Belgian nationalism is often seen as a contradiction in terms. Anyone familiar with Belgian politics is aware of deep linguistic divisions between the Flemish and Walloons and the growth of aggressive Flemish nationalism. Yet Belgium is still here. Since 1830 it has defied all predictions that it could not work, survived long German occupations in both the First and Second World Wars, and remains one country. Understanding Belgium and its unusual nationalisms has never been simple. Maarten van Ginderachter's work, which covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is an invaluable guide.The book's subtitle pitches the book as a social history of modern Belgium, but a more exact label would be a history of Belgian workers and their relation to the state. The main actors remain the leaders and to some extent the members of the Belgian Workers Party (BWP), formed in 1885. Their newspapers and other publications provide most of the archival material, and their contradictory evolution in the years leading up to the First World War drives the narrative. According to van Ginderachter, the BWP practiced a strange kind of reformism, resting on the use of the general strike and other putatively revolutionary tactics, which was linked to the long, drawn-out, and occasionally violent struggle for the vote in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Although it was a rhetorically internationalist party, and attacked as such by Liberal and Catholic opponents, the BWP was nonetheless subject to all the pressures of Belgian nationalism and ethnic, linguistic, and regional loyalties. During and after the First World War, its members were divided between Walloon and Flemish wings, the first largely pro-French and the second pro-German. If we want, as van Ginderachter argues, to explore the development and power of Belgian nationalism, and to understand it from the bottom up as well as from the top down, the BWP is probably the best place to start.In the Belgian context, van Ginderachter finds that all the known laws of nationalism did not seem to work. The “hyperliberal” state never defined Belgians as the French and German states did. Elections only weakly imbued citizens with national consciousness. Military conscription remained haphazard and did not bind young men together across class and linguistic lines. Imperial possessions in Africa never filled the void, although they left a marked racial legacy. The education system never had the same success in patriotic instruction as in other European countries. For many Belgians, the national flag wasn't even the favorite tricolor on offer. Especially in the Walloon industrial areas, many marches featured the French flag, if not plain red. Van Ginderachter provides several amusing examples of bolshie Belgian workers confronted by police ordered to have their flags conform to patriotic standards. This, in other words, is not the story of a successful and all-pervasive Belgian national project.After demonstrating that nationalism from the top down had only partial success, van Ginderachter moves on to nationalism from the bottom up. Identifying some authentic working-class feeling relatively unmediated by the state is immensely difficult. The archival record itself imposes certain views on its subjects, and even sympathetic contemporary observers fall victim to what a number of scholars term Eigen-Sinn, roughly translated by van Ginderachter as “a subversive appropriation of imposed values, symbolic inversions of existing power relations, and evasive or ironical dealings with outsiders, authority figures, and people with a higher social rank” (106). The response of a miner from the Borinage to an outsider asking if he had ever met a socialist worker exemplifies the term: he had, he said, once met a dark man in a red fez who might have been one.How, then, to gauge working-class Belgians’ actual feelings about national questions? Here van Ginderachter draws on “propaganda pence,” or short messages that BWP members paid party newspapers a small and variable sum to print. Van Ginderachter, only partly tongue in cheek, labels them “proletarian tweets” (107). These short messages had the same brevity and anonymity as the average tweet and covered the full range of political and personal expression, from crude descriptions of sexual conquest to pride in local party work and expressions of national, ethnic, and local feeling. Socialist newspaper editors left these messages unedited and faced condemnation from the membership on the rare occasions they chose to censor them. The sheer scale of van Ginderachter's excavation is impressive (27,529 messages between 1886 and 1900). They reflect, as much as possible, the average working-class newspaper reader, and they expose some important trends. Few if any “tweeters,” for example, named Marx or Engels. National, ethnic, and linguistic issues rated far lower than those related to party, class, or neighborhood. Workers more often wrote (safely anonymous) libels of local employers or of workers in Catholic organizations, than attacks on the monarchy. In quantitative and qualitative terms, van Ginderachter marshals proletarian tweeters in a rough approximation of Belgian workers’ national consciousness.In his view, the First World War and German occupation raised that consciousness in ways comparable with other countries. The vast majority of Belgian men and women experienced the war as civilians and were reminded of the alien German presence—and therefore their own distinctiveness as Belgians—every day. These conditions did what decades of institutional pressures and patriotic education never quite managed to do. Even as the German occupiers tried to manipulate linguistic divisions to their advantage, Belgian nationalism finally came into its own. Van Ginderachter toes that conclusion to a general point: he argues that “the Great War really gave birth to twentieth-century Europe and its obsession with ethnicity and nationalism” (173). In the Belgian context, the war interrupted the previous emphasis on “consocialism,” or the identification by people along class, ideological, and religious lines rather than ethnic and linguistic ones. For the first time, on a mass scale, the war introduced a strong ethnic and linguistic element into Belgian politics.So did the war end a period of Belgian exceptionalism? Should we talk about a Belgian Sonderweg? Does Belgium simply fail to recite the script prepared by other European nationalisms? This book suggests a qualified yes to each of these questions. It also has an obvious political purpose. This book helps to suggest the origins of the malaise in which Belgium now finds itself, barely able to form governments from a jumble of incompatible Flemish and Walloon parties. After all, the politics that predominate now first became obvious in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The great strength of this book is not as prologue to the present. The first half provides a serious challenge to easy generalizations about the codevelopment of nationalism and states, and the power of education systems, military conscription, and other aspects of state power in producing a strong national consciousness. The second half helps historians, including those who are not Belgian specialists, to think about nationalism as a popular phenomenon that can be accessed. In both cases, van Ginderachter has succeeded in making Belgium an exemplar for the rest of Europe even as it provides an exception to it.