MALTA: Emotions were running high this week in Malta at the final mass rallies before today's vote on EU membership, the most momentous decision the island has taken since independence from Britain four decades ago.
The referendum is the first being held in any of the 10 countries set to join the Union next year: Malta may be the minnow of the new intake, but bigger countries, such as Poland, are watching closely to see what its 380,000 people decide.
Maltese laughingly describe themselves as passionate and deeply divided about football, saints' days, party loyalty - and Europe. This tense and occasionally nasty campaign has proved the point.
Prime Minister Mr Eddie Fenech-Adami and his conservative Nationalist party argue fiercely that EU membership is a national issue, not a party one.
"We can choose to be part of the world's most powerful economic bloc," says the Yes camp. "Or we can choose to be irrelevant to the rest of the world for the rest of our lifetime."
The man called simply "Eddie" by his admiring supporters had put it more succinctly: "No island is an island."
The No camp, led by the opposition Labour party, wants Malta to have a loose but hazily defined "partnership" with the Union, to be a "Mediterranean Switzerland" which somehow keeps its options open and holds Brussels and its laws at a distance.
Polls predict a close result, with attention focusing on a few thousand floating voters and worries that the No side will claim the result is invalid. That is a distinct possibility since they are calling on supporters to vote against, abstain or spoil their ballots. Turnout will be crucial.
Formally, the referendum is non-binding, but it is unlikely that a clear Yes could be ignored even if Labour wins general elections that could be held as early as next month.
Malta, with a GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of about 50 per cent of the average among the 15 member-states, applied to join the EU under the nationalists in 1990, but the bid was suspended under the 1996-1998 Labour government.
Now, as then, Labour is led by Alfred Sant, author of Confessions of a Maltese European, the fruit of the five years he spent with his country's mission in Brussels. But Mr Sant is no diplomat.
When Gunther Verheugen, the EU's German commissioner for enlargement, visited recently, the Labour leader talked of the damage done by Luftwaffe bombs during the second World War. He dismissed the former president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine, as a bossy "Taliban".
Pro-EU supporters complain of the scaremongering familiar from Denmark's referendum on the euro and Ireland's on ratifying the Nice Treaty. Labour attacked the EU working time directive for banning overtime. It does no such thing.
Mr Sant named Maltese companies which, he claimed, would be threatened by membership.
Most quickly countered that they saw new opportunities in the single market.
The anti-EU campaigners invoked restrictions on hunting, a non-existent danger of legalised abortion and a threat that the neutrality of what was once imperial Britain's unsinkable island fortress would become a modern bastion for an "EU army".
And figures for the £120 million in cash Malta is to receive in its first two years of membership were creatively massaged downwards. "Sant has made a political issue out of this referendum," Mr Mark Vella, a retired bank manager, said at Thursday's rally. "But it should be about the good of Malta." - (Guardian Service)