Flemish Nationalism, a Rainbow Phenomenon

Flemish Nationalism is a fairly recent phenomenon in the history of the Low Countries. It had its origin, as a by-product of Belgian politics, in the decade after the First World War and evolved, in various forms, into a factor that coloured the whole of Belgian society.

It weighs heavily, though normally indirectly, on the policies of parties and governments and has had a far-reaching influence on the three successive reforms of the constitution and the state since 1970.

 

In order to understand the origin of Flemish Nationalism, we must first recall a prior history which goes back deep into the Ancien Régime.

The region that is known today as ‘Flanders’, and which comprises northern Belgium from the North Sea to the River Maas, was in earlier centuries the Dutch-speaking part of the Southern Netherlands. It was not a political entity, but encompassed principalities such as the duchy of Brabant, the county of Flanders and other regions which had taken shape in the feudal period. The region bordered in the North on the protestant Dutch Republic, in the South on the French-speaking part of the Southern Netherlands, modern ‘Wallonia’, which was likewise made up of former feudal principalities.

The total dominance of French culture in Europe, including the Low Countries, in the eighteenth century meant that the Dutch language - in fact the various dialectal variants of that language - had a low social status. The local nobility, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the wealthy bourgeoisie spoke French and this deepened the gulf between the ruling classes and the common people, between rich and poor, between rulers and ruled.

At the end of the eighteenth century there arose, under the influence of liberal intellectuals, a first reaction against the subordination of ancient ‘Diets’, as Dutch was also called. A progressive jurist and politician, the Brussels lawyer Jan Baptist Verlooy, who sympathised with the ideals of the French Revolution and who ascribed the cultural decline of his homeland to the neglect of the Dutch spoken by the general population in favour of French, published, in 1788, a controversial essay with the title: Treatise on the Neglect of the Mother Tongue in The Low Countries (Verhandeling op d'onacht der moederlyke tael in de Nederlanden). This was to become one

of the most famous texts of the later Flemish independence movement.

For the time being, however, the situation did not improve. In 1795 the Southern Netherlands came under the control of France. First the Republic and then the Empire pursued a policy of systematic gallicisation that was to continue for 20 years. After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the whole of the Southern Netherlands was incorporated into the United Kingdom of the (Northern and Southern) Netherlands in 1815.

From 1819, King William i carried out various measures which, both in administration and education, were consciously directed at the Dutch character of the Flemish people. However, this ‘Hollandish’ policy met fierce opposition. The Catholic bishops were extremely hostile to the Calvinist North. The ruling classes continued to cling to the French language and opposed all efforts to introduce the use of Dutch.

The short-lived rule of the House of Orange came to an end in 1830. The separatists who wrenched the Belgian part, Flanders and Wallonia, from the United Kingdom belonged to the French-speaking nobility or bourgeoisie; some of the leaders even came from France. Independent Belgium consequently became a state governed exclusively in French. In the Northern (Flemish) provinces only the teachers in primary school gave their lessons in Dutch. Everywhere else in Flanders French was required: in the civil service, the courts, the army, secondary education, the university, business and trade. The royal court and the ecclesiastical hierarchy also spoke only French.

The capital, Brussels, until 1830 still a city with a Dutch-speaking majority, thereafter quickly became increasingly gallicised under the influence of the administrative structure and the social pressure of the rich upper strata of society. French-speaking Wallonia, with its new, dynamic coal and steel industries, dominated Flanders, which was still largely rural, poor and culturally backward and which served primarily as a reservoir of cheap labour.

A cultural battle: the Flemish Movement

All the signs were that after some decades this Belgian regime would have eliminated Dutch completely as a language of popular and cultural use. But there was a reaction against this fatal development. A generation of young Flemish intellectuals who had grown up in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands had had secondary and higher education in Dutch. They knew that Dutch language and culture had proved their worth in the past and they made a stand for the maintenance and restoration of Dutch. This intelligentsia, which primarily comprised teachers, lawyers, writers, doctors and members of the lower clergy, refused to accept the official policy of gallicisation. Some ten years after the founding of the Belgian state they started a longterm campaign that became known to history as the Flemish Movement and that would fundamentally alter Belgium.

