Malta, the smallest member of the European Union, has always benefited from its strategic geographic position. The island nation is in the center of the Mediterranean, at a pivotal gateway point between southern Europe and northern Africa.

And in the newly unified Europe, the tiny country — with about four-fifths the population and one-and-a-half times the acreage of the District of Columbia — likewise has an outsized profile on some key issues: immigration from Africa and relations with the Arab Muslim world.

It’s of course true that in the EU’s nominally egalitarian membership, some members are more equal than others. Still, Malta has a voice in the union’s deliberations and a vote equal to France or Germany in its decision-making — a bit like the clout that Wyoming and North Dakota can command in the Senate.

“You can do two things with small states,” argues Michael Frendo, Malta’s foreign minister. “One is to ignore them, the other is to embrace them; and if you embrace them, you can tap their resources. Malta is the southernmost point of the European Union, and strategically important — not militarily, but politically.”

That’s certainly the case when it comes to the issue of immigration from the south. Since Malta is some 200 miles off the African coast, boats from Africa wash up on its shores — their holds filled with people, alive or otherwise — with alarming frequency.

Malta joined the European Union in May 2004, along with a clutch of nine other small states, including Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Frendo, an attorney by training, was Malta’s first minister for Europe, and for the past two years has been foreign minister. He visited Washington last week to sign the Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative. With the world’s eighth-largest shipping registry, Malta would bring some 1,200 vessels under the initiative’s authority to search them for potential evidence of terrorist or rogue-state nuclear traffic.

The key to swimming among the big fish in the EU, he says, was preserving one’s own diplomatic composure. “We didn’t strut,” Frendo says. “We told the European Union we had an agenda — which was Mediterranean issues, illegal immigration, the environment — and we focused on matters that were in our strategic interest.”

Frendo says it’s a myth that the 15 original EU nations consigned his class of 10 smaller states to diplomatic limbo. The real challenge, he says, was getting and holding the interest of the EU’s bureaucracy in Brussels — an ongoing difficulty for the smaller members.

For added comfort, Frendo has organized the Olive Oil group, an informal regional consortium of foreign ministers from Mediterranean states in the EU that produce olive oil: Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus, along with Malta. They convene informally to discuss issues of common interest and how to resolve them.

But Malta really hopes to make its mark with its proposal for a structured, ongoing contact between Europe and the Arab world, starting with a conference of EU and Arab League foreign ministers. “The point is not to discuss their problems, but to talk about an agenda of reform: development, security, energy, climate change,” Frendo says. “We need to engage the Arab world, which has been a source of friction in Europe. The Arabs are the people we have problems with, and we hardly talk to them. Europe needs a new visibility in the Arab world, and a new engagement.”

Such an EU-Arab conference would include Syria, but not Iran. By definition it would also exclude Israel, which is likely to raise objections from both Jerusalem and Washington. Bigger EU members likewise expressed initial reluctance but are growing more receptive. But Frendo knows it behooves him to be patient. “If the initiative had come from a larger member state, not us, it might have had a quicker time frame,” he says.

Roland Flamini is a Washington journalist who specializes in international affairs.