Belgian History Research Articles

Advances in life sciences and bioterrorism. Risks, perspectives and responsibilities.

The First World War left millions dead on the battlefields of Europe, and the survivors returned home with the experience of the first industrial‐style war fresh in their minds. It was particularly because of the horrors created by the use of chemical weapons and the mutilation that these gases caused that the main players in the war started to consider a widespread ban on such methods of attack. After several years of negotiations, on 19 June 1925, the major industrialized countries signed the protocol for the ‘Prohibition of the Use of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare’ in Geneva, which is now known as the Geneva Protocol. But less than 20 years after its creation, this protocol did not prevent some contractors of the treaty from engaging in offensive biological warfare programmes. Furthermore, the development and use of biological weapons by Japan in the Second World War led to an expansion of these programmes in various Western countries and in the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, Western countries started to critically assess their biological weapons programmes because of technical problems in the production and storage of the agents involved. In addition, it became clear that biological weapons are of limited military use because they pose a considerable risk to the attacker as well as to the attacked. The USA and the UK therefore concluded that the size of their existing conventional, chemical and nuclear weapon inventories was sufficient to retaliate against a Soviet attack and that biological weapons were no longer required. This conclusion eventually culminated on 10 April 1972 with the signing of the ‘Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction’ (BTWC) (www.opbw.org) that entered into force in 1975. However, rumours …

Van de Bende Van Nijvel tot Dutroux : een beleidswetenschappelijke analyse van de politiehervorming in de jaren '80 en '90

In May 1998 the Belgian government and Jour opposition parties reached the «Octopus agreement,» deciding on the most comprehensive police reform in Belgian history. However, the problems to which the reform was intended to be a solution were known long before and the basic option of this reform also existed for some time. Hence the research question: why did the reform only take place in May 1998 and not earlier ? To answer this question, the paper follows the narrative method : it tells the story that preceded this Octopus agreement from 1980 onwards. That narrative is «codified» in the language of a theoretical framework, a combination of the policy analysis models of Kingdon and Baumgartner and Jones. Together, these models turn out to be very useful to structure the narrative and provide a strong answer to the research question, allowing for analyticgeneralisation andJuture comparison.

Political propaganda in the Brabant Revolution: Habsburg ‘negligence’ versus Belgian nation-building

This paper explores the functioning of political propaganda during the Brabant Revolution, that is, during Belgium's contribution to the ‘Age of the Democratic Revolution’. More in particular, it examines the differences between royalist and patriot propaganda. Detailed reference to the political dialogue pamphlets of the time allows for the reconstruction of the first instance of (cultural) nation-building in Belgian history. In more general terms, the paper hopes to contribute to the argument for an historic and developmental approach to the study of nation, with particular attention for its multi-faceted and (potential) emancipatory functionality.

Paul Willems: le dernier écrivain belge?

Paul Willems, Flemish writer and playwright, who wrote in French, can be considered along with Suzanne Lilar as one of the last Belgian writers in national understanding of this word. This paper is a proposal of analysis of the last prose writing of Willems Le Pays noyé. As this work can be read as an allegory of Belgian history, attention is drawn to the problem of Belgian identity and its formation process. Moreover the final remarks deal with the attitude of Willems to French language, reflected in his different dramatic writings.

Het gebruik van de voorkeurstem bij de parlementsverkiezingen van 13 juni 1999

At 13 June 1999, elections for the regional Parliaments, the federal Parliament (both House of Representatives and Senate) and the European Parliament were held in Belgium.The percentage of voters casting a preferential vote at these elections increased again, reaching the highest score ever in Belgian history. On average, 60,9 % of the electorate expressed their preference for one or more candidates. Although voters have the possibility to cast a multiple preferential vote (i.e. a vote for several candidates figuring on the same party list) , this possibility is not used very much. A voter who cast a preferential vote, only vote on average for 1,73 candidates.The further increase in preferential votes was a little surprise since strong limitations were imposed upon campaign expenditures and on commercial affichage. Political and social evolutions, such as individualism, anti-party feelings and mediatisation seem to have had a stronger impact upon preferential voting than these material limitations.The use of the preferential vote varies from one constituency to another, from Flemings to Walloons, and from one party to another. There were some notable evolutions. The voters of the extreme-right Vlaams Blok and of the green parties Agalev and Ecolo, who traditionally cast less preferential votes than voters of other parties, have dimished the gap between them and the other parties. Another important evolution is the decrease of pref erential voting in some constituencies in Wallonia. As for the Senate and the European Parliament, more Flemings now cast a preferential vote than Walloons do. The large constituencies used for these elections seem to attract very well-known politicians and as a consequence also very much preferential votes in Flanders.Despite the increase in preferential voting, the order of the list, composed by the party remained in most cases decisive whether or nota candidate was elected.

