by Paul Martin
It is best known for its chocolates, chips, beer and lace. Its favorite sons include Agatha Christie’s Inspector Poirot, boy-hero Mannikin Pis, Johnny Haliday, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone. But this tiny country of 10 million — with an area about the size of the Republic of Armenia — is not only home to the capital of modern Europe, but a cauldron of the continent’s past.
Sitting astride the crossroads of northern Europe, Belgium is the meeting place of the Latin and Germanic cultures. It is the most European of all nations because it has witnessed most great movements of European history. Everyone has passed through here — Medieval German merchants and French kings, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, the shippers of English wool and Italian spices, Spanish inquisitors and Dutch Calvinists, Desiderius Erasmus and Karl Marx (who was an habitué of what is now the Maison du Sygne, on Brussels’ Grande Place, the most expensive restaurant in Belgium), Austrian Hapsburgs and King Henry VIII of England.
Belgium has been a helpless plaything for larger nations, the provinces that are today Belgium moved successively from one occupying power to another. The Spanish were succeeded by the Austrians, the Austrians by the French, the French by the Dutch. Time and time again, foreign armies (especially the royal armies of France) marched against Belgium, pummeled its cities, plundered its warehouses, used it as a battleground for conflicts with other nations. The French Revolution annexed Belgium to France, moved its proudest works of art to the Louvre, again destroying and pillaging churches and monasteries.
When the French, led by Napoleon, were finally defeated in 1815 at Waterloo, Belgium was denied independence by the Great Powers and forced into a merger with Holland. It was not until 1830 that the Belgians were able to cast off the Dutch, expel all foreign troops, declare their independence and choose an uncle of Queen Victoria as the nation’s first King of all Belgians, Leopold I.
Historically the area was not even called Belgium, but was known instead by the names of its major “counties” (ruled by a count) and “duchies” (ruled by a duke): Flanders, Brabant, Liège, Hainaut. Except for the fleeting reference in Caesar’s Commentaries to the fierce “Belgii” tribes of northwest Gaul (58 BC), the word “Belgium” scarcely United by religion, with more than 90 percent of Belgians Catholics, its royal family is the last remaining Catholic monarchy in all of northern Europe. The late King Baudouin, a fervent Catholic and anti-abortion stalwart, even went to the extreme of abdicating the throne for a day in order to remove himself from the debate when his parliament voted on the issue two years ago. In northern Flanders, small street shrines to the Virgin Mary grace every town and village. And colorful public religious ceremonies and processions, celebrations of saints’ days, pepper each year’s calendar.
It is divided by language. Populated in the south by Celtic tribes speaking a later-Latinized language that became French and in the north by Frankish invaders speaking a form of low German, called Dutch. Today, Flemish (a dialect of Dutch) is spoken by 60 percent of the population, most of whom live in Flanders. French is the language of most of the rest who live in Wallonia. And then, to confuse things even more, there is the small German speaking enclave on the border with Germany.
Today an inevitable “linguistic line” runs across Belgium, splitting the nation almost in half. South of the line (Wallonia) the French-speakers are called Walloons. North of the line the Flemish-speakers are called Flemings. In places where the linguistic line cuts through a populated area, you can cross a street — from one sidewalk to another — and suddenly encounter signs, billboards, the speech of people that have changed from French to Flemish and vice versa. On one highway that swings back and forth from one linguistic area to another, the name of the city of your destination changes on the highway signs: Liège to Luik, Louvain to Leuven, Mons to Bergen and Anvers to Antwerpen.
The regions have their own government and administrative machinery within a federal system. Fire brigades are split into Dutch-speaking and French-speaking sections; public libraries are divided along linguistic lines; unions, professional associations and even the Catholic clergy are pluralized. The capital, Brussels, is carved out of the Flemish northern half of the nation — officially bi-lingual, but predominantly French. At the city limits of the Atomium in Brussels, you need only to walk across the street and suddenly everyone is speaking Flemish instead of French.
Mercifully, the language divide has remained just that, with an absence of violence. However, tension has flared in communes around Brussels over the introduction of French-speaking cable TV. Graffiti is a major weapon on both sides, with dual-language traffic signs a favorite target for defacing one of the two languages displayed. In Tervuren, the first Flemish town on the border with Brussels, graffiti proclaims “taal grens” — the language border.
Recently, the British School of Brussels, an establishment serving the children of Belgium’s foreign elite based in Tervuren, on the Flanders side of the language border, tried to hold a festival of French films. Before the guests began to gather at the campus, the school was occupied by a particularly militant and well-organized force from the Flemish extremist parties’ “language brigade”. It was kid gloves stuff, but the show was canceled.
