Belgium No Longer Exists

Alizee’s discomfiture might not have been news beyond the close confinesBelgium: Land of waffles and chocolate? of the Benelux pageant circuit, but for the political context in which it arose. National elections are typically the cue for frantic horse-trading between the chaotic patchwork of regional parties that make up the Belgian political scene, but even by those standards, last June’s parliamentary elections were a mess. It took the warring factions fully 41 weeks before they came to an uneasy coalition agreement this Tuesday, and even that is unlikely to hold for very long. And in the interim, Belgians have started to ask real questions about the continued viability of their state.

Throughout most of its history, Belgium has, at least for foreigners, been a watchword for dullness. The popular trivia challenge to name ten famous Belgians still stumps all comers; even Wikipedia needs Tintin, Hercule Poirot and Dr. Evil to pad out the numbers. Brussels, home to many of the institutions of the European Union, is regularly voted Europe’s most boring city – “despite its renown for its waffles, chocolates, and comic books”, as the EU Observer website grumbled this week without apparent irony. The stereotype is reinforced by the sense that Belgium is somehow an artificial construct, designed a couple of hundred years ago to keep the Germans from invading France, or the French from invading Holland – no one can ever quite remember. De Gaulle once said that Belgium had merely been invented by the British to annoy the French.

This sense of artificiality is increasingly shared by many Belgians...or civil war? themselves. The continuing fiasco of last year’s election has raised tensions between the Dutch-speaking Flemish half of the country and the Francophone “Walloons” in the south that threaten to split the nation in two. The Flemish majority have long nurtured resentments towards their French-speaking compatriots; the Belgian elite has historically been drawn from the latter community, and older Dutch-speaking Belgians still recall being taught in French in defiance of their cultural traditions. Television and radio, newspapers and magazines, universities and schools, and cultural institutions of all kinds cater for one community or the other, but almost never both: a celebrity among Dutch speakers may be all but unknown to the French. Even the traffic lights are painted in different liveries; red and white in the French areas, yellow and black in Flanders.

More importantly, this is a federal state, as Ingrid Robeyns has aptly put it, without any federal political parties. Flemish people vote for Flemish parties, Walloons for French parties, and the twain meet only to discuss cobbling together coalition deals after elections. Given an electoral system in which politicians are required only to appeal to their own communities, it is unsurprising that the result is identity politics of an unconstructive and occasionally ugly nature. Add into the mix the significant economic disparity between the two halves of the country, which necessitates redistribution of wealth from Flemish north to French south on a large scale, and it is a minor miracle that Belgium has held together as long as it has. Bemused citizens watch their politicians squabbling and arguing about district re-zoning, unemployment rates and who is subsidising whom, and wonder if they might not be better off with a divorce, after all.

Separatist politicians, most of whom are on the Flemish side, are naturally happy to feed off this low-level but growing discontent. The leader of one such party, Bart De Wever, earned some attention this week by announcing rather dramatically that “Belgium no longer exists”, and for many of his compatriots that is probably true. But it was another comment, later in the same interview, that was arguably more revealing; “This is not Kosovo, but nor is it the 19^th Century. We are members of a European Union that now decides 60 percent of our laws. We will never be completely independent.”

It’s in this context that the possible fragmentation of Belgium needs to be seen. The current coalition is cobbled together with parties from all over the political spectrum, left and right, Flemish and Walloon, and for that reason alone is unlikely to last very long. Belgium may split, though on balance that's still an unlikely scenario. But in the meantime, life in the French-speaking enclave of Brussels goes on as normal. Jerusalem it ain’t.

At a time when the European Union is pushing the cause of deeper and wider integration in everything from immigration policy to tax harmonisation, voters in Belgium have the same concerns as voters everywhere; about jobs and education, improving healthcare and cutting crime. Dutch-speaking Belgians will ultimately support whatever set of arrangements is most likely to bring this about, just as they’ll swallow their pride to chat up Alizee Poulicek in French, if the chance ever comes their way.

Eurocrats are fond of boasting that the EU has banished war from the continent, though this raises eyebrows in NATO headquarters, let alone the former Yugoslavia. But to an extent, at least, they are correct; conflicts which not so long ago might have been settled by force or violence are, in a confederation of interconnected states, much more likely to be resolved peacefully, if not always amicably. Hillary may claim, ludicrously, to have brought peace to Northern Ireland, but perhaps more persuasive was the prospect of economic rescue for the province’s impoverished inner cities and stagnant business sector, much of it coming from EU coffers. Religious persecution and entrenched discrimination are not dead, but in a Europe where the same tedious directives and regulations apply to all, regardless of creed or colour, they seem increasingly to belong to another age.

This is not to say that nationalism in Europe is a waning force; very far from it. Devolution of power to Scotland and Wales was supposed, in the words of one former Scottish Labour politician, to “kill nationalism stone dead”; instead, it has revitalised it. Other regions from Catalonia to Lapland have similar concerns, and press for a greater say in their own affairs. But for separatist parties all over the continent it is “independence within Europe” that is the watchword. The rallying cry of the resurgent Scottish nationalist movement is still freedom, but freedom to sit in plenary sessions of the European Fisheries Commission, not march on London. Separatist terror groups like the IRA and ETA have withered on the vine as people have come to realise that there is little to gain and simply too much to lose through violence; in the Balkans, too, the carrot of European partnership is having an uneven but measurable effect in persuading political demagogues and nationalist movements to put down their AK-47s in favour of a chair in dull but worthy committee meetings. In our post-ideological politics, it seems increasingly preposterous to spill blood over who has the right to vary the rate of corporation tax. Ever-closer union is boring us all into submission.