Malta

Malta's documented past begins in the Neolithic, when settlers from Sicily reached the islands around 5900 BCE and, over the following millennia, raised the megalithic temple complexes of Ggantija, Hagar Qim, Mnajdra, and Tarxien, together with the underground Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. This temple-building culture flourished from roughly 3600 to 2500 BCE before giving way to Bronze Age communities. From the early first millennium BCE the archipelago was drawn into the Phoenician trading world, and the harbours of Malta and Gozo passed under Carthaginian control before falling to Rome during the Second Punic War in 218 BCE. Under Roman and then Byzantine rule the islands were administered as a quiet provincial outpost, and Christian tradition records the shipwreck of the apostle Paul on Malta in 60 CE.

Arab forces from Ifriqiya took the islands in 870, and roughly two centuries of Muslim rule reshaped agriculture, place names, and the local Semitic vernacular that would evolve into modern Maltese. Norman Sicily, under Roger I, brought Malta back into the Latin Christian sphere in 1091, after which the islands followed the dynastic fortunes of Sicily through Hohenstaufen, Angevin, and Aragonese hands. In 1530 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V granted Malta to the Order of the Knights of Saint John, displaced from Rhodes, who governed it as a sovereign religious state for more than two and a half centuries. The Knights repelled the Ottoman Great Siege of 1565 under Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette, founded the fortified capital that bears his name, and turned the islands into a Mediterranean centre of fortification, hospitaller medicine, and corsair warfare.

Napoleon expelled the Order in June 1798 on his way to Egypt, but French rule proved short; a Maltese uprising, supported by Britain and the Kingdom of Naples, drove the garrison out by 1800. The Treaty of Paris in 1814 confirmed Malta as a British possession, and over the following century the islands became a strategic naval base, coaling station, and dockyard for the Royal Navy, a role that brought catastrophic bombardment during the Second World War. The collective resistance of the population during the 1940 to 1942 siege was recognised by the award of the George Cross in 1942.

Constitutional self-government developed gradually through successive twentieth-century reforms, and Malta achieved independence within the Commonwealth on 21 September 1964 under Prime Minister George Borg Olivier. The country became a republic on 13 December 1974, replacing the monarch with a Maltese head of state, and the last British and NATO forces departed in 1979 under a non-aligned posture pursued by Prime Minister Dom Mintoff. Politics from the 1970s onward alternated between the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party, with shifts of power managed through regular parliamentary elections.

After the end of the Cold War, Malta reoriented decisively toward European integration, joining the European Union on 1 May 2004 and adopting the euro on 1 January 2008, while remaining outside NATO. Today Malta is a unitary parliamentary republic, with a President as ceremonial head of state, a Prime Minister leading the government, and a unicameral House of Representatives elected by single transferable vote, providing the constitutional framework within which the institutions described in the rest of this dossier operate.