Feature3 – BelgiumAndGeorgia
Will France move into Belgium?
Watching the mess in Georgia, we should not get too smug about breakaway provinces on the fringe of central Asia. An ugly struggle for ethnic separation is brewing only an hour’s train trip north from Paris.
I’m talking about Belgium. The divorce between northern Flanders and Wallonia, the southern French-speaking half, has been anticipated for so long that people in France do not give it much thought. "Are the Belgians mad?", France-Inter, a state radio station, asked its listeners in a jokey poll this month.
France takes a condescending, affectionate approach to its small neighbour. The butt of jokes, Belgians are seen as slow-witted frites (chips/French fries) eaters with a creative genius that produced Art Nouveau, Hergé, the father of Tintin, and entertainers who move to France when they make it. Otherwise, Belgium is Brussels, the French-speaking seat of the European bureaucracy and source of many French ills.
This cozy view may be in for a jolt if the six million Dutch-speakers succeed in what seems like an unstoppable push to extract rich Flanders from its unhappy 178-year marriage to Wallonia.
France has just had a wake-up with an opinion poll that found that 49 percent of
Walloons would like to be annexed by France if Flanders splits off. An extraordinary 60 percent of the French said that would be fine by them.
I suspect that they were not really thinking about the question, put by La Voix du Nord, the Lille newspaper, and Le Soir, the Brussels daily. Or perhaps they were succumbing to the present movie-driven fad for les Ch’tis, the inhabitants of the French far north.
Secession to France is a far-fetched idea and no Paris party supports it, although a Belgian group has been campaigning for a annexation for years. Talk of shifting the frontier northward across half Belgium is pretty alarming when you think of the wars that have been fought over that patch of Europe. Among the odd consequences, France would take over Waterloo, the south Brussels suburb where Napoleon made his last stand.
But Belgian break-up is not far-fetched and France might have to come to the aid of the Wallons in some form.
The Belgian government has been paralysed for a year. As Yves Leterme, the Flemish-born Prime Minister, runs daily business, three wise men have been appointed by King Albert II to find a formula that will probably unstitch further the already loose federal arrangement.
The two sides have never really got on since Britain cobbled the old southern Netherlands provinces together as a nation state in 1830 to ensure that France did not take it over again, as it did in the 1790s. In the late 1940s, when Wallonia was gripped by strikes, General de Gaulle told colleagues that he was ready to absorb the region if the Walloons begged for it.
The Flemish cause – driven by resentment towards the once dominant but now poor French-speakers – has been growing ever more radical. A decade ago, when I lived in Brussels for four years, the tensions were unpleasant. You got a dirty look if you addressed Flanders shop-keepers in French. My son took compulsory Dutch in his French-speaking primary school, but there was not much mixing between the two tribes. Belgian politics are so intricate, with an array of different assemblies, including a small German-speaking region, that few foreign journalists pay them much attention.
Now the linguistic, ethnic feud has deepened, with Dutch-speaking towns on the edge of Brussels even banning bilingual signs and, in one case, ordering French-speaking children to use only Dutch in a municipal playground.
The Flemish nationalists envisage a peaceful divorce of the type between Slovaks and Czechs. Apart from lingering fondness for the nation and the royal family that symbolises it, there is one big obstacle: the city of Brussel or Bruxelles, to use its twin name. A separate region, Brussels is a mainly French-speaking (officially bilingual) enclave inside Flanders. The Flemish cannot imagine Brussels not being part of the Nieuwe Republiek van Vlaanderen. One idea has been to make it a neutral European Federal District, like Washington DC, Mexico DF or Canberra ACT, but it’s hard to see Flanders accepting that.
The Belgian malaise will probably just rumble on, but it is sobering to think that ethnically-driven separatism is at work in the heart of modern, rich, western Europe, not just something that goes with horses and carts and Russian tanks.
(by charles bremner, The Times, 20August08)
