Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (141 page)

Moreover the Republic of Ireland itself underwent an unprecedented socio-economic transformation in the course of the 1990s and now bore little discernable resemblance to the ‘Eire’ of nationalist imaginings. From the perspective of youthful Dublin, absorbed in its newfound role as a multi-cultural, low-tax outrider for post-national Euro-prosperity, the sectarian preoccupations of the Provisional IRA had come to be regarded in much the same way as the imperial, unionist obsessions of the Orange Order were seen in London: bizarre antiquarian relics of another age.

To anyone familiar with their earlier history, the new politics of sub-national particularism in the larger states of western Europe might appear simply as the reversion to type following the centralizing detour of the previous century. Even the outstanding contemporary European exception to this pattern actually illustrates the rule: Germany, the largest European state west of the former Soviet Union, did
not
experience a comparable separatist resurgence. This was not because of any peculiarities of its history but because post-Nazi Germany was
already
a truly federal republic.

Whether they were mapped directly on to ancient states (as in the case of Bavaria) or were newly conceived territorial combinations of once-independent principalities and republics (like Baden-Württemburg or NordRhein-Westfalen), the
Länder
of modern Germany exercised a considerable degree of financial and administrative autonomy in many of those aspects of government that impinge most directly upon people’s daily lives: education, culture, the environment, tourism and local public radio and television. To the limited extent that
territorially
-defined identity politics might have appealed to Germans—and here Germany’s distinctive past probably
did
play an inhibiting role—the
Länder
thus offered a serviceable surrogate.

Indeed it was not in western Europe’s largest country but instead in one of its smallest that the politics of national separatism took their most concentrated form. Belgium, a country the size of Wales with a population density exceeded only by the adjacent Netherlands, was the one West European state whose internal schisms bore some resemblance to contemporary developments in the post-Communist east. Its story may thus cast light on why, after the separatist wave of the late twentieth century had receded, the national states of
Western
Europe remained intact.

By the 1990s the towns and valleys of Wallonia were sunk into post-industrial decline. Coal mining, steel making, slate and metallurgical industries, textile production—the traditional cradle of Belgium’s industrial wealth—had virtually disappeared: Belgian coal production in 1998 was less than two million tons per year, down from twenty-one million tons in 1961. In what was once Europe’s most profitable industrial region there remained only the decrepit mills of the Meuse valleys above Liège and the gaunt, silent mining installations around Mons and Charleroi. Most of the former miners, steel-workers and their families in these communities now depended upon a welfare system administered from the country’s bi-lingual capital and paid for—as it seemed to Flemish nationalists—out of the taxes of gainfully employed northerners.

For Flanders had boomed. In 1947 over 20 percent of the Flemish workforce was still in agriculture; fifty years later fewer than 3 percent of Dutch-speaking Belgians derived their income from the land. In the decade from 1966 to 1975 the Flemish economy grew at the unprecedented rate of 5.3 percent per annum; even during the economic trough of the late Seventies and early Eighties it continued to grow, at a rate nearly twice that of Wallonia. Unencumbered by old industry or an unemployable workforce, towns like Antwerp and Ghent flourished with the growth of services, technology and commerce, aided by their location athwart Europe’s ‘golden banana’, running from Milan to the North Sea. There were now more Dutch speakers than French speakers in the country (by a proportion of three to two), and they produced and earned more per capita. The Belgian north had overtaken the south as the privileged, dominant region—a transformation accompanied by a crescendo of demands from the Flemish for political gains to match their newfound economic dominance.

Belgium, in short, combined all the ingredients of nationalist and separatist movements across Europe: an ancient territorial division
³⁴⁷
reinforced by an equally venerable and seemingly insuperable linguistic gulf (whereas many residents of the Dutch-speaking regions have at least a passive acquaintance with French, most Walloons speak no Dutch) and underpinned by stark economic contrasts. And there was a further complication: for most of Belgium’s short history the impoverished communities of rural Flanders had been dominated by their urban, industrialized,

Belgium in 2005

French-speaking Walloon compatriots. Flemish nationalism had been shaped by resentment at the obligation to use French, at the French-speakers’ apparent monopoly of power and influence, at the francophone élite’s arrogation to itself of all the levers of cultural and political authority.

Flemish nationalists, then, had traditionally taken for themselves a role comparable to that of Slovaks in pre-divorce Czechoslovakia—even to the extent of actively collaborating with the occupiers during World War Two in the forlorn hope of some crumbs of separatist autonomy from the Nazi table. But by the 1960s the economic roles had been reversed: Flanders was now presented by its nationalist politicians not in the image of backward, under-privileged Slovakia but rather as Slovenia (or—as they might prefer—Lombardy): a dynamic modern nation trapped in an anachronistic and dysfunctional state.

These two self-ascribed identities—repressed linguistic minority and frustrated economic dynamo—were now
both
woven into the fabric of Flemish separatist politics, such that even after the old injustices had been swept away and the Dutch-speaking provinces of the north had long since won the right to the use of their own language in public affairs, the remembered resentments and slights simply attached themselves to new concerns instead, bequeathing to Belgian public policy debates an intensity—and a venom—which the issues alone could never explain.

