Reappraisals (39 page)

The new Belgian state rested on a highly restricted suffrage that confined power and influence to the French-speaking commercial and industrial bourgeoisie; in practice it was held together not by any common feeling of Belgianness but by hierarchically organized social groups— “pillars” (
piliers
in French,
zuilen
in Dutch)—that substituted for the nation-state. Catholics and anticlericals in particular formed distinct and antagonistic communities, represented by Catholic and liberal political parties. These parties, in turn, served not just to win elections and control the state but to mobilize and channel the energies and resources of their “pillar.” In each case an electoral constituency doubled as a closed social, economic, and cultural community.

With the emergence in the 1880s of a Socialist party that sought to control the growing industrial working class, the “pillarization” of Belgium into liberal, Catholic, and Socialist “families” was complete. From the late nineteenth century until the present, Belgian public and private life has been organized around these three distinct families— with antagonism between Socialists and Catholics steadily displacing in significance the older one between Catholics and liberals. Much of daily life was arranged within hermetically separated and all-embracing nations-within-a-nation, including child care, schooling, youth groups, cafés, trade unions, holiday camps, women’s groups, consumer cooperatives, insurance, savings societies, banking, and newspapers.

At election time, especially following the expansion of the suffrage (extended to all men in 1919, to women in 1948), governments could only be formed by painfully drawn-out coalition building among the parties representing these pillars. Such coalitions were typically unstable (there were eighteen governments between the world wars and there have been thirty-seven since 1945). Meanwhile, political, judicial, civil service, police, and even military appointments are made by “proportionality,” which is to say that they are assigned to clients and friends within the pillars through a complex and corrupting system of agreements and deals.

Some of this story is, of course, familiar from other countries. The “culture wars” of Imperial Germany and the parliamentary instability of Fourth Republic France come to mind, as does the
proporz
system of public appointments in Austria today and the clientele-driven venality of postwar Italy (two countries likewise born in uncomfortable and contested circumstances). But Belgium has two distinguishing features. First, the pervasive system of patronage, which begins in village councils and reaches to the apex of the state, has reduced political parties largely to vehicles for the distribution of personal favors. In a small country where everyone knows someone in a position to do something for them, the notion of an autonomous, dispassionate, neutral state barely exists. As Belgium’s current prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said in the mid-eighties, Belgium is little more than a party kleptocracy.

Second: Below, above, within, and across the social organizations and political divisions of Belgian society runs the yawning fault line of language. In the northern half of the country (Flanders, Antwerp, Limburg, and much of Brabant, the region around Brussels), Dutch is spoken; in the southern half (“Wallonia,” which stretches from Hainault in the west to Luxembourg in the east), French. Living in the village of Zedelgem, close to the much-traveled tourist sites of Bruges and Ghent and just twenty minutes from the frontier with French-speaking Hainault, I encountered many Dutch speakers who cannot (or will not) speak French; a much larger proportion of the French-speaking population of the country has no knowledge of Dutch. Brussels, officially “bilingual,” is in practice a French-speaking enclave within the Dutch-speaking sector. Today these divisions are immutable, and they correspond quite closely to an ancient line dividing communities that fell respectively under French or Dutch rule.
³

Their origins, however, are fairly recent. French, the court language of the Habsburg monarchy, became the language of the administrative and cultural elite of Flanders and Wallonia during Austrian rule in the eighteenth century. This process was reinforced by the French revolutionary occupants and their Napoleonic heirs. Meanwhile, the peasants of Flanders continued to speak (though less frequently read or write) a range of local Flemish dialects. Despite a shared language base, Flemings and Dutch were divided by religion; the Flemish Catholics’ suspicion of the Protestant ambitions of the Dutch monarchy contributed to their initial welcome for an independent Belgian state. Domination by French speakers was reinforced by early-nineteenth-century industrialization; impoverished Flemish peasants flocked to Wallonia, the heartland of Belgium’s wealth in coal, steel, and textiles. It is not by chance that many French-speaking Walloons today have Flemish names.

