Ireland was less clear. The channel separating Scotland from Northern Ireland is less than fifty miles wide, but the gulf between the sensibilities of the two communities remains immense. Whereas Scottish nationalism derived above all else from a desire to resist and repulse the English, the national patriotism of Protestant Ulstermen consisted of a consuming determination to remain at all costs within the ‘Union’. The tragedy of the Irish ‘troubles’ lay in the opposed but otherwise identical objectives of the ultras of both sides: the Provisional IRA seeking to expel the British authorities from Ulster and reunite the province with an independent, Catholic Ireland; the Protestant Unionists and their paramilitary volunteers fixated upon suppressing the ‘Papists’ and retaining
If by the last years of the century both the Unionists and the Provisionals were finally forced into compromise, this was not for lack of determination on the part of extremists on both sides. But for the same reasons that the massacres in Bosnia and Kosovo brought about the intervention of outsiders, so the seemingly endless cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity in Ulster not only undermined local sympathy for armed militants in the communities they claimed to represent, but forced London, Dublin and even Washington to intervene with more energy than they had mustered hitherto and press at least an interim agreement on the warring parties.
Whether the Good Friday Agreement, signed in April 1998, could resolve the national question in Ireland remained unclear. The interim solution on which both sides reluctantly concurred left much unresolved. Indeed, the terms of the accord brokered by the Prime Ministers of Ireland and the UK, with assistance from President Clinton—local self-government by an Assembly based in Ulster, with guarantees of representation for the Catholic minority, an end to the Protestant monopoly of police and other powers, confidence-building measures across the two communities and a standing Inter-Governmental Conference to oversee implementation—contained much that could have been imagined, with good will on all sides, twenty years earlier. But as an armistice in Ireland’s Hundred Years War the agreement seemed likely to hold for a while. Not for the first time in such matters, the ageing radicals at the head of the insurgency appeared to have been won over by the prospect of office.
Moreover the Republic of Ireland itself underwent an unprecedented socio-economic transformation in the course of the 1990s and now bore little discernable resemblance to the ‘Eire’ of nationalist imaginings. From the perspective of youthful Dublin, absorbed in its newfound role as a multi-cultural, low-tax outrider for post-national Euro-prosperity, the sectarian preoccupations of the Provisional IRA had come to be regarded in much the same way as the imperial, unionist obsessions of the Orange Order were seen in London: bizarre antiquarian relics of another age.
To anyone familiar with their earlier history, the new politics of sub-national particularism in the larger states of western Europe might appear simply as the reversion to type following the centralizing detour of the previous century. Even the outstanding contemporary European exception to this pattern actually illustrates the rule: Germany, the largest European state west of the former Soviet Union, did
Whether they were mapped directly on to ancient states (as in the case of Bavaria) or were newly conceived territorial combinations of once-independent principalities and republics (like Baden-Wurttemburg or Nord-Rhein-Westfalen), the
Indeed it was not in western Europe’s largest country but instead in one of its smallest that the politics of national separatism took their most concentrated form. Belgium, a country the size of Wales with a population density exceeded only by the adjacent Netherlands, was the one West European state whose internal schisms bore some resemblance to contemporary developments in the post-Communist east. Its story may thus cast light on why, after the separatist wave of the late twentieth century had receded, the national states of
By the 1990s the towns and valleys of Wallonia were sunk into post-industrial decline. Coal mining, steel making, slate and metallurgical industries, textile production—the traditional cradle of Belgium’s industrial wealth —had virtually disappeared: Belgian coal production in 1998 was less than two million tons per year, down from twenty-one million tons in 1961. In what was once Europe’s most profitable industrial region there remained only the decrepit mills of the Meuse valleys above Liege and the gaunt, silent mining installations around Mons and Charleroi. Most of the former miners, steel-workers and their families in these communities now depended upon a welfare system administered from the country’s bi-lingual capital and paid for—as it seemed to Flemish nationalists—out of the taxes of gainfully employed northerners.
For Flanders had boomed. In 1947 over 20 percent of the Flemish workforce was still in agriculture; fifty years later fewer than 3 percent of Dutch-speaking Belgians derived their income from the land. In the decade from 1966 to 1975 the Flemish economy grew at the unprecedented rate of 5.3 percent per annum; even during the economic trough of the late Seventies and early Eighties it continued to grow, at a rate nearly twice that of Wallonia. Unencumbered by old industry or an unemployable workforce, towns like Antwerp and Ghent flourished with the growth of services, technology and commerce, aided by their location athwart Europe’s ‘golden banana’, running from Milan to the North Sea. There were now more Dutch speakers than French speakers in the country (by a proportion of three to two), and they produced and earned more per capita. The Belgian north had overtaken the south as the privileged, dominant region—a transformation accompanied by a crescendo of demands from the Flemish for political gains to match their newfound economic dominance.
Belgium, in short, combined all the ingredients of nationalist and separatist movements across Europe: an ancient territorial division[359] reinforced by an equally venerable and seemingly insuperable linguistic gulf (whereas many residents of the Dutch-speaking regions have at least a passive acquaintance with French, most Walloons speak no Dutch) and underpinned by stark economic contrasts. And there was a further complication: for most of Belgium’s short history the impoverished communities of rural Flanders had been dominated by their urban, industrialized, French-speaking Walloon compatriots. Flemish nationalism had been shaped by resentment at the obligation to use French, at the French-speakers’ apparent monopoly of power and influence, at the francophone elite’s arrogation to itself of all the levers of cultural and political authority.
Flemish nationalists, then, had traditionally taken for themselves a role comparable to that of Slovaks in pre-divorce Czechoslovakia—even to the extent of actively collaborating with the occupiers during World War Two in the forlorn hope of some crumbs of separatist autonomy from the Nazi table. But by the 1960s the economic roles had been reversed: Flanders was now presented by its nationalist politicians not in the image of backward, under-privileged Slovakia but rather as Slovenia (or—as they might prefer—Lombardy): a dynamic modern nation trapped in an anachronistic and dysfunctional state.
These two self-ascribed identities—repressed linguistic minority and frustrated economic dynamo—were now
One of the crucial symbolic moments in the ‘language war’ came in the Sixties—fully half a century after Dutch had been officially approved for use in Flemish schools, courts and local government, and four decades after its use there was made mandatory—when Dutch-speaking students at the University of Leuven (Louvain) objected to the presence of French-speaking professors at a university situated within the Dutch-speaking province of Flanders-Brabant. Marching to the slogan of ‘