One of the crucial symbolic moments in the ‘language war’ came in the Sixties—fully half a century after Dutch had been officially approved for use in Flemish schools, courts and local government, and four decades after its use there was made mandatory—when Dutch-speaking students at the University of Leuven (Louvain) objected to the presence of French-speaking professors at a university situated within the Dutch-speaking province of Flanders-Brabant. Marching to the slogan of ‘
Walen buiten!
’ (‘Walloons Out!’) they succeeded in breaking apart the university, whose francophone members headed south into French-speaking Brabant-Wallon and established there the University of Louvain-la-Neuve (in due course the university library, too, was divided and its holdings redistributed, to mutual disadvantage).

The dramatic events at Leuven—a curiously parochial and chauvinist echo of contemporary student protests elsewhere—brought down a government and led directly to a series of constitutional revisions (seven in all) over the course of the ensuing thirty years. Although devised by moderate politicians as concessions to satisfy the demands of the separatists, the institutional re-arrangements of Belgium were always understood by the latter as mere stepping stones on the road to ultimate divorce. In the end neither side quite achieved its aims, but they did come close to dismantling the Belgian unitary state.

The outcome was byzantine in its complexity. Belgium was sub-divided into three ‘Regions’: Flanders, Wallonia, and ‘Brussels-Capital’, each with its own elected parliament (in addition to the national parliament). Then there were the three formally instituted ‘Communities’: the Dutch-speaking, the French-speaking, and the German-speaking (the latter representing the approximately 65,000 German speakers who live in eastern Wallonia near the German border). The communities, too, were assigned their own parliaments.

The regions and the linguistic communities don’t exactly correspond—there are German speakers in Wallonia and a number of French-speaking towns (or parts of towns) within Flanders. Special privileges, concessions, and protections were 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. Brussels was pronounced officially bilingual, even though at least 85 percent of the population speaks French.

In addition to the regional and linguistic Communities, Belgium was also divided into ten provinces (five each in Flanders and Wallonia). These, too, were assigned administrative and governing functions. But in the course of the various constitutional revisions real authority came increasingly to lie either with the region (in matters of urbanism, environment, the economy, public works, transport and external commerce) or the linguistic community (education, language, culture and some social services).

The outcome of all these changes was comically cumbersome. Linguistic correctness (and the constitution) now required, 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 from Flanders). Linguistic equality on the Cour d’Arbitrage (Constitutional Court) was similarly mandated, with the presidency alternating annually across the language barrier. In Brussels, the four members of the executive of the capital region would henceforth sit together (and speak in the language of their choice) to decide matters of common concern; but for Flemish or Francophone ‘community’ affairs they would sit separately, two by two.

As a consequence Belgium was no longer one, or even two, states but an uneven quilt of overlapping and duplicating authorities. To form a government was difficult: it required multi-party 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
was
formed it had little initiative: even foreign policy—in theory one of the last remaining responsibilities of the national government—was effectively in the hands of the regions, since for contemporary Belgium it mostly means foreign trade agreements and these are a regional prerogative.

The politics of this constitutional upheaval were just as convoluted as the institutional reforms themselves. On the Flemish side, extreme nationalist and separatist parties emerged to press for the changes and benefit from the new opportunities to which they gave rise. When the Vlaams Blok, spiritual heir to the wartime ultra-nationalists, rose to become the leading party in Antwerp and some Dutch-speaking suburbs north of Brussels, the more traditional Dutch-speaking parties felt obliged to adopt more sectarian positions in order to compete.

Similarly, in Wallonia and Brussels, politicians from the French-speaking mainstream parties adopted a harder ‘communitarian’ line, the better to accommodate Walloon voters who resented Flemish domination of the political agenda. As a result, all the mainstream parties were eventually forced to split along linguistic and community lines: in Belgium the Christian Democrats (since 1968), the Liberals (since 1972), and the Socialists (since 1978) all exist in duplicate, with one party of each type for each linguistic community. The inevitable result was a further deepening of the rift between the communities, as politicians now addressed only their own ‘kind’.
³⁴⁸

A high price was thus paid to mollify the linguistic and regional separatists. In the first place, there was an economic cost. It was not by chance that by the end of the twentieth century Belgium had 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 established practice of using public money (including EU regional grants) on a proportional basis to reward clients of the various community ‘pillars’ was now applied to the politics of the language community: ministers, state secretaries, their staffs, their budgets and their friends are universal, but only in Belgium does each come attached to a linguistic
doppelganger
.

By the end of the century ‘Belgium’ had taken on a decidedly
pro forma
quality. Entering the country by road, a traveler could be forgiven for overlooking the rather apologetic signpost inscribed with a diminutive ‘België’ or ‘Belgique’. But visitors could hardly miss the colorful placard informing them of the province (Liège, say, or West-Vlaanderen) that they had just entered, much less the information board (in Dutch or French but not both) indicating that they were in Flanders or Wallonia. It is as though the conventional arrangements had been handily inverted: the country’s international borders were a mere formality, but its internal frontiers were imposing and very real. Why, then, did Belgium not simply come apart?