A nation divided - Belgium

[frigidmagi]

telegraph

Beer, the national dish of "moules et frites" or "mosselen met frieten" and a pervasive cynicism with politicians are all that holds Belgium together after 100 days without government.

Despite increasingly desperate calls by Belgium's King Albert for national unity, the federal state has hit its worst crisis for 177 years after national elections on June 10 failed to produce a government and coalition talks descended into ugly squabbling between francophone Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish.

Freddy van Hoevelen, lives in the Flemish Brabant town of Vilvoorde, where legal battles and bitter rows over whether the Dutch-speaking municipality should be autonomous from a Walloon electoral constituency, are at the heart of Belgian's political deadlock.
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The 39-year old Flemish IT consultant has had enough. "The Belgian franc is gone. Our football team never wins anything anymore. The monarchy cannot even appeal to the politicians to stick together. It is time for us to get a divorce," he said.

"With the best will in the world, you can not build a country on a shared taste for mussels, chips and beer - no matter how tasty."

At the core of Belgium's crisis is a democratic deficit hardwired into a federal system that institutionalises divisions between Flanders, in the north of the country, and the southern region of Wallonia.

Belgium's 10.5 million citizens vote along ethnic lines, there are no national political figures in the country's 11 parties and there are five parliaments organised on rigid regional and linguistic lines.

While the Flemish make up the majority, with 60 per cent, political power must shared equally with the Walloons. This means that if half the country's 40 per cent of French speakers, only a fifth of the total population, want to block a government coalition they can.

An opinion poll in August about the disintegration of Belgium, underlined the divide with 45 per cent of Flemish people in favour compared with 20 per cent of Walloons against.

The Flemish sense of grievance is compounded by economic divides and a popular feeling that Walloons are unfairly benefiting. Unemployment among French speakers is 20 per cent, compared to eight per cent among Flemings.

Els De Graef echoes the sentiments of many Flemish nationalists when she accuses the Walloons of being "spongers" and "welfare addicts".

"We have had enough of paying for people who are just sucking at the welfare tit. The Flemish have a work ethic, too many Walloons just expect a free ride," said the Brussels housewife.

Images of young Flemish activists burning the Belgian flag hit the headlines last week, frightening many French speakers. The pictures were all the more shocking because they involve the youth wing of mainstream nationalists involved in government talks, not the extreme right separatists in Vlaams Belang.

Anne Abney, a young French-speaking student who lives in Vilvoorde with her Moroccan boyfriend, fears that Flemish separatism has ugly undercurrents.

"Many Flemish municipalities have banned the French language and many Flemish nationalists are intolerant and anti-immigrant. I would be frightened to live in an independent Flanders. I do not think it would be as liberal as the Netherlands," she said.

Like many Belgians, Nadine Christiaens, a Flemish librarian working in the multi-cultural Schaarbeek district of Brussels, believes Belgium is a flawed construction but also that a "pure Flanders" is a myth.

"I think the Flanders the Flemish politicians see does not exist anymore. Half my street are immigrants and do not speak Flemish. We live in a multi-cultural modern society. What is the Flanders they standing for? They think it is black and white but it is not," she said.

In the end, widespread cynicism with all Belgian politicians, both Flemish and Walloon, may be Belgium's salvation.

Koen Bollaert expressed the view of many on the prospects of a separate Flanders and Wallonie: "It will just be even more of an expensive and complicated racket than the federal government. It will not happen."

Oh dear.

[Mayabird]

What is it with Europe and the desire to break up into microstates, anyway? There's hardly a country that doesn't have some little province that wants to break away and be its own little podunk state.

[Cpl Kendall]

Can't the Queen or King (which ever the case may be) just choose a party to govern in a case like this? I believe the Queen of England has done so in the past as has the Governor General of Canada.

[Dartzap]

Can't the Queen or King (which ever the case may be) just choose a party to govern in a case like this? I believe the Queen of England has done so in the past as has the Governor General of Canada.

Other than the UK, no European nation really has a monarchy that anyone actually listens to. Especially those who take part in politics, heh.

Two words spring to mind: French and Revolution. They have odd ways about 'em, those continentalists, heh

[Norseman]

ACtually the Belgian monarchy has a lot of power, since it's the only unifying element in the country. I should also add that if something like this happened in Norway the King would be forced to pick a party.

Belgium however is a mess, no one is interested in a compromise anymore.

[frigidmagi]

More info, guardian

Willy the florist has had enough of his kingdom. He is an unwilling subject of an unloved country. A middle-class father of 12-year-old twins running a thriving flower business in this small Dutch-speaking town on the eastern fringe of Brussels, Willy is reduced to obscene gesturing by the very mention of his country.

"Belgium?" he splutters. "That's something that doesn't exist. The national anthem? Nobody knows it. Nobody can sing it. The king? A parvenu. A dysfunctional family. We're not going to take it any more."

Article continues
Willy is Flemish and proud of it. His native language is Dutch but like many Belgians he also speaks French and English. When he goes into Brussels on business, he complains, they call him a racist if he speaks in his own tongue.

