Belgian Nation-state Research Articles

Territorial Ironies: Deservingness as a Struggle for Migrant Legitimacy in Belgium

This article ethnographically examines the everyday lives and collective activism of undocumented migrants in Belgium as they await the results of asylum appeals and regularisation applications. We show how the values emphasised by state-led migrant legalisation regimes contrast with undocumented migrants’ narratives of their own worthiness. In foregrounding deservingness as a moral and legal threshold, we argue that the Belgian nation-state responds to undocumented migrants by enforcing and implementing citizenship policies that persistently keep them on the fringes of legitimacy and recognition. The discursive constructions of ‘good citizens’ that undocumented migrants embody and make claims to in Belgium extend to and envelop the lives of undocumented migrants in Europe in general.

Social Democracy and National Identity: The Ethnic Rift in the Belgian Workers' Party (1885–1914)

The image of the Belgian Workers' Party as a solid party unchallenged by ethnic tensions and united around a common Belgianness does not stand up to historical scrutiny. Using the key concepts of imagined communities, ethnies, mythomoteur,and oppositional patriotism, this article argues that despite its undeniable integration into the political, social and economic structures of the Belgian nation-state, the BWP was ethnically divided between Flemish and Walloon socialists in the period 1885–1914.

Gerechtelijke nationale cultuur en haar blinde vlek: de mercuriales en gelegenheidsredes van Charles Faider als procureur-generaal bij het Hof van Cassatie (1871–1885)

AbstractThis article sketches the attitude of the Belgian liberal magistrate and politician Charles Faider towards the constitutional civil liberties and freedoms. One can discover an interesting paradox by comparing his opening speeches and his acts as a politician. In the speeches he gave as procureur-général at the Cour de cassation, Faider consequently emphasised the beneficiary effects of the liberal 1831 Belgian Constitution. In his discourse, the Belgian magistrates were the best guards of the splendid future of the nation, because they fully understood the age-old national tradition of civil liberties. However, as a politician, he did not hesitate to limit the constitutional rights and liberties. Due to the political pressure of Napoleon III, he limited the freedom of the press by outlawing insulting foreign heads of state. The gap between his discourse and his practice is the perfect expression of an interesting paradox: in the 19th-century Belgian nation state, liberty and national identity profoundly influenced each other, but at the same time restricted their mutual possibilities, because the overall image of a free but responsable nation had to be maintained.

Belgian Citizenship: Managing Linguistic, Regional, and Economic Demands

Until 1830-1831, there was no Belgian nation-state and thus no political framework for national citizenship. The 1830-1831 Belgian laws on nationality were extremely restrictive, mostly based on the traditional concept of jus sanguinis , paternity, and familial national unity. In Belgium, the principle of equality inherent in citizenship has today overcome the past restriction of citizens rights vis- á -vis the poor, women voting rights (1948), and maternal transmission of citizenship (1984). Citizenship has become exclusive again regarding aliens. With a workforce including 10% aliens, Belgium has renewed its xenophobic sentiments and declared strict immigrant regulation to be elemental to the nation. The creation of a Belgian federation was the result of a process of devolution of a once unitary state, in which several forces succeeded in transferring competencies to newly created sub-states. The reforms are the result of conflicts and diverging perceptions between the major language groups, the Dutch and Francophone speakers. European Union policy is a constant challenge to consensus and democracy. However, pessimism regarding the capacity of Belgian consensus could be seriously questioned when one looks to the unique historical challenge of Belgium as it achieved local, regional and national independence, based on consensus. The Welfare State, the codetermination of the workers, and the labor-management dialogues have been a challenge to democracy in industrial and bi-polar countries such as Belgium. Nevertheless, the most challenging conflict has been the linguistic/cultural/ethnic problem. Thus the Belgian historical consensus and the two levels of citizenship, for the Flemings and the Walloons, federal and regional/communitarian, seems to have prepared these populations to share a dual allegiance, to Europe and to their region/community.

'A profitable company'. Het pantheon als historisch genre in het negentiende-eeuwse België

'A profitable company'. The national pantheon as a historical genre in nineteenth-century BelgiumAfter the Revolution of 1830, the new Belgian nation state was in a patriotic mood. It celebrated its national glory in pantheons, imaginary temples in which the heroes from the national past were represented and accumulated. These pantheons were almost omnipresent in the public spaces of the kingdom. They familiarized the Belgians with their heroic ‘forefathers’ and with their legacy. The meaning and message of these pantheons were easily accessible. The sculpted, painted and written specimens of the genre could adopt various forms and could be composed according to different schemes. The national heroes were gathered either in a series of individual portraits or in a single group portrait. Often they displayed a hierarchic structure. The discussions about the medium concerned the selection and selectivity of the series and compositions: who could be allowed to enter the Hall of Fame of the nation, and was it not too crowded? Moreover, the excessive growth of the number of pantheons threatened to undermine their effectiveness. King Leopold II made various attempts to raise one National Monument in honour of the heroes of the nation, after the exemple of the Walhalla of Ludwig I of Bavaria. But the pantheon had lost prestige by the end of the nineteenth century. As an expression of the historical culture it had become marginal. Only within the framework of the debate on the ‘layered’ Belgian nationality, did a certain revival occur. In the year 1930, the Flemish subnation established its own pantheons.

