Posted: Wed 06 Aug 2008 03:24 Post subject: Flemish Nationalism on the Rise, Belgium Teeters on the Edge
Quote:
August 4, 2008
Abroad
NY Times
With Flemish Nationalism on the Rise, Belgium Teeters on the Edge
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
LINKEBEEK, Belgium — The other morning Damien Thiéry was in the meeting room of the town hall here, where every month or so, at public council sessions, Flemish nationalists harass him.
The population of this bedroom community outside Brussels is 84 percent French-speaking. More than a year ago it picked Mr. Thiéry, a Linkebeek native, as mayor. But Linkebeek is within the Flemish north, and the region’s Flemish government has so far declined to ratify his election.
Mr. Thiéry is not Flemish.
The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung a few days ago called Belgium the “most successful ‘failed state’ of all time.” The Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme offered to resign last month, saying that the “federal consensus model has reached its limits,” and that he couldn’t bring harmony to the country’s Flemish and French-speaking regions, raising the specter that this nation of 10.4 million might split up for good.
For the umpteenth time. Belgium’s perennial woes have been much reported upon. The country keeps muddling on, as it has for decades, with per capita income exceeding that of Germany, the world’s leading exporter, although maybe a tipping point has been reached. Much of the trouble now arises from increased demands for autonomy by the more populous, prosperous north, and disputes over electoral districts like Linkebeek.
It’s about culture in the end. In its escalating dysfunction Belgium demonstrates the inextricable link between culture and nationhood. As acting mayor Mr. Thiéry presides over tense meetings at which nationalists from out of town listen to hear if he utters a word in French instead of Flemish, as the various Dutch dialects of Flanders are known. If so, he said, all council decisions can be annulled, and he can be replaced as mayor by someone the Flemish choose.
“We have two separate cultures in Belgium,” said Mr. Thiéry, a sturdy man wearing shirt sleeves on a warm summer day, clearly exasperated. “It wasn’t this divisive when I grew up. Protesters shout, ‘French people get off our territory’ at our meetings. Flemish authorities refuse to give contracts to our French-speaking schoolteachers; they give Flemish children here 179 euros a year for school trips and other expenses, French children, 68 euros. If we want subsidies, we are obliged to stock our library with 75 percent of the books in Flemish, but it’s ridiculous to have a Flemish library in a mostly French-speaking town.”
Should Flanders ever secede, an independent Flemish nation that hoped to regain European Union membership would need to respect popular elections, including his, he added ruefully. “Ironic, no?” he said.
Els Witte is a Belgian historian. At her apartment, up the street from the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels, she pondered the bad marriage of French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders.
“A language is a culture,” she said. “In Belgium the two cultures know very little about each other because they speak different languages. There are singers known in one part, not in the other. Television is different, newspapers, books.”
Francophones have now come to talk about “linguistic cleansing.” Flemish, many of them openly resentful of subsidizing poorer French-speaking compatriots, who for years lorded it over them economically and otherwise (unemployment today is three times higher in rust-belt Wallonia), say the issue is preserving national heritage. “It’s difficult to have a rational conversation,” said Roel Jacobs, a writer born to Flemish parents who lives in bilingual Brussels.
“There are six million Dutch speakers and they’re angry about Francophone influence, but meanwhile they care nothing about the influence of English and Anglo culture,” he went on, “so it’s not rational. We’ve forgotten our true cultural history. In the 15th century Bruges was the most vibrant city outside Italy because it was full of foreigners. Then it was Antwerp, when the foreigners left Bruges. Today the national movement in Flanders is in complete denial of the past.”
A century or so ago Émile Verhaeren, the Flemish Symbolist poet, who was born in Sint-Amands, near Antwerp, and educated at the University of Leuven, wrote in French. Now the university has split into two, the one Flemish, the other French and moved to Wallonia, and the region around Sint-Amands is a stronghold of far-right, anti-immigrant Flemish nationalists.
“Back then the Francophones didn’t want a bilingual country,” Ms. Witte said. “French dominated, and it would have meant they would need to learn Flemish. Educated Flemish spoke in French. But then the electoral system changed and allowed everyone to vote, and more power went to the non-French-speaking Flemish middle and lower classes.”
The other afternoon Francis Dannemark was at home in Brussels. Through the open French doors in his library, a Ping-Pong table crammed the balcony, beyond the stacks of books and DVDs. “I don’t think it will, but for the first time I really believe Belgium could disappear,” he said. Mr. Dannemark is an editor at Le Castor Astral, a French-language publisher. He prints translations of Flemish writers from Dutch, a rarity here.
“Flemish people today revere their writers because for them language is a symbol of independence,” he said. “I was shocked that my French-speaking counterparts didn’t know their neighbors.” He picked up a French translation of “The Belgian Labyrinth,” by Geert van Istendael, perhaps the most well-known living writer in Flanders, who’s still largely unread by Francophones.