He says French-speaking nurses wouldn't help his Dutch-speaking boy in hospital recently. And his comatose 80-year-old neighbour who was rushed to hospital? Same story. His wife didn't speak French and the doctors wouldn't speak Dutch. And if Willy - "don't use my full name, I've got a business to run here" - needs to go to court, that too will be in Brussels and the judges will speak French.

"The Flemish have shut up for too long. But now it's come to the point where we're not stupid any more. This country's sick. It's dying. Not right away. But it's terminal. Little by little, it's over. We will separate in the end."

A whiff of the Balkans is wafting through the heart of the EU. Belgium, a kingdom created by the great powers 177 years ago to keep the Dutch in their place and as a buffer between France and Germany, is falling apart.

It has always been a battlefield. From Waterloo to Passchendaele and the Ardennes, the superpowers of their day brought their wars to Belgium. Now Belgium is under attack from within.

"There's no Belgian sentiment," says Filip Dewinter, the leader of the Vlaams Belang party of extreme Flemish nationalists. "There's no Belgian language. There's no Belgian nation. There's no Belgian anything."

Plausible

Earlier this week, Mr Dewinter tried to gather support for a referendum on independence for Flanders, the larger, wealthier northern part of Belgium. His attempt in the Flemish parliament failed because the mainstream parties do not want to be associated with a party viewed as extremist, racist and rabble-rousing.

But opinion polls show support for an independent Flanders running at over 40% and rising. A country called Flanders is an entirely plausible prospect - a wealthy, successful, diligent country of six million. A smaller version of Holland. The mainstream Flemish parties currently struggling to form a government are also nationalist.

The crisis is a result of political failure and lack of leadership in a small country top-heavy with politicians. In a Belgium of 10.5 million people, there are 11 parties in the national parliament. Then there are another five parliaments organised on regional and linguistic criteria. There is not a single national politician or leader (bar King Albert) or a single national political party that straddles the linguistic and cultural north-south divide between Flanders and the southern region of francophone Wallonia.

"I don't know any federal state where you don't have national parties. Here the parties are purely local," says André Sapir, head of the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. "We are a federal state, but we have less and less of a common political framework."

Defining "Belgianness" is becoming a sorry national sport with loyalists struggling to come up with unifying factors or symbols that reinforce national identity apart from the underwhelming national football team or the royal family.

Geert Beekkman, however, is a Fleming who prefers a united Belgium to an independent Flanders. The air traffic controller at Brussels airport blames the crisis on the country's elites.

"How can you divide a country of 10 million into two countries? And what do you do about Brussels? It's the politicians. They've just decided it's better to split the country."

Indeed, it's the political paralysis that is producing a Balkanised Belgium. One hundred days after national elections, Belgium is rudderless, its rival Dutch- and French-speaking politicians unable to agree on a new coalition of Christian Democrats and Liberals.

The Flemish Christian Democrat leader, Yves Leterme, won the elections and should be the new prime minister. But he is unacceptable to the Walloons because he is an ardent champion of greater autonomy for Flanders.

The Walloons want to keep Belgium because they get much more out of it. The public sector is twice as big in Wallonia as in Flanders, unemployment at 17% is also double the Flemish rate. Flanders is wealthy, successful, bigger and votes for the right, complaining endlessly that it is being hobbled by transfers of public money to Wallonia, which is smaller, poorer and tends to vote for the left.

French-speaking socialists have run Wallonia for a long time (although they lost in June) and Flemish nationalists quip that Wallonia is the last Soviet republic in Europe.

Parallel worlds

The verbal abuse on both sides is turning nasty. Many Flemish disparage the Walloons as lazy spongers who are too stupid to learn Dutch. Historically, the French speakers were the Belgian elite, lording it over the Flemish whom they viewed as country bumpkins. Beyond Brussels, the French- and the Dutch-speakers inhabit parallel worlds that rarely intersect or integrate.

The tectonic plates of Germanic and Latin Europe rub up against each other along the line that separates Flanders from Wallonia just south of Brussels. The tremors are getting worse.

As the estrangement deepens, the city of Brussels runs in the opposite direction as Belgium's melting pot, which immensely complicates the strategies of separatists. The prospering EU capital is also home to Nato headquarters and a large immigrant population mainly from central Africa. Historically, Brussels is a Flemish city, but now it is a large French-speaking enclave in Flanders.

If push comes to shove, neither side would surrender Brussels, fuelling talk of extra-territoriality, turning the city into a post-national "capital of Europe".

"Brussels is the last obstacle," says Bart De Wever, a Flemish party leader. "We would have divorced years ago if it wasn't for Brussels."

BBC Blog

They are hanging out the flags round my way. And it's not in celebration, but despair at political failure.

Each day another black, red and gold flag seems to sprout from the window of a house or apartment. I'm tempted, just out of devilment, to stick a black lion rampant on a gold field out of my bedroom window. But the Flemish flag might not go down too well in my French-speaking part of Brussels.

