to curse the traffic on Regional Road not because you were born here, but because you now have to collect your child from ballet in Naxxar afterwards. It is, as sociologist Dr. Marcello Gauci puts it, “the moment when the island stops being a postcard and starts being a responsibility”.

Local councils feel the shift first. In Qala, Gozo, mayor Paul Buttigieg noticed new faces turning up for clean-up campaigns: Pakistani engineers who arrived via the tech sector, Serbian chefs who opened a bistro in the square. “They asked for rubbish bags, not tax breaks,” he laughs. One family planted prickly-pear cuttings along a rubble wall; an 83-year-old farmer teased them for choosing the wrong orientation, then stayed three hours to replant them properly. By sunset, three languages swore at the thorns. That is citizenship grafting itself onto limestone.

Cultural citizenship runs deeper than paperwork. Ask any Maltese-Australian who returns for the festa of St. Paul’s Shipwreck: the passport stamped in Sydney is only the prologue. The real naturalisation happens when they argue with cousins about whether the band should march down Triq il-Merkanti or Triq San Gwann, when they instinctively slow the car at a zebra crossing even though “in Melbourne we’d just zoom”. The island reclaims them not through legislation but through rhythm: the 6 a.m. factory whistle in Paola, the iron clang of the kaxxa tal-festa dropped on a doorstep at dawn.

The pandemic sharpened the definition. Foreign health-care workers who had barely navigated the bus system suddenly worked 14-hour shifts on COVID wards; Maltese pensioners knitted them woollen socks labelled “Grazzi ħafna”. No one asked who held which passport. Meanwhile, Maltese entrepreneurs in Berlin organised crowdfunding for ventilators back home. Citizenship revealed itself as reciprocal stewardship, not a status to flash at passport control.

Even the environment demands commitment. When the NGO Żibel hauls 2.3 tonnes of plastic off Għar Lapsi, half the volunteers are Maltese, half are not. They share pastizzi afterwards, debating whether the new deposit-return scheme will actually work. That conversation, conducted over greasy paper, is more binding than any oath of allegiance.

So when politicians flirt with resurrecting cash-for-passport schemes under shinier names, the rebuttal must be cultural, not merely economic. Citizenship is the stories you bother to remember: the smell of fenkata in a cousin’s yard, the first time you cursed “mela!” in traffic, the funeral where you didn’t know the deceased but went anyway because the church bell sounded heavy. It is the promise that tomorrow’s heatwave, power cut, or village feast matters to you even when escape is one flight away.

Malta’s greatest export was never the passport; it is the willingness to keep caring once the stamp dries. Anything less is just real estate with a flag.