“A Flemish friend,” Mr. Dannemark said, “put it to me this way: ‘Flanders has nothing in common with Holland except language, and the Flemish and Walloons have everything in common except language.’ But there’s almost no communication between the two communities, except through rock music, which everybody sings in English, and sports, which transcend everything.”
Mr. Dannemark added: “Flemish culture is dynamic today, Flemish intellectuals are fluent in Dutch and French and English, and they aren’t part of the separatist movement. Many of them come to live in Brussels because we here are the last Belgians. Most people in Flanders now say, ‘I’m Flemish,’ not ‘I’m Belgian.’ It’s as if Flemish-speaking Belgium wanted to leave Europe. And if they weren’t poor, Walloons would probably want to secede too.”
Mr. Jacobs sighed when that remark was repeated to him. “All cultural movements have a history and the nationalist movement in Flanders started long ago when left-wing liberals from French-speaking Belgium promoted Flemish as the language of the people in Flanders,” he said. “They believed promoting the Dutch language would help educate the poor, who could learn French afterward. Then the Catholic Church came to dominate the movement, to see it as rural and religious in opposition to liberal, urban, bilingual Brussels, and it became conservative. Now there’s a xenophobic, far-right wing.
“I consider myself someone from Brussels,” he added. He was at the moment in a cafe in the city. A Francophone literary colleague ambled over with his young daughter in tow, patted Mr. Jabobs on the back, idly picked up a compilation of Flemish writings, one of Mr. Dannemark’s books, which was resting on the table, and rolled his eyes. Discerning the conversation, he suddenly remembered a pressing engagement.
“My family is from Flanders,” Mr. Jacobs went on. “They put me in a Dutch Catholic school. I learned French in the street. I write in Dutch but refuse to publish only in Dutch, so I translate myself into French. But it’s difficult to have a public on both sides. Flemish writers want to be published in Holland, Francophones in France.”
The enmity is everywhere. The other morning Eugene Messemakers was on the street in Vilvoorde, a Flemish town not far away from Brussels. A retired construction project manager, he has been a councilman for 32 years from the mostly Francophone neighborhood of Beauval, he said. French speakers like him make up some 10 percent of Vilvoorde’s population of 31,000. Mr. Messemakers nodded toward city hall, behind him. The entrance had been moved to the rear of the building. His explanation was that the stone front bore old inscriptions chiseled in French. There was a Flemish flag outside, and a European Union flag.
No Belgian one.
“It’s gotten to the point that landlords want to rent only to Flemish speakers,” he said. “I used to hire Flemish workers for building projects in Francophone areas, but now French workers need to speak Dutch to be hired by Flemish bosses. At my bank, documents are in Flemish and if you ask for them in French you’re told they’re out.”
Ms. Witte, the historian, responded: “Years ago many Flemish went to places like Liège in Wallonia to work and never got the reciprocity Francophones in the Flemish parts of Belgium now want. Even today, there is still a feeling among Francophones that French is so important they don’t need to learn Dutch.”
Asked if the Flemish side, at this point dominant, might be more linguistically accommodating, Ms. Witte, who’s Flemish, paused.
“In a global society, nations are less important,” she answered. “It’s a moral question. Does a culture have a right to stand up for itself? More than that: Do unity and nationhood take priority over one’s culture? That’s not just an issue for Belgians but everyone.”
Posted: Wed 06 Aug 2008 03:31 Post subject: Fear of Islamists Drives Growth of Far Right in Belgium
Quote:
February 12, 2005
NY Times
Fear of Islamists Drives Growth of Far Right in Belgium
By CRAIG S. SMITH
NTWERP, Belgium - Filip Dewinter, a boyish man in a dark blue suit, bounds up two flights of steep stairs in his political party's 19th-century headquarters building where posters show a Muslim minaret rising menacingly above the Gothic steeple of the city's cathedral.
"The radical Muslims are organizing themselves in Europe," he declared. "Other political parties, they are very worried about the Muslim votes and say let's be tolerant, while we are saying - the new political forces in Europe are saying - no, we should defend our identity."
From the Freedom Party in Austria to the National Front in France to the Republicans in Germany, Europe's far right has made a comeback in recent years, largely on the strength of anti-immigration feelings sharpened to a fear of Islam. That fear is fed by threats of terrorism, rising crime rates among Muslim youth and mounting cultural clashes with the Continent's growing Islamic communities.
But nowhere has the right's revival been as swift or as strong as in Belgium's Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, where support for Mr. Dewinter's Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, has surged from 10 percent of the electorate in 1999 to nearly a quarter today.
Vlaams Belang is now the strongest party in Flanders, with support from a third of the voters in Antwerp, the region's largest city. Many people worry that the appeal of antiIslamic politics will continue to spread as Europe's Muslim population grows.
