State, Nation, Ethnicity
At the gates of Brussels, in its green setting, Overijse (pronounced: overeïs) knows its immutable rituals. The grape festival, the cycle races, the walks in the forest followed by a Trappist beer… and the community wars. In this Flemish commune of 27,000 inhabitants to the south-east of the capital, a lock between Wallonia and Brussels, French speakers represent more than a quarter of the population. Large French-speaking families have settled there, sometimes for generations. After the linguistic border was established in 1963, they found themselves in Flanders where only Dutch (or Flemish) remains the language. “Overnight, we were considered emigrants in our own country,” says a notable. This was the start of tensions.
In the latest episode, the municipal gazette launched a public appeal to denounce traders who use a language other than Dutch in their relations with customers. Please take photos, note the time and date of the “crime”… Outcry! Even Marino Keulen, the very pointed Flemish Minister of the Interior, said everything bad about it: “No law requires traders to put up posters written in Dutch. The idea of denunciation is reprehensible and medieval.” This is what stuck in the throat of mayor (mayor) Dirk Brankaer. According to him, the municipality does nothing other than “kindly ask real estate agencies and some publishers to use Dutch in their announcements to the public”. Language courses are even offered. For Dirk Brankaer, “pacification is never better served than by respect for the culture and the region where we come to settle”.
Pacification? The methods used are not always “friendly”. Let’s take the case of Alice (not her real name), a Walloon trader established on Brusselsteenweg. Its only fault: its sign is bilingual. Also, its walls are regularly tagged. She even received a visit from around ten angry people from the TAK (Taal Aktie Komitee) action group, who burst into her store. In two minutes, they had erased everything in French with a marker. Then, Alice received a letter from an individual “inviting” her to remove the disputed inscriptions, with a copy to the Flemish organizations (Flemish ultra) in the municipality. “The police didn’t even want to register my complaint,” she says. In the meantime, Alice’s sign is still there… English is also in the crosshairs. The Belgian capital is officially bilingual, but French-speaking in practice. The Flemish do not want to hear about its extension, in order to prevent the Flemish periphery from becoming even more “Frenchified”. (Le Temps, 07/15/2008)
This Flemish approach is reminiscent of that of Quebec. But Quebec is a French-speaking island in an English-speaking ocean. In Belgium, Flanders represents 60% of the population and 70% of the wealth. But this majority behaves like a minority. – but is it really a majority? Only the narrow framework of the Belgian State allows it to be qualified in this way. Internationally, Dutch has around twenty million speakers, ten times fewer than French. Dutch-speaking cultural resources are not negligible, but cannot be compared to those of the French-speaking, English-speaking and German-speaking groups. The Flemish “people” were historically pushed back onto a very narrow territory, reduced to semi-slavery in the North of France, and dominated in Belgium itself by a State which from 1830 wanted to attempt, not without presumption, a process of centralization and French-style acculturation – a process which ultimately failed. There is no doubt that this unflattering historical journey can give today a pretext for feelings of inferiority and vengeful attitudes.
The memory of the people being what it is, we can however assume that this is largely a matter of political manipulation. Flanders is a handful of SMEs that work. These new upstarts are today the most active instigators of employers’ poujadism and separatist parties.
However, in reality, the two populations do not get along so badly. Their biological background is the same, their culture very similar, and the notion of “Belgium”, which dates back to antiquity, predates that of Flanders, which can at best date from the period after the occupation by the Franks. Saliens. So what? To “heat” the Flemish population, it is enough to pull out the old tricks of nationalism: say “defend” the language, split the statistics to make people believe that it is a separate society, designate scapegoats, amalgamate the French-speaking world and immigration, blame the national state for the social crisis, put the qualifier “Flemish” behind any plausible noun. As Pascal said, sprinkle yourself with holy water, and you will believe. In a park in a town on the outskirts of Brussels, even the jay (a common European bird) becomes “Flemish”. This nationalization of culture and even nature is to the advantage of those who would benefit financially from no longer helping Wallonia, and in the event of independence, would be promoted to the head of a new state.
Let’s be clear, expressions such as “the Flemish don’t want” have absolutely no meaning – we don’t know, in reality, what exactly the population wants, and it’s not a few biased polls and elections manipulated by the political system who will tell us. How strong are nationalist attitudes? To what extent are they inspired by minority propaganda? How heavy do movements like the TAK actually weigh? If the social sciences deserved their name, they would have addressed these questions a long time ago to provide a certain answer.
Rather than trying to force French speakers and foreigners to speak Flemish, it would be more judicious to give them a positive image of the Flemish language and culture. The task is arduous, it is true. It is much easier to pose as a victim. It will be difficult for this heavy and timid people – a caricature of the Germanic world – to make their patois speaking and the limited resources of their culture seductive. However, there is no other reasonable choice, because what the Flemish “authorities” are doing today only results in making them odious to French-speakers and foreigners. Belgium’s international image, based on friendliness and intercultural flexibility, is good. This shows that a process of seduction is possible. Such a bet was succeeded even by France, despite the Bonapartism of its system, its poor quality of service and its weak openness to the international dimension.
It is true, to do justice to the “Flemish” point of view, that in Brussels, Charleroi, Liège, or even Namur, the social crisis is in full swing. And not only that, legacy of history, which is generated by a difficult economic redeployment and by the incompetence of a clientelist political class – it is also the contemporary crisis of empty narcissism and ethnic borders which are fading. Thus a mayor from the Brussels periphery called for an end to linguistic administrative facilities on the grounds that they attract many French-speaking Brussels residents of non-native origin to his municipality; another Flemish politician claimed, tellingly, that French speakers are immigrants to Flanders. The idea of using Flemish identity as a shield against immigration and the social crisis can be good. But this forgets that the latter were promoted by decades of federal governments involving Flemish parties. The eight years of the previous government, led by a Flemish Prime Minister, did not in any way reverse the trend, quite the contrary, while allowing the flagships of national industry to be sold abroad.
In fact, everything happens as if the legitimate protest of the population against the consequences of current policies was diverted and channeled into a nationalist diversion.
So the troubled game of some is perhaps causing the only split that is really serious – that of the spirit of community.
