Postwar

was divided and its holdings redistributed, to mutual disadvantage).

The dramatic events at Leuven—a curiously parochial and chauvinist echo of contemporary student protests elsewhere—brought down a government and led directly to a series of constitutional revisions (seven in all) over the course of the ensuing thirty years. Although devised by moderate politicians as concessions to satisfy the demands of the separatists, the institutional re-arrangements of Belgium were always understood by the latter as mere stepping stones on the road to ultimate divorce. In the end neither side quite achieved its aims, but they did come close to dismantling the Belgian unitary state.

The outcome was byzantine in its complexity. Belgium was sub-divided into three ‘Regions’: Flanders, Wallonia, and ‘Brussels-Capital’, each with its own elected parliament (in addition to the national parliament). Then there were the three formally instituted ‘Communities’: the Dutch-speaking, the French-speaking, and the German-speaking (the latter representing the approximately 65,000 German speakers who live in eastern Wallonia near the German border). The communities, too, were assigned their own parliaments.

The regions and the linguistic communities don’t exactly correspond—there are German speakers in Wallonia and a number of French-speaking towns (or parts of towns) within Flanders. Special privileges, concessions, and protections were established for all of these, a continuing source of resentment on all sides. Two of the regions, Flanders and Wallonia, are effectively unilingual, with the exceptions noted. Brussels was pronounced officially bilingual, even though at least 85 percent of the population speaks French.

In addition to the regional and linguistic Communities, Belgium was also divided into ten provinces (five each in Flanders and Wallonia). These, too, were assigned administrative and governing functions. But in the course of the various constitutional revisions real authority came increasingly to lie either with the region (in matters of urbanism, environment, the economy, public works, transport and external commerce) or the linguistic community (education, language, culture and some social services).

The outcome of all these changes was comically cumbersome. Linguistic correctness (and the constitution) now required, for example, that all national governments, whatever their political color, be ‘balanced’ between Dutch- and French-speaking ministers, with the prime minister the only one who has to be bilingual (and who is therefore typically from Flanders). Linguistic equality on the Cour d’Arbitrage (Constitutional Court) was similarly mandated, with the presidency alternating annually across the language barrier. In Brussels, the four members of the executive of the capital region would henceforth sit together (and speak in the language of their choice) to decide matters of common concern; but for Flemish or Francophone ‘community’ affairs they would sit separately, two by two.

As a consequence Belgium was no longer one, or even two, states but an uneven quilt of overlapping and duplicating authorities. To form a government was difficult: it required multi-party deals within and across regions, ‘symmetry’ between national, regional, community, provincial, and local party coalitions, a working majority in both major language groups, and linguistic parity at every political and administrative level. And when a government was formed it had little initiative: even foreign policy—in theory one of the last remaining responsibilities of the national government—was effectively in the hands of the regions, since for contemporary Belgium it mostly means foreign trade agreements and these are a regional prerogative.

The politics of this constitutional upheaval were just as convoluted as the institutional reforms themselves. On the Flemish side, extreme nationalist and separatist parties emerged to press for the changes and benefit from the new opportunities to which they gave rise. When the Vlaams Blok, spiritual heir to the wartime ultra- nationalists, rose to become the leading party in Antwerp and some Dutch-speaking suburbs north of Brussels, the more traditional Dutch-speaking parties felt obliged to adopt more sectarian positions in order to compete.