The Making of The White March: The Mass Media as a Mobilizing Alternative to Movement Organizations

The White March in Brussels on October 20, 1996 left many social scientists speechless. They witnessed by far the largest demonstration in Belgian history, 300,000 participants, but were struck by the total absence of any mobilization machinery. This article's thesis is that the press acted as an adequate alternative to intermediary organizations and, as such, was responsible for the huge success of the White March. Focusing on the coverage of the Dutroux case in five Belgian newspapers during the three months leading up to the demonstration, we argue that there is sufficient evidence that the media co-produced the White March. We demonstrate empirically how the different thresholds of central conventional mobilization theory were passed by the press, and conclude with a theoretical discussion on the circumstances favorable for media-driven peak mobilizations.

A History of Belgium's Child Protection Act of 1912 The Redefinition of the Juvenile Offender and His Punishment

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The White March as a Belgian Body without Organs: On dissipative structures, strange attractions and empty signifiers

This essay comments on the so-called ’White March‘ which, in the aftermath of the Dutroux-case (which was about multiple child abuse and child murder), led one out of 30 Belgians to participate in the biggest demonstration, albeit a silent one, Belgium has ever known. It is argued here that this White March can be read, in a Deleuzean way, as a rhizomic flash, or, using metaphors from chaos theory, as a dissipative structure, which was strangely attracted around empty signifiers (e.g. “Whiteness”), to form a Body without Organs. This formation, or build-up of a white (Belgian) Body without Organs is explained by pointing at two complementary processes which post-Fordist, flexible, “hypermodern” Belgium is sliding into: 1) under “hypermodern” conditions of flexibility, of post-Fordist regulation, of de/re/centring subjectivities and of budgetary austerity, the old Belgian regulatory mode of political pacification through pillarization is becoming more and more obsolete, and, at the least, is growing incapable of regulating ever proliferating nomadic subjectivities; 2) de/re/centring, nomadic subjectivities, in Belgium, losing the old comforts of pillarized regulation and pacification, are floating and whirling freely in Belgium's political void, since there is no alternative mode of regulation – such as a public space or culture of civic negotiation – in sight/site. This has brought Belgium's mental and political landscape on the verge of deep instability, or, in the language of chaos theory, in a phase of exploding bifurcations, in which small causes can produce big consequences – a phase, that is, in which tiny particles of social energy can rapidly cluster together (around “strange attractors”) to form dissipative structures, mostly around “empty signifiers”, in a (Deleuzean) Body without Organs. This happened, in Belgium, when, in August 1996, the Dutroux-case broke out. The Dutroux-case gathered – rhizomically – huge portions of “White material” of unregulated discontent from Belgium's multiple locations of multiplicity to form a Body without Organs, which, in turn, materialized in the White March of October 20th 1996, after it had been named by Marc Dutroux's legal counsel, who suddenly spoke a language of universalism, equality, and civic culture. When the counsel spoke words, that is, which did not match with Belgian everyday life experience, still submerged as it was (and is) in the old mental habits of Belgium's politics of pillarization, with its trench mentality, and its war-of-position-like strategics. The essay closes with some considerations on the future of Belgium's emerging White Movement. In a sense, this essay aims at two goals: it tries to read one of the most significant events in Belgian history using rather “unusual” metaphors, and, secondly, while doing so, it aims at showing that metaphors from chaos theory and from Deleuzean post-structuralism can be merged together while describing (or explaining) concrete historical events. This essay, then, tries to contribute to what might be called a historiography of rhizochaotics, or a psycho-geography of rhizomic and chaotic socio-mental energies.