The Belgian state was Francophone, but French was not imposed— the 1831 constitution (Article 23) stated, in effect, that Belgian citizens could use the language of their choice. French was required only for government business and the law. But when a movement for Flemish-language rights and a distinctive Flemish identity began to assert itself in the mid-nineteenth century (beginning with the 1847 Declaration of Basic Principles of the Flemish movement), it had little difficulty demonstrating that in practice Dutch speakers, or the speakers of regional Flemish dialects, were at an acute disadvantage in their new state. They could not be tried in their own language; secondary and higher education was de facto a Francophone near-monopoly; and French-speaking interests looked after themselves at the expense of their Flemish co-citizens. When American grain imports began to undercut and destroy the home market for Flemish farmers, the Brussels government refused to establish protective tariffs for fear of retribution against (Walloon) industrial exports.

The conflation of linguistic rights and regional interests was thus present from the outset in Flemish resentment of “French” domination. Once a suffrage reform in 1893 gave the vote to a growing body of Dutch-speaking citizens from the north, most of whom were solidly organized within the Catholic social and political “pillar,” the state was forced to compromise with their demands. By 1913 Dutch was officially approved for use in Flemish schools, courts, and local government. In 1932 a crucial step was taken, when Dutch became not just permitted but required in Flemish schools. The union of language and region—the creation of two administratively distinct unilingual territories conjoined only by the overlap in Brussels—was now inevitable.

This process, implicit in the language legislation between the two world wars, was delayed by World War II. As in World War I, radical Flemish activists tried to take advantage of the German occupation of Belgium to advance the separatist cause. On both occasions, German defeat set them back. After World War II in particular, the memory of the wartime collaboration of the ultra-separatist Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV) discredited the Flemish case for a generation. At the same time, the postwar punishment of (disproportionately Flemish) collaborators rankled, as did the abdication of King Leopold III in 1950. The king’s ambivalent behavior during the war had discredited him with many Belgians, but a referendum in March 1950 produced a national vote of 58 percent in favor of keeping him (among Dutch-speaking voters, 72 percent voted for the king). However, demonstrations in Wallonia and Brussels, where a majority wanted to see Leopold go, forced him to step aside in favor of his son Baudouin, leaving many Flemings resentful of the way the vote, and their preference, had been overturned.
⁴

What finally doomed the unity of Belgium, however, was the reversal of economic fortunes. Where once French-speaking Wallonia had dominated, it was now in precipitous decline. During the fifties two hundred thousand jobs were lost as the mines of the Sambre-Meuse region closed. Coal mining, steel making, slate and metallurgical industries, textile production—the traditional core of Belgian industrial power—virtually disappeared; Belgian coal production today is less than two million tons per year, down from twenty-one million tons in 1961. Only the residue of what was once the continent’s most profitable industrialconurbation remains, in the decrepit mills of the Meuse valleys above Liège and the gaunt, silent mining installations around Mons.

The country that built the first railway in continental Europe (from Brussels to Malines), and that still has the densest rail network in the developed world, now has little to show for it but an unemployment rate, in Wallonia, among the highest in Western Europe. In Charleroi and the neglected industrial villages to its west, middle-aged men gather listlessly in dingy, decaying cafés; they and their families owe their subsistence to Belgium’s generous and vigorously defended welfare system, but they are doomed to a superannuated existence of extended, involuntary retirement and they know it.

Flanders, meanwhile, has boomed. Unencumbered by old industry or an unemployable workforce, towns like Antwerp and Ghent have flourished with the growth of service technology and commerce, aided by their location at the heart of Europe’s “golden banana,” running from Milan to the North Sea. In 1947 over 20 percent of the Flemish workforce was still in agriculture; today fewer than 3 percent of Dutch-speaking Belgians derive their income from the land. There are more Dutch speakers than French speakers in the country (by a proportion of three to two), and they produce and earn more per capita. This process, whereby the Belgian north has overtaken the south as the privileged, dominant region, has been gathering speed since the late fifties—accompanied by a crescendo of demands from the Flemish for political gains to match their newfound economic dominance.