Occasionally the war rocks the foundation of the state. Fourons, or Voeren as the Flemish call it, nestles in a corner of Liège surrounded by French-speaking Wallonia to the south and the Netherlands to the north. It consists of six tiny villages and is a crucible of radical Francophone separatism. Most residents are French speakers who have been administered since 1962 by Dutch-speaking Flanders under a bizarre territorial carve-up. In theory all public services should be manned by people who speak Flemish.
The Francophones’ goal is to return to the embrace of Wallonia; or failing that, to win bi-lingual status. Flemish nationalists threatened to withdraw support for Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene’s shaky coalition in protest at concessions offered to French speakers in the tiny region of Fouron. The cabinet was split, but a compromise was worked out in true Belgian fashion. Nevertheless, for all concerned there was the knowledge that over the past 20 years minuscule Fourons has brought down three governments.
The language divide also assumes European dimensions. The regions that constitute the Belgian state were asked to ratify the Maastricht Treaty allowing EU citizens to vote or stand in local elections in their country of residence. Concerned that European expatriates would upset their fragile language-based setups in residential areas close to Brussels, the Flemish speaking region secured an exemption on the vote of EU residents. In districts where foreigners make up more than 20 percent of the population, they will have to meet a six-year residency requirement.
The fiercest competition between the regions, though, is economic. Wallonia inherited much of the country’s industrial past — a dilapidated smokestack industry unable to compete in the modern market — which it has milked at the expense of modernization. Flanders, on the other hand, has aggressively invested in modern plants and has developed a microelectronics base of world standing. Some 77 percent of Belgium’s micro-electronics industry with its 30,000 workers is based in Flanders where Silicon Valley production centers have proliferated.
A lively debate now rumbles across Belgium about more Flemish control over the levers of power in the country. The Francophone grip and influence has been consolidated over the years by a system of cross-share holdings in the nation’s biggest concerns and multiple directorships which the Belgians have developed into an art form.
Belgium has long been a country of paradoxes. By the port of Antwerp, in the tawdry red light district where almost naked women display their wares in shop-like windows, is Red Square. This is a tumble-down, but buzzing few blocks with wall-to-wall shops selling electronics, leather and brassware, furs, gaudy furnishings, jewelry and gold. The windows of the shops advertise their wares in Cyrillic. Their owners are mainly Georgian-Jewish immigrants. And the Russian ruble — along with the proliferation of other CIS currencies — are freely convertible. During the Cold War era, it was a port of call for sailors and their families who were disgorged from Soviet ships visiting the port of Antwerp.
There were more sinister aspects of this anomalous presence in the Cold War era. The Russians had a big economic presence with their oil refinery at the mouth of the port of Antwerp, NATO’s second most important resupply artery in the event of war. It always remained a NATO nightmare that, should the unthinkable happen, the Soviets would empty their storage tanks into the mouth of the port and set it ablaze. And, the refinery’s compound bristled with a forest of antennae, reckoned by NATO to be capable of monitoring its naval operation in the North Sea area.
But security is something the Belgians take in their stride. Though the capital is perpetually playing host to the world’s dignitaries, security is low-key. The Belgians have a special way of doing it. For the funeral of King Baudouin, one of the most impressive arrays of foreign heads of state descended on Brussels including the Queen of England, Emperor of Japan, the US Vice President and representatives from a host of countries — including some of whom who were at war with each other. As they gathered in the Gothic St. Michael’s Cathedral, there was a problem. Leaders of the two opposing factions in the bloody Yugoslav war were at the funeral. The Belgian solution to this security puzzle: they were seated side by side in the Cathedral so that terrorist attack by either side would end in mutual martyrdom.
However, to those who regard Belgium as a pushover, history provides a cautionary Belgian tale. When a French king, in 1127, sought to name the successor of a childless Count of Flanders, the cities of Flanders rejected the choice, named their own successor and faced an ensuing French invasion. For the awesome battle ahead, they armed themselves with ugly little “goedendags”, small spiked balls of iron on four-foot chains which they swung violently about their heads. Thus equipped, on a muddy field outside the town of Kortrijk, this motley group of artisans and craftsmen met and defeated 2,000 French knights, who with their horses were slashed to pieces by the weapons. Incidentally, “goedendag” in Flemish is “how do you do.”
Paul Martin is a Brussels-based consultant and former correspondent for the London Times.