Trade integration in the twentieth century: What does Belgian history tell us?

Trade Integration in the Twentieth Century: What Does Belgian History Tell Us? — This paper studies globalization, protection and the impact of regional trading blocs in the twentieth century. The authors take the perspective of a small open core country in Europe. Using a gravity approach, it can be shown that trade integration in Europe followed a U-shaped pattern during the last hundred years. Moreover, the similarity between the gold standard and the current period is striking. Finally, evidence is found of a strong EC effect, in particular among EC6 countries.

Some Remarks on Urban History in Belgium

Some Remarks on Urban History in Belgium

Women, Work, and Politics: Belgium, 1830-1914.

This is a study of the working women of Belgium from the country's independence in 1830 until the First World War. Patricia Penn Hilden argues that the success of Belgium's industrial revolution - second only to Britain's in the nineteenth century - was uniquely dependent on female labour. In contrast to women in other European nations, Belgian women earned their wages in virtually every industrial setting: in mines and mills, in factories, on the docks, and in the dozens of semi-artisanal trades that underpinned industrial development. Women's widespread and significant participation in the labour market - unrestricted by the labour legislation that elsewhere controlled female waged work - found expression in the emergent politics of Belgium's working class. Women not only participated in male-led politics, but also created and led their own `women's movements', first during the `anarchist' period of the First International, then during the organization of socialist politics after 1880. Dr Hilden's extensively researched analysis indicates the extent to which the economic and political activities of Belgium's ouvrieres and arbeidsters mirrored their small country's many deviations from historical patterns prevalent elsewhere. This important scholarly study has many valuable contributions to make to our understanding of the relations between socialism and feminism, labour history, and the history of Belgium.

Tweehonderd jaar privatiseringsdebat in België : Historische reflectie over het wel en wee van de Belgische (tele)communicatiebedrijven

The debate on the privatization of some public enterprises in Belgium has been reopened. Pros and cons seem to be inspired by ideological and political imperatives rather than by scientific considerations. The way in which similar debates were carried out during Belgian history, highlights some features of the actual debate. This paper traces back the way in which the tensions between thepublic and the private sectors have been approached and regulated. This historical analysis points to some inconsistensies and shortcomings of actual opinions on telecommunications regulation in Belgium, and more generally to the social function of telecommunications in contemporary society.

Popular fiction in England, 1914-1918

While Englishmen were dying by the thousands on the battlefields of Europe, their friends and relations on the home front were reading books of humor, tales of espionage and adventure, colorful romances, and historical swashbucklers. Harold Orel's penetrating book explains why escapist dominated the popular literary market in England throughout the Great War. A large factor, he shows, was the view of publishers, reviewers, booksellers, libraries, literary groups, and the general reading public that escapist was a useful diversion from the inescapable horrors of war. Orel begins with a survey of the British literary world and its attitudes toward the novel at the outbreak of the war. Within a broad social, cultural, and economic context he depicts the fiction industry at a time of extraordinary upheaval, before the triumph of Modernism, when the attitudes and esthetics of writers, the tastes of readers, and the economics of the marketplace were undergoing rapid transformation. Subsequent chapters offer detailed studies of fifteen of the most touted novels of the period and the ways they reflected--or, more often, failed to reflect--the radical changes taking place as they were being written. The writers examined include George Moore, Norman Douglas, Frank Swinnerton, Compton Mackenzie, Mary Webb, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, John Buchan, Alec Waugh, H.G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. Many of their novels during these years avoid mention of the war that was reshaping their world, or allude to it only obliquely. The book concludes with a review of changes in the publishing world in 1918, the last year of the Great War. In its comprehensive coverage of a wide range of oncepopular but now neglected novels, Orel's authoritative study fills a gap in the cultural and literary history of early twentieth-century England.

Belgian politics in 1989

The center-left Martens VIII cabinet, which had taken office in May 1988 following the longest political cricis in Belgian history, continued in 1989 implementation of its constitutional reform program. The European elections had no domestic impact, but during the campaign the focus was once again on the burning immigration issue. Meanwhile, abortion liberalization caused tension inside the majority. In foreign affairs, the focus was on normalization of relations with Zaire.