These demands have been met. Through seven revisions of the constitution in just thirty years, the Belgian unitary state has been picked apart and reconstructed as a federal system. The results are complex in the extreme. There are three “Regions”: Flanders, Wallonia, and “Brussels-Capital,” each with its own elected parliament (in addition to the national parliament). Then there are three “Communities”: the Dutch-speaking, the French-speaking, and the German-speaking (representing the approximately 65,000 German speakers who live in eastern Wallonia near the German border). These, too, have their own parliaments. The regions and the linguistic communities don’t exactly correspond—there are German speakers in Wallonia and some French-speaking towns (or parts of towns) within Flanders. Special privileges, concessions, and protections have been established for all of these, a continuing source of resentment on all sides. Two of the regions, Flanders and Wallonia, are effectively unilingual, with the exceptions noted. In officially bilingual Brussels, 85 percent of the population speaks French.

There are, in addition, ten provinces (five each in Flanders and Wallonia), and these, too, have administrative and governing functions. But real authority lies either with the region (in matters of urbanism, environment, the economy, public works, transport, and external commerce) or with the linguistic community (education, language, culture, and some social services). The national state retains responsibility for defense, foreign affairs, social security, income tax, and the (huge) public debt; it also administers the criminal courts. But the Flemish are demanding that powers over taxation, social security, and justice shift to the regions. If these are granted, the unitary state will effectively have ceased to exist.

The politics of this constitutional revolution are convoluted and occasionally ugly. On the Flemish side, extreme nationalist and separatist parties have emerged. The Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang), spiritual heir to the VNV, is now the leading party in Antwerp and some Dutch-speaking suburbs north of Brussels. The traditional Dutch-speaking parties have consequently been forced (or tempted) to take more sectarian positions. Similarly, in Wallonia and Brussels, politicians from the French-speaking mainstream parties have adopted a harder “community” line to accommodate Walloons who resent Flemish domination of the political agenda.

As a result, all the mainstream parties have split along linguistic and community lines: The Christian Democrats (since 1968), the Liberals (since 1972), and the Socialists (since 1978) all exist in duplicate, with a Flemish and a Francophone party of each type; the Christian Democrats dominate Flemish politics, the Socialists remain all-powerful in Wallonia, and the Liberals are prominent in Brussels. The result is further deepening of the rift between the communities, as politicians and electors now address only their own “kind.”
⁵

One of the crucial moments in the “language war” came in the sixties, when Dutch-speaking students at the University of Leuven (Louvain) objected to the presence of French-speaking professors and classes at a university situated within Dutch-speaking Vlaams-Brabant. Marching to the slogan of “Walen buiten!” (“Walloons get out!”), they succeeded in breaking apart the university, whose Francophone members headed south into French-speaking Brabant-Wallon and established the University of Louvain-la-Neuve. In due course the university library, too, was divided and its holdings redistributed, to mutual disadvantage.

These events, which occurred between 1966 and 1968 and brought down a government, are still remembered among French speakers—just as many Flemings continue to meet annually on August 29 in Diksmuide, in West Flanders, to commemorate Flemish soldiers killed in World War I under the command of French-speaking officers whose orders they could not understand. The memorial tower erected there in 1920 carries the inscription “Alles voor Vlaanderen—Vlaanderen voor Kristus” (“All for Flanders—Flanders for Christ”). On the Belgian national holiday— July 21, which commemorates Leopold of Saxe-Coburg’s ascent to the throne in 1831 as Leopold I of Belgium—flags are still hung out in Wallonia, but I did not see many in the tidy little villages of Flanders. Conversely, the Flemish authorities in 1973 decreed that they would recognize the date of July 11 in celebration of the victory of the Flemish towns over the French king Philippe le Bel at the Battle of the Golden Spurs (Kortrijk) in 1302.