Flemish Dutch Is the Language of the Flemings

Abstract. The Flemish nation is a reality. Flanders has even become a state to some extent. Flanders no longer speaks French. French has been gradually ideologised from the language of prestige to the language of the enemy. Flanders has not chosen Flemish, but Dutch as its new language of prestige. There was no elite in Flanders speaking Flemish. Those who should have developed Standard Flemish in the 17th and 18th centuries, switched to French. After 1830, the Orangists put forward three major arguments to reject Flemish and to opt for Dutch. First, Flemish was not strong enough to compete with French. Second, Flemish was not good enough; it was corrupted by French, it was only a poor by-product of a Belgian nation-state that was dominated by French. Third, by opting for Dutch, the Flemings would link up with their history. In the second half of the 19th century, a process of dutchification gradually set in. As the importance of language as a social, economic and, therefore, political factor increased, the influence of Dutch grew stronger. Yet, there seem to be limits to the dutchification of Flemish society and, consequently, of the language of the Flemings. Even the most dedicated supporters of Pan-Netherlandic unity somehow reject the language of the Dutch as a model for Flanders.

The Treachery of Art: This is Not Belgium

The Treachery of Art: This is Not Belgium Stéphane Spoiden (bio) En creux: la Belgique est un trou sur la page du monde. Le vide n’existe pas, et pourtant il existe, mais en creux. —Claude Javeau Partiellement francophone mais non français, nordique mais sans mythologie, plural mais sans contours, lieu d’infiltrations constantes et de dénis tout aussi flagrants, il est une culture parce qu’il ne peut se prévaloir d’en avoir une. —Marc Quaghebeur A Virtual State Belgium likes to think of itself as being at the heart of Western Europe and is indeed central to many European Union activities. Brussels is the capital city of the European Union and the seat of most of its institutions. But Belgium is also a small country overshadowed by economic and cultural giants such as Germany, France and Britain. The first questions that one might want to pose concerning this small and relatively little known country are: How can Belgium cultivate its cultural identity despite the powerful influence of surrounding cultures? Can Belgium retain or develop an individual cultural character and, if so, what form(s) can its expression take? The answer to these questions may be found in what has become a cliché concerning the cultural particularity of Belgium: a country that lies at the crossroads of the two major cultural types in Western Europe: Latin and Germanic. 1 The country is comprised of two communities: the Walloons and the Flemings, each loosely associated with one of the two cultural types, as well as a minuscule German-speaking [End Page 137] community of about 65,000 people. But as a consequence of being at this intersection, each of the two principal communities is also situated at the periphery of the two European cultural regions. Belgium is thus a country simultaneously on the margins and at the center of the cultural dynamics of Europe. This marginal centrality/central marginality leaves the country riven by tensions and divisions. I contend that Belgium’s cultural identity is determined by this unique geographical and cultural situation. The unique position of Belgium has prompted many observers to conclude that Belgium has been, since its creation in 1830, either an artificial state or a non-nation. The French statesman Talleyrand, for instance, famously contended that the creation of Belgium was merely a by-product of European diplomacy of the time that did not significantly reflect cultural or national character. The idea of Belgium as a non-nation has recently gained considerable currency among the Belgians themselves who, witnessing the increasing fragmentation of their country and the concomitant rise of an antagonistic biculturalism, have more and more difficulty discerning cohesive cultural or national forces within the country. Furthermore, it has been frequently asserted, particularly in intellectual circles, that Belgium has no particular identity at all. In response to this paradoxical assertion of non-identity among Belgian intellectuals, however, historians are quick to remark a cultural unity among the different Belgian populations of the region since the Middle Ages. The biculturalism that separates Flemings and Walloons did not arise before the latter part of the nineteenth century. Until independence from the Netherlands in 1830, a multicultural society in the so-called Belgian territories, whose origins are traceable to the numerous small groups inhabiting Southern Netherlands, was subsumed under a loosely defined common culture. What was called Belgium during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in fact an entity composed of several regions that shared a common history and enjoyed some form of political union. A national sentiment only arose after Belgium gained independence from the Netherlands and avoided annexation by an interested France. 2 A State to Be or Not to Be a State A virtual state of Belgium had been in existence since the Middle Ages, and the creation of a real Belgian nation-state in 1830 paradoxically initiated the demise of Belgian cultural unity by fostering a biculturalism based on linguistic differences. Reginald de Schrijver, a renowned Belgian historian, points out that “there was [End Page 138] no Flemish or Walloon consciousness in the modern sense, and thus no Flemish or Walloon people” (1981, 16). That perception progressively changed when the...

Ethnic Conflict within a Fractured Belgian Nation-State The Case of the Trouble in Brussels (May 1991)

AbstractThis paper analyses clashes which took place between Belgian police and young people mainly from 'immigrant' backgrounds in Brussels during 1991. Four models were developed in the Belgian press for understanding the violence, but a deeper understanding of the public confrontations requires an alternative explanation which places local events in a wider context of power and state. The conflict should more properly be understood as the reaction of a relatively powerless community to its disadvantaged situation. The young people were acting not as victims but as active agents questioning dominant notions and policies concerning 'integration', challenging the ethnic labels applied to them and asserting a desire for citizenship rights. Despite these positive reactions the relationship between minorities and the state has not radically changed and violence could easily break out again as more recent events have demonstrated.