Whittle: The True Story by John Golley

1074 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AXI) CULTURE aspects, often neglected topics, will prove to be indispensable to the history of French aviation, and it exemplifies the type of approach necessary to place the history of aviation in its broader historical context and thus in the mainstream of historical study. John H. Morrow, Jr. Dr. Morrow, Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia, was recently the Charles Lindbergh Professor at the National Air and Space Museum. He is the author of two books on early German air power and is currently writing a history of air power in World War I. Whittle: The True Story. By John Golley. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987. Pp. 272; illustrations, bibliography, appen­ dixes, index. $24.95. Not all of the heroism of World War II is found on the battlefields of Europe. The courage and tenacity of Frank Whittle and his team at Power Jets, Ltd., is the core of John Golley’s account of the conceptualization, design, and development of the first turbojet engine. Told with understated humor and grace characteristic of Whittle himself, the story records Whittle’s struggle to win financial backing for his new company, his initial success, and his subsequent disillusionment as he saw the turbojet taken away from Power Jets by more powerful commercial interests. Golley tells a good story, but as history the book is a disappointment. “The true story,” in fact, seems less true than Whittle’s own account in Jet: The Story of a Pioneer (London: Frederick Muller, 1953), from which much of this work is drawn in the form of long quotations without citation. The author has added new information from Sir Stanley Hooker’s autobiography, Not Much of an Engineer (Shrews­ bury: Airlife, 1984), to flesh out the role of Rolls Royce in early jet engine development, but the chapter on Whittle’s visit to America and the development of the Whittle engine by General Electric is without substance. Golley appears to have missed a golden opportunity to ask Sir Frank Whittle to fill in the details of his life after World War II and his views of the evolution of propulsion technology from the turbojet to the turbofan. The inclusion of “A Brief Summary of Power Jets’ Work on Turbofans” in technical appendix 6 only whets our appetites to know more of the true story. Virginia P. Dawson Dr. Dawson teaches at Cleveland State University. She recently completed Engines and Innovation: A History of Lewis Laboratory, under a National Aeronautics and Space Administration contract. ...

Belgian politics in 1988

During the first Jour months of 1988, Belgium witnessed the painstaking formation of the Martens VIII center-left Cabinet. In October 1987, the Christian Democratic-Liberal Martens VI Cabinet had been forced to resign over the perennial Fourons affairs. After the parliamentary elections of December 1987 which had resulted in a Socialist victory, the center-left Martens VIII Cabinet wassworn in on May 9, 1989, marking the end of a political crisis which had lasted 147 days; i.e., the longest crisis in Belgian history. During the remaining months of 1988, the new Government sought parliamentary approval for its ambitious constitutional reform program, having very little time left for continuing the economie recovery policy started under the Martens VI Cabinet.During the second half of 1988, relations between Belgium and Zaire deteriorated.

Tactical Evolution in the French Army, 1560-1660

Trying to understand seventeenth-century European history without weighing the influence of war and military institutions is like trying to dance without listening to the music. Territorial unification, bureaucratic growth, social tension, and civil rebellion were all influenced by the style and growth of armies on the Continent. No single publication has done more to extend our knowledge of seventeenth-century military history than Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660.1 This very brief but provocative essay published in 1956 has set the terms of the debate and stimulated research and writing for nearly three decades. Roberts asserted that a revolution in tactics accomplished by the Dutch statthalter Prince Maurice of Nassau (1584-1625) and the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus (1611-32) drove the older Spanish system of massive, unwieldy infantry formations off the battlefields of Europe. New strategy took advantage of well-trained mobile armies to pursue victory, instead of prolonging stalemate. At the same time, standing armies emerged as land forces grew to unprecedented proportions, giving statesmen potent weapons of war for grand schemes. However, the gargantuan armies spawned in the seventeenth century burdened society with crushing taxation, heavy-handed bureaucracies, and all the weighty trappings of absolutism. Since the initial appearance of Roberts's essay, a number of

Animal Representations in Kuba Art: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sculpture