Flag out in BrusselsThe profusion of flags is a patriotic but also partisan response to the failure of political parties to form a government. It’s now 108 days after the general election.

But this is not some vague expression of frustration but a specific display by French-speakers of loyalty to king and country, amid speculation that Belgium may bust in two. "I haven’t seen any around my way," sniffed a Flemish friend, when I mentioned the flags.

Well, he wouldn't. For in many ways the flags are a protest against the man who is still expected to become prime minister of Belgium. To the flag hangers, Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme represents those who don’t care overmuch about the existence of the country or the rule of the royal family.

He’s the one who dismissed Belgium as "an accident of history" and has questioned whether French-speakers are intellectually capable of learning his language. Given the royal family’s own questionable skills in that direction, it’s not at all polite.

Demonic issues

The obvious sticking point between the potential coalition parties is a reform package aimed at devolving more power to the Flemish regional government, giving them more power over health and the courts.

There’s also a side issue of the problem in Flemish towns around Brussels, where some feel not just French-speakers but French political parties are taking over. But for once the devil is not in the detail but in the demonic cultural and linguistic issues lurking behind these particulars.

tintinbottle203.jpgBelgium is a cosy, friendly country, a good place to live if you don’t want to live life at a breakneck pace. Or in my case, if you want an ideal base to throw yourself in to the hurly burly and retreat from it at decent intervals. But it is a country starkly divided on linguistic and cultural lines, which are far more firmly drawn than in some countries where such divisions have had far more brutal expressions.

It’s partly economic. I wrote some time ago about a survey that purported to show that if Belgium split, Flanders would be one of the richest countries in Europe, French-speaking Wallonia one of the poorest. Crucially, this divide is reflected in the political parties.

Cliches and stereotypes are dangerous generalisations, but it's necessary to refer to them to explain the tensions. Many Flemish see the French either as disdainful one-time aristocrats who are too arrogant and dismissive to learn the language of their fellow countrymen, or as lazy good-for-nothings high on tax subsidies, and trapped in Wallonia, an area that until recently was dominated by a Socialist Party apparently unaware of the economic direction of the last 20 years and allegedly corrupt.

One of my Flemish friends confesses that he finds his Francophone countrymen far more "foreign" than the Brits, like me. It’s probably an arrogant, very English way of seeing it, but to me there is no denying that Belgium can seem like an argument between the more "Anglo-Saxon" Flemish and their French-speaking neighbours. For humour or for approaches to the economy they would tend to look to the UK rather than France.

Two of everything

There’s another big difference, although I am not sure what political impact it has. The Walloons look up to France: they follow its politics more closely than their own, watching French films and reading French books. In return, the French on the whole sneer at their northern neighbours: one guidebook I have begins, "If you want to hear the language of Voltaire spoken in a German accent, go to Belgium."

belgium_flemish_203_2.gifThe Flemish, on the other hand, laugh at Dutch food, drivers and landscape, while maintaining they speak a purer Dutch than their neighbours in the Netherlands.

I must admit I hadn’t clearly seen the political problem, until I saw a think tank make this point in a Guardian article about the divide: Belgium is a federal nation without federal-level parties.

In Belgian politics there are two of everything. Socialists. Liberals. Christian Democrats. There’s a Francophone party and a Flemish party. Each with their own leaders and policies.

This is, I think, unique. It’s true in Germany the Bavarian CSU keeps itself proudly separate from the Christian Democrats but the same does not apply to the Social Democrats, Socialists or Greens. In the USA the differences between southern Democrats and their northern colleagues is well-known, but just imagine if they ran different candidates for president.

Unfortunately, the linguistic divide is not a new phenomenon but something that dates back to the country's foundation.

In 1830 the Netherlands ruled here. The linguistically repressed Walloons took their cue from the latest revolution in France and the upper and middle class liberals took to the streets. A provisional government was set up and eventually a kingdom established. One where the French language was the only official one and Flemish peasants accused of a crime couldn’t defend themselves because they couldn’t understand the charges or reply in their own language.

This only really changed in the 1960s, when linguistic liberalism combined with the decline of heavy industry to give Flanders more of a say. In Mr Leterme’s accidental country, the resentment between the two linguistic communities is not a tension that has sprung up over time, the conquest of one over the other was what brought Belgium into being.

An EU protectorate?

So a leader in the Economist touched a raw nerve a few weeks ago urging a “praline divorceâ€

[Mayabird]

Something that I want to ask all these European microstate wannabes, modern American secessionists, etc.:

Have any of you actually given a moment of thought into what you'd do after getting independence? You know, all those picky little things nations have to do, like collect taxes, set up embassies, run a national government, and so on? All the stuff that you don't do now and is taken care of quietly by your national boogieman?

If you have, go ahead and keep ranting. If not, or your one second of thought consisted of everything being candy and roses and easy as an approximation of pi...well, you're not going to listen to me anyway, but I will laugh my ass off if you actually somehow do get independence and fuck it up.