By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
Belgium went to the polls on June 9. But the country doesn’t really have a “national” election. There are separate votes in Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia. Most Flemish voters can only vote for Flemish parties, and French speakers can vote for French-speaking parties. In the capital, Brussels, Belgians can pick and choose.
This has created a fragmented political landscape. Traditional parties don’t operate nationwide. They split into Flemish and French-speaking parties decades ago, catering to their own regions. The issue of identity threatens the continued existence of the Kingdom of Belgium, now six years short of its 200th birthday.
This country of 11 million people now has a nest of parliaments: a federal one; one each for its three regions; and then yet other ones for the French, Dutch and German-speaking “communities.”
Government is duplicated rather than deepened by levels of public spending that are among the highest in the European Union. In Belgium responsibility is shared between so many layers that ultimately no one is in charge.
Sixty per cent of Belgians are Flemish, and two thirds of the national wealth is created in Flanders. The Constitution, however, gives parity to French speakers in the number of ministerial posts.
Ethnic conflict in Belgium has historically been intense, but generally peaceful. Its roots are linguistic: most of the population speaks Dutch, but the official language in the nineteenth century was French. Ethnic demands and conflict management strategies were initially non-territorial, but increasingly acquired a territorial aspect.
The fact that Dutch and French speakers were territorially mostly segregated facilitated this evolution. As well, after 1945 divergent economic developments between the Flemish north and francophone south, with the former becoming far more prosperous, gave rise to a genuine Walloon nationalism.
In 1962 the cultural and linguistic border was drawn for the first time between the Flemish and French-speaking areas. In 1963 language laws established Flemish, French and German as the official languages for their geographical areas.
Most institutions in the country are now divided. There is no longer even a single national broadcasting service, though separate channels are provided to the different language groups, Dutch, French and German. As a consequence, the general news agendas of Flanders and Wallonia are also entirely different.
It is largely Flemish nationalism that has made the country’s future precarious. Some use it to push a liberal economic agenda while others push exclusionary identity politics. There are also “Orangists,” who see Flemish independence as a step towards a union with the ethnically similar Netherlands.
In Flanders, migration was a major concern on June 9, with people calling it the “biggest problem.” That explains the position of Vlaams Belang (VB), an anti-immigration and separatist party calling to close the borders.
A few weeks before vote, the party’s leader, Tom Van Grieken said Flanders should become an independent republic, with Brussels as its capital. “Belgium is a failed state,” he declared.
The VB has called Belgium a “forced marriage” and says it will work towards an amicable dissolution from Wallonia. It wants to split the country, starting with a “declaration of sovereignty” backed by a Flemish majority.
One of the ironies about Belgium being described as a failed state is there is less for the state to fail at than almost any other European country because so much power has been devolved to the three regions – Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels.
From cradle to grave, the lives of Belgium’s divided communities barely overlap, with different schools, media, language and lifestyle. Its international borders are almost invisible, yet its internal ones are unignorable, as historian Tony Judt, has pointed out.
Secession would be simple, but pointless, he argued in a 1999 essay entitled “The Stateless State: why Belgium Matters.” Judt concluded that “We all know, at the end of the twentieth century, that you can have too much state. But Belgium may be a useful reminder that you can also have too little.”
Belgium offers a lesson in stability through chaos. Even its demise would be serene. It is the world’s most successful failed state. This is, after all, a country where someone sabotaged a nuclear-power station in 2014, without causing too much of a stir. A reputation for slack policing and arms-smuggling made it a perfect hub for Islamist terrorists, who killed scores between 2015 and 2016 in Belgium and France.
In any case, a new national government is likely to coalesce around the Flemish right-wing New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which is autonomist rather than secessionist, and beat the VB in Flanders June 9. Its leader, Bart De Wever, is trying to form a ruling federal coalition. This is the first time a member of the N-VA has a clear shot at the country’s top job. But at least five parties, French and Flemish, may have to be involved.
The N-VA has dismissed separatism in the short term and wants to reform the Belgian state into a “confederal” one instead, moving all power to the regional level but keeping a national brand for things like foreign affairs and national defence. De Wever is also championing a classic conservative program of fiscal discipline and law and order. So he’s seen as somewhat less “dangerous,” for those who wish to see Belgium remain one state, no matter how tenuous.
No comments:
Post a Comment