During the First World War, Paul Nash was commissioned by the Ministry of Information to make a visual record of events taking place on the battlefields of Europe. He reportedly remarked of the experience that he no longer considered himself wholly an artist but had become in some senses a 'messenger'. Nash, of course, was in part referring to his role in documenting for people with no direct experience of the war the military endeavours of their countrymen. At another level, however, his statement may be taken as an acknowledgement of the shift of emphasis which is brought about when a work is explicitly intended as a public testament and not created mainly for that smaller coterie of people with established and informed tastes in artistic expression. The characterisation of Nash's relationship to this wider audience as that of a messenger is apt. By analogy with a message the imagery of his war painting had to be accessible, for the invitation to create a 'public' profile of battles and their aftermath carried with it restraints on the freedom to develop his own more personal artistic language. The imagery needed to be direct and certain. Indeed, had Nash conceived his task in more esoteric terms he would have failed to

Gottfried Benn's `Karyatide' in the Context of His Early Poetry

Although Gottfried Benn's `Karyatide' (p. 45 ), 1 published in 1916, has been one of the most frequently anthologized and discussed of all his poems, it is symptomatic of the persistent tendency of Benn criticism to concentrate on individual poems or to group them in largely synchronic structural or thematic categories that it has rarely been considered within the context of his early poetry as a whole. Moreover, the only critic to have done so in any detail, Else Buddeberg, 2 has located the poem in an undifferentiated early period extending from 1913 to 1917, without recognizing that, along with other poems published during Benn's years in Brussels (1915-17), `Karyatide' represents an important new stage in the development of his poetry which, while continuing some of the earlier tendencies, is structurally and stylistically quite distinct from the work of 1912-13 and in some respects already points forward to that of the 1920s. 3 It is the aim of this article to show the poem's place in this context and at the same time to explain its undeniable quality in terms of its successful resolution of some of the basic problems of Benn's early verse. It is necessary to preface this discussion with a brief glance at the historical context of the Brussels work. Although Benn experienced the carnage of war at first hand during the invasion of Belgium and subsequently, as a medical officer with the German military government, was in an excellent position to observe the behaviour of the victors during the

University Influence on Regional Development: Example of a New Creation-The Louvain Catholic University at Louvain-La-Neuve

At 30 km from Brussels, a driver going from Brussels to Luxemburg on the E40 motorway, known as the Ardennes Motorway, will find a new lead-out signposted 'LouvainLa-Neuve-South'. This title, worthy of a big metropolis, may well intrigue anyone who has not closely followed the political history of Belgium. Louvain Catholic University (known as UCL) was created in 1425; its influence at national and international level contributed to the development of the city of Louvain. Intimately involved in recent decades in Belgian political history, the University could not escape the linguistic and community conflicts perturbing Belgium. It would take too long to detail here the political events which led the French section of this university, in 1968, to take the decision to leave the city of Louvain-Leuven in Flemish-situated in the Flemish part of the country, to set itself up on Walloon soil, not in an existing town but on an undulating plateau in 'Brabant Wallon'. One thing certain is that the influence of the University on regional development was but little perceived at the time when the decisions were made. Of course, the borough authorities who welcomed the University realised the importance it would have for their borough, but that was more a matter of local policy speculation than a design for regional development. Only a few minority voices pointed out the interest for the whole of Wallonia of this location of the old Alma Mater in the French-speaking part of the country. The parliamentary debates and legal texts which consecrated this new localisation in no way reflect the 'regional development' dimension of the problem. Furthermore, a divorce quite clearly appeared between the legislator's wish to confine the University to a campus in the open country, where the quality of the persons authorised to reside there could be carefully controlled, and the University's definitely stated wish to create a town, the social-cultured support indispensable to the proper balance of university life. For some of the professors, leaving Louvain was a big wrench, so it was necessary to propose a setting which would try to resemble it. The fact of appointing as principal town-planner the one who had so successfully restored the big 'Beguinage' in Louvain helped to bring together the nostalgics and those who, frightened by the revolutionary situation existing at that time-May 1968-on campuses, such as that of Nanterre, wished to insert the University in an urban framework. There students, considered as being a jarring element, would be blended with the townsfolk, seen as a more stable element.