Reappraisals (40 page)

The outcome of all this is absurdly cumbersome. Linguistic correctness (and the constitution) now require, for example, that all national governments, whatever their political color, be “balanced” between Dutch- and French-speaking ministers, with the prime minister the only one who has to be bilingual (and who is therefore typically a Fleming). Linguistic equality on the Cour d’Arbitrage (Constitutional Court) is similarly mandated, with the presidency alternating annually across the language barrier. In Brussels, the four members of the executive of the capital region sit together (and speak in the language of their choice) to decide matters of common concern; but for Flemish or Francophone “community” affairs they sit separately, two by two. Whenever money in Brussels is spent on “community” affairs—schools, for example—it must always be apportioned exactly 80:20, in accordance with the officially fixed ratio of the respective language groups. Even the automatic information boards on interregional trains switch to and fro between Dutch and French (or to both, in the case of Brussels) as they cross the regional frontiers.

As a consequence, Belgium is no longer one, or even two, states but an uneven quilt of overlapping and duplicating authorities. To form a government is difficult: It requires multiparty deals within and across regions; “symmetry” between national, regional, community, provincial, and local party coalitions; a working majority in both major language groups; and linguistic parity at every political and administrative level. And when a government is formed, it has little initiative: Even foreign policy—in theory the responsibility of the national government—is effectively in the hands of the regions, since for Belgium it mostly means foreign trade agreements, and these are a regional prerogative.

JUST WHAT REMAINS of Belgium in all this is unclear. Entering the country by road, you could be forgiven for overlooking the rather apologetic signpost inscribed with a diminutive “België” or “Belgique.” But you will not miss the colorful placard informing you of the province (Liège, say, or West-Vlaanderen) that you have just entered, much less the information board (in Dutch or French, but not both) indicating that you are in Flanders or Wallonia. It is as though the conventional arrangements had been inverted: The country’s international borders are a mere formality, its internal frontiers imposing and very real.

The price that has been paid to mollify the linguistic and regional separatists and federalists is high. In the first place, there is an economic cost; it is not by chance that Belgium has the highest ratio of public debt to gross domestic product in Western Europe. It is expensive to duplicate every service, every loan, every grant, every sign. The habit of using public money (including EU regional grants, a rich source of provincial and local favors) on a proportional basis to reward clients of the various pillars has now been adapted to the politics of the language community: Ministers, state secretaries, their staffs, their budgets, and their friends are universal, but only in Belgium do they come attached to a linguistic doppelgänger. The latest government, top-heavy with carefully balanced representation of every possible political and regional interest, is no exception,illustrating, as one political commentator put it, the “surrealist inflation of portfolios and subdivision of responsibilities.”
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But the cost of Belgium’s peculiar politics goes beyond the charge on the Belgian franc (a lingering token of nationality, foredoomed by the coming of the euro). Belgian insouciance in the face of urban planning— the gross neglect that has allowed Brussels to become a metaphor for all that can go wrong in a modern city—is not new. Baudelaire in 1865 was already commenting upon the “tristesse d’une ville sans fleuve” as the burghers of Brussels buried the local stream under tarmac and cobblestones. But the disastrous “urban renewal” of the 1960s, and the soulless monumentalism of the “Europe” district of Brussels today, bear witness to a combination of unrestrained private development and delinquent central authority that is distinctively federal in nature—there is simply no one in charge, even in the capital.

The Dioxin Affair in the summer of 1999 (“Chickengate” to the delighted editorialists of
Le Monde
) illustrated the same problem. The troubling feature of the scandal was not just that one or more suppliers of animal feed had ignored the usual sanitary precautions and leaked a lethal substance into the food chain. It was also that the government had known about it for weeks before telling either the European Union or its own public; and when the news did come out, the government in Brussels had no idea what to do about it or how to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. The main concern of the Belgian government was how to appease and recompense infuriated farmers for the animals that had to be destroyed and the sales that were lost: Many Flemish farmers belong to the Boerenbond, a powerful organization of Flemish agribusiness, which is part of the Catholic “pillar” of Flemish politics, and was thus a power base of the Christian Democratic prime minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene.

In the absence of government oversight, the striking incidence of high-level corruption and graft is no surprise (Baudelaire again: “La Belgique est sans vie, mais non sans corruption”). Belgium has become sadly notorious as a playground for sophisticated white-collar criminals, in and out of government. At the end of the 1980s, the Belgian government contracted to purchase forty-six military helicopters from the Italian firm Agusta and to give the French company Dassault the job of refitting its F-16 aircraft; competing bidders for the contracts were frozen out. It later emerged that the Parti Socialiste (in government at the time) had done very nicely from kickbacks on both deals. One leading Socialist politician who knew too much, André Cools, was killed in a parking lot in Liège in 1991; another, Étienne Mange, was arrested in 1995; and a third, Willy Claes, a former prime minister of Belgium, sometime (1994- 95) secretary general of NATO and foreign minister when the deals were made, was found guilty in September 1998 of taking bribes. A former army general closely involved in the affair, Jacques Lefebvre, died in mysterious circumstances in March 1995.

The Dassault/Agusta affair was especially significant, not just for the links between government, politics, business, and graft, but because of the apparent involvement of organized crime—something already evident in a number of murders and kidnappings through the eighties and early nineties. These were followed by a series of highly publicized crimes against children, culminating in the truly awful affair of Marc Dutroux. In prison today on charges of murder, Dutroux was at the center of an international pedophilic network running what used to be called the “white slave trade,” procuring boys and girls alike for the pleasure of powerful patrons in Belgium and abroad. He and his accomplices, all based in the depressed industrial towns of southern Wallonia, were responsible between 1993 and 1996 for the kidnapping, rape, or murder of six girls, two of them starved to death in a cellar under Dutroux’s house. What stirred the public to anger was not only the crimes but the astonishing incompetence of the police charged with finding the criminals—and a widespread belief that some of those responsible for finding and prosecuting them had been part of a (homosexual) ring which continued to benefit from very highly placed protection.