Initially, and for many decades, it was a social cultural movement, concerned with the problem of public language use. The promoters, known both to their French-speaking opponents and popularly as ‘flamingants’ - a term which they quickly adopted as an honorific title - strove to replace the monopolistic position of French by a system of general bilingualism. To achieve this aim they chose the long but peaceful route of legislation. By means of language laws, which had to be wrung from a stiff parliamentary opposition - not only from Walloons but from gallicised Flemings - it was possible by the end of the nineteenth century in certain administrative and education sectors in Flanders to replace monolingualism by a limited bilingualism. Wallonia, however, remained monolingual in administration. Every suggestion by the Flemish that a form of bilingualism be introduced into administration there as well, so that the whole of Belgium would gradually develop into a bilingual country - something like Canada in the twentieth century - was uncompromisingly rejected by the Walloons. As a result, Belgium was to remain - and remains to this day - a country made up of two monolingual regions (Flanders and Wallonia), the bilingual region of Brussels and the German speaking sub-region.

Political radicalisation

When the First World War broke out there was still much to do. The introduction of Dutch into the State University of Ghent, promised by the government, was still a dead letter. In the civil service, the judiciary, business and at court, French was still the only language permitted.

The fact that French was the sole language of the officer corps would shortly give rise to problems on the front line, where Flemish troops were

given orders in a language they did not understand, often with fatal consequences in battle. The young Flemish intellectuals in the trenches on the River IJzer came into conflict with the French-speaking officers and with the general staff and formed a clandestine Front Movement, which resolved to undertake strong action after the war for equal treatment for Flemings. Their slogan was unequivocal: ‘Here is our blood. When shall we have our rights?’ The social-cultural language movement acquired a radical political emphasis. For the first time harsh nationalistic tones could be heard. The leaders of the Front Movement spoke of self-government for Flanders.

A similar reaction took place in the occupied part of Belgium. There, a number of flamingants chose to cooperate with Germany, which they hoped would force through and complete the use of Dutch in administration, including the University of Ghent. The so-called activists did not even shrink from declaring the independence of Flanders. However, they were not really taken seriously by the German authorities and were regarded as traitors by the majority of the Flemish population. After the war, many of them were punished by the Belgian courts and deprived of their livelihood. Some opted for voluntary exile and began a new life in the Netherlands. Others fled to Germany, where they would join with the National Socialists in the thirties.

On the front on the River IJzer, the Flemish Movement took a decisive

turn. A political radicalisation took place which would grow in subsequent years, in part as a result of all kinds of provocations and ineptitude on the part of the Belgian authorities. Above all, the refusal of the government to maintain the use of Dutch in the University of Ghent, which had been implemented by the Germans, caused bad blood even among those who had not collaborated with the Germans.

When the authorities had the simple gravestones which the Flemish soldiers had had erected with their own money in memory of their fallen comrades crushed so that the rubble could be used for metalling roads, there was general indignation. Former soldiers marched in force in protest to the field of the IJzer to remember the dead and demand the restoration of their honour. This ‘pilgrimage’ would be repeated again and again. On the former battlefield near Diksmuide a massive Tower was erected in 1930 with at the top the slogan of the troops at the front, which had been on the destroyed gravestones: All For Flanders: Flanders For Christ (avk - vvk; Alles Voor Vlaanderen: Vlaanderen voor Kristus). It was not a clerical or narrow Catholic slogan but an old, nineteenth-century saying of the Flemish Movement, which appealed for solidarity with the people and faithfulness to moral values.

Each year from then on a ‘pilgrimage’ brought tens of thousands of people together around famous and charismatic speakers who called for Flemish militancy. The pilgrimage to the River IJzer developed in the inter-war period into the most spectacular and important demonstration of Flemish national consciousness. It is still held every summer to this day.

In the two decades after the First World War the Flemish Movement grew ever stronger. Whilst the major national parties once again linked up with the pre-war social-cultural movement and were of the opinion that language legislation was still the best method for transforming Flanders from a bilingual to a monolingual Dutch region, various groups came into being which were not content with language laws and which pressed for Flemish selfgovernment and constitutional reform along more federal lines. In these groups there was also much interest in and sympathy for similar movements elsewhere in the world, such as Irish nationalism. Some nationalists, who hoped for the disappearance of Belgium as a state, dreamed of a union of Flanders and the Netherlands in a Greater Netherlands.

In 1919 a Front Party was formed which gathered primarily former soldiers round a pacifist, democratic and fairly ‘left-wing’ programme. They argued for a political truce which would allow believers and free-thinkers to come together in action to promote further Flemish independence. It was not a strictly organised grouping and it was weak in parliamentary terms, but it did appeal to a section of the young intelligentsia.

