Malta’s Europeanization experience: How smallness enables a state to minimise the monitoring of its implementation of EU policy by third parties

Abstract

This paper discusses the issue of how size impacts a country’s experience of EU membership, in
particular its ability to control the implementation of EU policy. Small countries share several
characteristics at an EU level, in that they avoid isolation in the Council and depend on partnership with
larger member states. In terms of Malta, this was shown to be the case but other factors appear to have
brought this about, in particular the country’s political history. In terms of Europeanization, small states
adopt flexible arrangements to manage membership with public servants empowered in the process.
This was not the case for Malta where membership saw greater involvement for public servants in
policy making but no increase in actual power due to a heavy centralisation of decision-making which
empowered the political class. Where size appears to have played a role in the country’s
Europeanization experience was in terms of how that centralisation process has allowed the
government to control the monitoring of its implementation of EU policy by third parties, including the
Commission.