Belgium’s police forces are characteristically many and divided. There are dozens of “communal” police forces, responsible only for their immediate vicinity. Then there is the Police Judiciaire—nation-wide in theory, in practice divided by and run from local
arrondissements
. Finally there is the Gendarmerie, the only truly national police force but just eighteen thousand strong.
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These separate police forces do not cooperate—they don’t even share information. And in the Dutroux affair they were competitive—each trying to keep a step ahead of the other in the hunt for the abductors of the girls.

As a result, they actually impeded each other’s inquiries. In addition, they were inept. When Dutroux, a convicted rapist on parole, was questioned by police at his home, the house (where the children were hidden and still alive) was never searched. Later, in April 1998, when Dutroux was already under arrest, he managed to escape from the gendarmes guarding him. That he was recaptured later the same day has done little to reassure many Belgians, now convinced that Dutroux, who has yet to be tried, is being protected by friends in high places. The investigation of his crimes was hampered most recently by the unexplained suicide, in July 1999, of Hubert Massa, the Liège public prosecutor responsible for preparing the case (he also led the investigation into the Cools murder case).
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The horror of the Dutroux affair triggered a deep anger and frustration in the Belgian public; in October 1996 three hundred thousand people marched through Brussels to protest crime, corruption, incompetence, the heartless and ineffective response of the authorities, and the sacking of an overzealous magistrate thought to be too “sympathetic” to the victims. Since then parliamentary inquiries and administrative reforms have followed one another, to no obvious effect. But the embarrassing dioxin scandal of this past summer may have had more lasting consequences. In the elections of June 13 this year the Belgian voters finally threw Dehaene’s Christian Democrats out of office for the first time in forty years. The Socialists lost votes everywhere and the Liberals (loosely comparable to Germany’s Free Democrats in their business-friendly politics) came into government under Guy Verhofstadt—young (forty-six) by local standards and the first Liberal prime minister since 1884.

Moreover, the Greens (known in Wallonia as Ecolo and in Flanders as Agalev) have entered government for the first time, together with the Volksunie, a Flemish populist party founded in 1954 but somewhat moderated in tone since then. This breakthrough of such small, non-“pillar” parties, ending the throttlehold on government of the three established groupings, may be a passing reaction to the scandals, a protest vote and nothing more. The same elections also saw an increase in the vote for the Vlaams Blok in Flanders and Brussels; in the Antwerp districts, where it topped the poll, its rhetoric and even its posters eerily echo Jörg Haider in Austria, Christoph Blocher in Switzerland, and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. Like them, the Vlaams Blok uses nationalist rhetoric as a smokescreen for anti-immigrant and racist demagogy, and its growing support does not necessarily correspond to much real interest in its separatist program. But beyond the protests and the frustration, something else is happening.

Belgium today is held together by little more than the king, the currency, the public debt—and a gnawing collective sense that things cannot continue as they have. Of course, the desire for a political house-cleaning, Italian-style, is quite compatible with demands for even more federalization—as radical Flemish politicians have not failed to point out, both the Agusta and the Dutroux scandals originated in Wallonia. But this argument no longer carries as much weight as it did—and risks the charge of cynical opportunism. The generation of the sixties, now in power, continues to play the federalist and communalist cards; but recent polls suggest that most people, even in Flanders, no longer put regional or language issues at the head of their concerns.

This is especially true of new Belgians: The children of immigrants from Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Morocco, or Algeria have more pressing concerns. Even those who identify strongly with Flanders (or Wallonia) don’t see a need to abolish Belgium, much less conjoin their fate to another country, or to “Europe.” Language politics, then, may have blown themselves out in Belgium—though there is a risk that those who have built political careers on them may be slow to appreciate the change.

For similar reasons, the old “pillars” are in decline. Younger Belgians see the world rather differently. They are not much moved by appeals to sectoral interest—the same prosperity that has underwritten the “Flemish miracle” has defanged the politics of linguistic resentment. What is more, Belgians no longer align themselves with a single party or community in every facet of their lives. Declining religious practice, the accessibility of higher education, and the move from countryside to town have weakened Catholic and Socialist parties alike. In their place has come the rise of single-issue, “à la carte” voting. This is a desirable development—without the “pillars” Belgian politics and public life may well become more transparent, less cozy and corruption-prone. In short, they will cease to be distinctively Belgian. But what, then, will keep the country together?

One answer is prosperity. The obvious difference between Belgium and other, less fortunate parts of Europe, where politicians exploit communal sensibilities and corruption flourishes, is that Belgium is rich. Brussels may be an unappealing, seamy city, and unemployment may be high in Wallonia, but life for most people in Belgium is tranquil and materially sufficient. The country is at peace—if not with itself then at least with everyone else. If Belgium disappeared, many Belgians might not even notice. Some observers even hold the country up as a postnational model for the twenty-first century: a virtually stateless society, with a self-governing, bilingual capital city whose multinational workforce services a host of transnational agencies and companies.

Even the transportation system has a curiously decentered, self-deprecating quality. A major junction in the trans-European network, Brussels has three railway stations; but none of them is a terminus— trains to Brussels go to and through all three stations. The “Central Station” is, symptomatically, the least of them—obscure, featureless, and buried underground beneath a heap of concrete. As with its stations, so with the city itself: Brussels has successfully effaced itself. Whatever “there” was once there has been steadily dismantled. The outcome is an unaspiring anonymity, a sort of underachieving cultural incognito of which Sarajevo and Jerusalem can only dream.