Wither Belgium?
Dutch-French Rift Leaves Nation's Future in Doubt
By CHARLES TRUEHEART
Washington Post Service
Waremme, Belgium -- Helene Papagrigoriou is a fortyish cashier at a rest stop on a busy highway that cuts across the belly of Belgium, roughly tracing the country's fault line of language and culture.
She was born in Athens, but she has the passion of the immigrant patriot. Only her passion isn't for Belgium, it's for Wallonia, the country's southern, French-speaking region. Even though half her customers are from the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, and she works for a Flaners company, Papagrigoriou will speak only a melodious French and professes not to know a word of Dutch.
Like many a French speaker in Belgium these days, and like many a Dutch speaker too, she has an attitude. When a Flemish customer got hostile recently about her refusal to speak his language, Papagrigoriou said, she made a Nazi salute and replied: "Heil Hitler!"
Finishing the story, she added ruefully: "And here we are in a united Europe."
Belgium has spent two decades dramatically empowering its Dutch- and French-speaking regions, but the price has been a weakened central government and a fragmenting sense of national destiny. The drive to satisfy demands for autonomy, most of them generated by the more prosperous and populous Flanders region in the north, has aggravated the natural divisions of language and history. And the integration of Europe, notably its new common currency, has created a powerful alternative to national allegiances.
There is deep resignation in the voices of Belgians when they talk about the future of their nation.
"This country is really too little for all the differences we have. People wonder: What are we doing in Belgium?" said Catty Coenen, a young bilingual saleswoman who lives in the Flanders town of Tongeren.
"I think this country is falling apart," said Alain Gerlache, [PR Chief of the PM, former] editor in chief of RTBF, the French-language Belgian state TV network. "Nobody is interested in maintaining Belgium as such, especially with the acceleration of European integration. What do we have in common? It used to be the Belgian franc [ie the $250 billion public debt], and now it doesn't exist."
Even key politicians on both sides of the divide speak of an inexorable deconstruction of the federal state. They refer to the "accident" of Belgian nationhood, its "artificial" and "transient" nature. They speculate morbidly about the modalities of its rupture --such as the prospect, favored by sentimental Wallonians, of "reattaching" their region to France. [informal meetings have occured between France's Quai d'Orsay and Wallonian rattachistes]
Of Belgium's 10 million people, fewer than 4 million speak French. Almost all of them live either in the capital, Brussels, an enclave inside Flanders, or in Wallonia. Belgium's Flemish majority speaks a close variant of the Dutch language spoken next door in the Netherlands.
The dominant position of Flanders is recent. For most of Belgium's 169 years, until the end of World War II, the political and economic ruling class spoke French, wherever they lived. Flemish and Walloon, which is very close to French, were the dialects of the working classes.
Speaking French, like the creation of a "king of the Belgians," had the virtue of building Belgian unity from two regions cobbled together at a diplomatic conference table in London after the Napoleonic wars. But it also bred Flemish resentment.
Even though they are more numerous and now more powerful, the Dutch speakers of Belgium still act like an oppressed minority. That self-image has generated a powerful sense of nationalism. In the last 20 years Dutch speakers have systematically demanded, and gotten, control over all but a few functions of government. So have, less eagerly but in self-defense, the Walloons.
Flemish strength is not just in population figures and political muscle. Economic power that had once been concentrated in the heavy industries of Wallonia has shifted to light industry and high-tech in once-impoverished Flanders.
The state of Flanders has become a powerful instrument of regional power, projecting itself to its people and to outsiders with only passing reference to the existence of the parent state. Flanders has much to boast about, with low unemployment and healthy growth that contrasts with those of many other European countries --and with Wallonia.
Nationalist politicians in both Belgian regions embrace what Flanders's Minister President Luc van den Brande calls "devolution," borrowing the term most recently applied to the extensive autonomy handed down to Scotland and Wales by the British government. He, like many Flemish, also likes the parallel to Spain's powerful Catalonia region and to secessionist sentiment in prosperous northern Italy.
"Often a state is too or too small to give the right answers to the expectations of populations," said van den Brande, who also serves at the head of something called the Assembly of European Regions and touts the ideas of "bottom-up government" and "new communities of interest" in Europe.
Most analysts and politicians predict that any division of the country will be an elaborate and characteristically Belgian compromise reached in a smoke-filled room. But others worry that with tensions so close to the surface, things could turn ugly.
"There could be a march of a demonstration, someone throws a rock, someone gets out his hunting rifle --It's dangerous. In Yugoslavia, two months before the war, nobody thought it was possible," said Anne Morelli, a Free University of Brussels historian whose latest book examines the racist quality of Belgium's language wars.
Although a majority of Belgians tell pollsters they favor the continuation of a united Belgium, more and more they vote for politicians like van den Brande and Robert Collignon, his Walloon counterpart, who advocate Flanders-for-the-Flemish and Wallonia-for-the-Walloons positions.
A more overt brand of Flanders nationalism has driven the Vlaams Blok party in Flanders to electoral successes, including decisive power in the city of Antwerp [>30%] and the support of 12 percent of the Flemish population.
It is those voters, analysts say, that the Flemish parties (there are no Belgian national parties to speak of) will be targeting in parliamentary elections June 13 [1999].
A poster kicking off the campaign of van den Brande's party highlighted the creation of 30,000 jobs in Flanders, not needing to note that Wallonia has 15 percent unemployment [latest unemployment figures: Flanders=7.3%, Wallonia=18%, Brussels=18.4%]. Another asserted that average incomes in Flanders are 7 percent higher than in the Netherlands, another country altogether.
"The posters don't say "Independent Flanders,"" Euroquest pollster Francois Heinderyckx said. "They don't have to." The message is clear, he said: Flanders is more than self-sufficient, and Wallonia is its economic albatross.
Van den Brande said his party [the Christian-democrat CVP] will be arguing for still more devolution in the coming campaign: more regional control over federal tax revenues and the division of the national social security system --notably health care, family assistance, and unemployment insurance.
To this, Collignon, the Walloon leader, draws another line in the shifting Belgian sand. "Social security is the cement of Belgium," he said. "A state without solidarity has no raison d'etre."
THE WASHINGTON POST, February 4, 1999
emu.edu.tr |