"What they all have in common is that they use the issue of immigration and Islam to motivate and mobilize frustrated people," said Marco Martiniello, a political scientist at the University of Liège in the French-speaking part of Belgium. "In Flanders all attempts to counter the march of the Vlaams Belang have had no results, or limited results, and no one really knows what to do."
Fear of Islam's transforming presence is so strong that even many members of Antwerp's sizable Jewish community now support Mr. Dewinter's party, even though its founders included men who sympathized and collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
Many of those supporters are Jews who feel threatened by a new wave of anti-Semitism emanating from Europe's growing Muslim communities. The friction is acutely felt in central Antwerp, where the Jewish quarter abuts the newer Muslim neighborhood of Borgerhout.
There, Hasidic diamond traders cross paths daily with Muslim youths, for many of whom conservative Islam has become an ideology of rebellion against perceived oppression. Israeli-Palestinian violence produces a dangerous echo here: anti-Israel marches have featured the burning in effigy of Hasidic Jews, and last June a Jewish teenager was critically wounded in a knife attack by a group of Muslim youths.
"Their values are not the right values," said Henri Rosenberg, a Talmudic scholar and lawyer who is an Orthodox Jew, speaking of the Muslim community. Though he is the son of concentration camp survivors and his grandparents died in camps, he campaigned on behalf of Vlaams Belang, then named Vlaams Blok, in regional elections last year.
As the right rallies beneath an anti-Muslim banner, European Muslims themselves have become increasingly politically engaged.
The community is far too divided along religious, racial and national lines to present a unified political force, so most of Europe's Muslim politicians have allied themselves with socialists or other left-leaning parties. But radical Muslims are also getting involved, and in many ways they are helping to validate the fears that keep parties like Vlaams Belang alive.
Behind the wooden door of a brick Brussels town house, Jean-François Bastin, 61, a Belgian convert to Islam, holds court before a steady stream of Islamic activists. His fledgling Young Muslims Party is one of the new groups aggressively pursuing pro-Muslim agendas in Europe.
He calls Osama bin Laden "a modern Robin Hood," and the World Trade Center attacks "a poetic act," "a pure abstraction." His 23-year-old son is in jail in Turkey on charges that he was involved in the bombings there that killed 61 people in November 2003.
But Mr. Bastin argues that his son's troubles are evidence that Muslim youths feel politically excluded in Europe. He says political engagement is an antidote to militancy.
"There is deviance because people don't find their place here," he said, a long, hennaed beard falling over the front of his Arab-style tunic, his graying hair tucked beneath a turban fashioned from a multicolored head scarf. "If we deny that political voice that can judge and determine what is good for Muslims, from the point of view of their religion and their citizenship, their children are going to look for adventures elsewhere."
Mr. Bastin, who converted to Islam in 1972 after a spiritual quest led him to Morocco, dismisses the far right's fears of an Islamization of Europe, even if he does dream of an Islamic theocracy governing the Continent someday.
"Were not talking about Shariah now," he said, referring to the Islamic legal code that fundamentalist Muslims believe should be the foundation of society. "Were talking about Belgian Muslims being recognized on the same footing as other confessions and ideologies."
In many ways radical Islamists like Mr. Bastin are holding Europe's broader, moderate Muslim population hostage, attracting attention disproportionate to their numbers.
"You have, in the current context, people who feel legitimized being anti-Muslim," said Mr. Martiniello, the political scientist. He cited the case of a Belgian man who had received death threats for employing a woman who wore a Muslim head scarf.
Many of the extreme right's supporters see Islam's growing European presence as the latest, most powerful surge of a Muslim tide that has ebbed and flowed since the religion spread to the Continent in the eighth century. They warn that lax immigration policies, demographic trends and a strong Muslim agenda will forever alter Europe.
The Continent's Muslim population, now 20 million, grew from a postwar labor shortage that was filled with workers from North Africa and Turkey. By the 1980's economic malaise and rising unemployment had created tension between the largely Muslim immigrants and the surrounding societies.
But family reunion policies, which granted visas to family members of immigrants already in Europe, fueled another, more sustained wave of immigration that continues today.
"We were very naïve," Mr. Dewinter said of the liberal policies. He called tolerance Europe's Achilles' heel and immigration Islam's Trojan horse.
The trend is even more distressing to the far right when considering the low birthrate of Europe's traditional populations and the likelihood that more workers will need to be imported in the coming decades to broaden the tax bases of the Continent's aging societies.
Already about 4,000 to 5,000 Flemish residents are leaving Antwerp every year, while 5,000 to 6,000 non-European immigrants arrive annually in the city, Mr. Dewinter said. Within 10 years, he predicts, people of non-European backgrounds will account for more than a third of Antwerp's population.
"It's growing very, very fast," Mr. Dewinter said. "Maybe that will be the end of Europe."
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