By Pierre Verjans, Professor at the Faculty of Law and Politic science (Université de Liège)

Created in 1830 on the model of the nation state, Belgium was led up until 1893 by a francophone elite deaf to the demands of cultural diversity for recognition. Nonetheless this cultural diversity had been acknowledged since close to a millennium and a half ago. The rise of the Flemish movement since the 1960s illustrates the various aspects of globalisation: the counter effects of decolonisation, the emergence of a post-industrial economy, the Europeanisation and Atlanticisation of public policies bringing about a questioning of the legitimacy of the unitary nation state. The failure of the Community based negotiations since 2007 and the political deadlock which has followed illustrate the priority once again accorded to the question of cultural diversity in Belgium after a lull lasting for fifteen years.

Introduction

Belgian cultural duality, whilst it has been around for a very long time, has been institutionally established since the setting up of the Common Market in 1957 and has accelerated its pace in the past few years. Thus, after the fall of three governments because of a local authority district of four thousand inhabitants (Verjans, 1993, 2007), in around twenty years, Belgian is tearing itself apart over the regional belonging (through electoral constituency) of the borough of Bruxelles-Halle-Vilvorde. The Flemish parties have proven to be active in this latter process, whose symbolic importance is vital (Devos, 2008). To put it differently, since the fifty years during which regionalisation has been on the political agenda, symbolic questions, minor in utilitarian terms, have headed the field and have enabled a relativisation of the tensions over the fundamental questions which weigh on the state’s budget, questions which are as a consequence settled by compromises made over symbolic issues. The dramatisation of the issues enables a masking of choices which are felt to be secondary but which weigh substantially on the state budget and on the consequences of political decisions.

Cultural diversity springs from a diverse history marked first of all by a thousand year old language difference but also by a religious difference, notably in the repression of Protestantism by the centuries long Spanish occupation, then by an early industrialisation in the South, with an internal migration of the population towards the ‘sprawling, all consuming towns.’ On the other hand universal suffrage would, after the ‘great transformation,’ allow a state policy of social cohesion to be set up, aiming to permit the region which was lagging behind, Flanders at that point in history, to catch up with the development of Wallonia. This systematic attraction of foreign investment towards Flanders after the Second World War and worker’s resistance in Wallonia would provoke a shift in Belgium’s economic centre of gravity. In the 1960s Flanders’ GDP by inhabitant caught up and then overtook that of Wallonia. Flanders would come to perceive the Walloon working world as strike mongering, lazy, and not very open to modernity, foreign languages and the new challenges of global capitalism.

Section 1: Geopolitics and the long term: Rokkanian variables

The long term in Western Europe began with the Roman invasion which imposed an administrative and linguistic uniformisation on the elites of the era and an imperial unification which would leave its mark. We know of Julius Caesar’s judgment, expressed at the beginning of the Gallic Wars: ‘the bravest of all these peoples are the Belgians, because they are the most distant from the civilisation and sophisticated mores of the  Prov[e]nce, because the traders rarely travel there and do not import into it that which is appropriate to softening hearts, because they are the closest neighbours with the Germans who live across the Rhine and with whom they are continually at war’ (Caesar, 1964, 13). The construction of Roman roads was to overcome these two problems: soften mores through trade and keep the Germans at a distance or even transform them into mercenaries at the service of Rome. After several centuries of unobtrusive populating by the Barbarians who were more and more becoming integrated into the Empire the Catholic church achieved ascendancy over the former. Latin remained the language of the men and women of letters and would perpetuate not the power centred on the Mediterranean but rather that of a hierarchy which, from Clovis to Charlemagne, would incarnate not that which the imperium possesses, but that which conferred the imperium through royal unction at Reims or holy unction at Rome. At the end of the Roman empire, the toponymy attests to a linguistic border in Belgium between a Germanicised North and a Latinised South. The long term phenomenon of the construction of states during the Middle Ages observed by Norbert Elias did not thus take place on virgin territory but in a space where the powerful knew, talked and wrote to each other. ‘When, in a social unit with a certain geographical spread, a large number of smaller social units, which through their interdependence form the large unit, have more or less equal social power and can because of this freely – without being hampered by already existing monopolies – compete for the opportunities of social power, in the first place the means of subsistence and production, there is a strong possibility that some will emerge from this combat as the victors, others as the vanquished, and that the opportunities end up falling into the hands of a small number, whilst the others are eliminated or fall under the control of some or other’ (Elias, 1979, 27). Lotharingia, the legacy of Lothair, Charlemagne’s grandson, to whom fell due the central section of the Carolingian empire in 843, remained the area which was the most irrigated by Roman roads, then by towns and trading exchanges, a sought after territory because of its prosperity but which could not be defended because it was caught in a pincer movement between the areas owned by the younger brothers, Germania and France. This dense urban network, at the centre of the geo-economic and geo-political stakes of Western Europe (Rokkan, 1987) would have to wait until the nineteenth century before the states gained more clear-cut identities from this ensemble of fragmented principalities and powers.