Similarly, in Wallonia and Brussels, politicians from the French-speaking mainstream parties adopted a harder ‘communitarian’ line, the better to accommodate Walloon voters who resented Flemish domination of the political agenda. As a result, all the mainstream parties were eventually forced to split along linguistic and community lines: in Belgium the Christian Democrats (since 1968), the Liberals (since 1972), and the Socialists (since 1978) all exist in duplicate, with one party of each type for each linguistic community. The inevitable result was a further deepening of the rift between the communities, as politicians now addressed only their own ‘kind’.[360]

A high price was thus paid to mollify the linguistic and regional separatists. In the first place, there was an economic cost. It was not by chance that by the end of the twentieth century Belgium had the highest ratio of public debt to gross domestic product in Western Europe—it is expensive to duplicate every service, every loan, every grant, every sign. The established practice of using public money (including EU regional grants) on a proportional basis to reward clients of the various community ‘pillars’ was now applied to the politics of the language community: ministers, state secretaries, their staffs, their budgets and their friends are universal, but only in Belgium does each come attached to a linguistic doppelganger.

By the end of the century ‘Belgium’ had taken on a decidedly pro forma quality. Entering the country by road, a traveler could be forgiven for overlooking the rather apologetic signpost inscribed with a diminutive ‘Belgie’ or ‘Belgique’. But visitors could hardly miss the colorful placard informing them of the province (Liege, say, or West-Vlaanderen) that they had just entered, much less the information board (in Dutch or French but not both) indicating that they were in Flanders or Wallonia. It is as though the conventional arrangements had been handily inverted: the country’s international borders were a mere formality, but its internal frontiers were imposing and very real. Why, then, did Belgium not simply come apart?

There are three factors that help account for Belgium’s improbable survival, and more broadly for the persistence of all the states of Western Europe. In the first place, with the passing of generations and the implementation of constitutional reforms, the separatist case lost its urgency. The old communitarian ‘pillars’— hierarchically organized social and political networks that substituted for the nation-state—were already in decline. A younger generation of Belgians was provingfar less susceptible to appeals based on sectarian affinity even if older politicians were slow to appreciate the fact.

The decline in religious practice, the accessibility of higher education, and the move from countryside to town loosened the grip of the traditional parties. For obvious reasons this was especially true of the ‘new’ Belgians: the hundreds of thousands of second- and third-generation immigrants from Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Morocco or Algeria. Like the new Basques, these people have pressing concerns of their own and little interest in the dusty agendas of ageing separatists. Opinion polls through the Nineties indicated that most people, even in Flanders, no longer put regional or language issues at the head of their concerns.

Secondly, Belgium was rich. The obvious difference between Belgium and other, less fortunate parts of Europe where nationalists were able successfully to exploit communal sensibilities is that for the vast majority of residents of modern Belgium life was both tranquil and materially sufficient. The country is at peace—if not with itself then at least with everyone else—and the same prosperity that underwrote the ‘Flemish miracle’ also attenuated the politics of linguistic resentment. This observation applies with equal force to Catalonia or even to parts of Scotland, where the more extreme exponents of the case for national independence saw their arguments steadily defanged by the demobilizing effects of unaccustomed affluence.

The third reason for the survival of Belgium—and of Western Europe’s other internally fragmented nation- states—has less to do with economics than with geography, though the two are closely related. If Flanders—or Scotland—could in the end remain comfortably part of Belgium or the UK it was not because they lacked the intensity of national sentiment that appeared to have re-surfaced in former Communist lands. Quite the contrary: the desire for self-rule was palpably stronger in Catalonia, say, than in Bohemia; and the gulf separating Flamands from Walloons was far wider than that between Czechs and Slovaks or even Serbs and Croats. What made the difference was the fact that the states of Western Europe were no longer free-standing national units with a monopoly of authority over their subjects. They were also and increasingly part of something else as well.

The formal mechanism for a move towards full European Union was set out in the Single European Act (SEA) of 1987; but what really drove the process forward was the end of the Cold War. The SEA had committed the twelve members of the Community to achieving by 1992 the full and free circulation of goods, services, capital and people—hardly a breakthrough, since these same objectives were already envisaged in principle decades before. It was the Maastricht Treaty of that year, and its successor Treaty of Amsterdam five years later, that propelled the Union’s members into a truly novel set of institutional and financial arrangements, and these were the direct outcome of radically changed external circumstances.

From Community to Union: The EU 1957-2003