National Socialist side tracks

In the thirties, there was a regrouping among various regionally scattered groups which propagated the ideas of the Front Party - and of the activists. In 1931 Joris van Severen, an intellectual patrician who had been an officer at the front and who had leanings towards the French nationalism of Charles Maurras, formed the League of Supporters of Dutch National Solidarity

(Verdinaso; Verbond van Dietse Nationaalsolidaristen). This was a paramilitary organisation, numerically small but with a strong ideological commitment, which initially expressed itself in strongly anti-Belgian and antiparliamentary language, but which later changed direction and began to agitate for a sort of Benelux avant-la-lettre.

In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the Flemish National League (vnv; Vlaams Nationaal Verbond) was formed. It brought together nationalistic groupings with petty bourgeois ideas who were put off by the fascistic, elitist style of the Supporters of Dutch National Solidarity. This League was also run in an authoritarian way but did not form a coherent whole. Alongside an anglophile and democratic wing there was a pro-German group which had the support of the overall leader, the teacher Staf de Clercq.

When the German army invaded Belgium in May 1940, Joris van Severen - who had become persona grata and was even admitted into the most socially exclusive Belgian salons just before the war - was arrested on grounds of national security. He was deported to France and executed without due process by a French firing squad at Abbeville. After his death the Verdinaso drifted into a coma from which it never recovered.

After the capitulation of the Belgian army, the Flemish National League chose to collaborate with the German occupier. The radical nationalist wing openly supported National Socialism. The middle class democrats allowed themselves to be appointed to high office in the national administration. Even the key Ministries of the Interior and Economic Affairs were given to members of the Flemish National League.

The League hoped that the German government would recognise it as the only political party in Flanders and the only negotiator with Berlin. In order to win the favour of the occupiers, it placed itself unconditionally at the disposal of the Nazi authorities. After the attack on the Soviet Union, it even press-ganged Flemish soldiers on a large scale for the Eastern Front. However, it found a formidable rival in a new organisation, the German-Flemish Union for Cooperation (De Vlag; Deutsch-Vlämische Arbeitsgemeinschaft). This had agitated for cultural ties with Germany before the war and now emerged, during the occupation and under the leadership of the former teacher Dr Jef Vandewiele, as a political group which, with the support of the ss and of the Nazi party, swore unconditional loyalty to Hitler and National Socialism and which declared itself in favour of the incorporation of Flanders as a Reichsgau in the Greater German Empire.

Thus Flemish Nationalism once again disintegrated into various mutually hostile groupings. One segment of the nationalist family rejected a second ‘activist’ adventure and withdrew into passivity. A small group of intellectual nationalists remained loyal to the Greater Netherlands idea and was active in the underground resistance to the occupation. But many others threw themselves, in the wake of the Flemish National League, into a collaboration which, as the war went on and the German chances of victory became less, inwardly tore the militants apart and traumatised them, not least because they began to realise that they were sacrificing Flemish interests to those of the Germans. The group around Vandewiele became enmired in a fanatical National Socialism, taking on its extreme racist ideology and anti-Semitism. These infatuated Nazis had a fanatical enthusiasm for the concept of a mythical Greater German Empire and wrote the traditional Flemish

Movement off as a hangover from the bourgeois and Christian society for which there was no longer a place in the New European Order.

After the Liberation in September 1944 the nationalistic circles reaped the rewards of their collaboration. The leaders were arrested and given harsh punishment. Some - but not Vandewiele - were executed. Tens of thousands of supporters also received prison sentences or were dismissed from their employment. The radical wing of the Flemish Movement was in a daze. The Tower on the IJzer, symbol and icon of the Movement, was blown up and completely destroyed by persons unknown - but Belgian soldiers were suspected. The perpetrators were never caught.

After the War

For ten years the nationalist parties were kept out of Parliament. Only in 1954 did the Antwerp electorate again send a nationalist representative to the Chamber, a single member with a weak following. However, the Flemish Movement was not dead. The ending of the Royal Question in 1950 with the abdication of Leopold iii, who had had the support of 72% of the Flemish electorate in a referendum but had been rejected by 57% of the Walloons, had shocked the whole of Flanders. The fact that Wallonia had been able to impose its will had created the impression that the Belgian unitary state either could not or would not respect the rules of democracy. The Flemish majority felt it had been stymied by Wallonia. Many Flemings drew the conclusion that the unitary state ought to be replaced by a federal structure, in which Flanders would have the right of self-determination and a wide measure of self government.

The post-war Flemish Movement took up this line of thinking. Its primary aim became a federal constitutional reform, with a division of certain government institutions. But a change also came about in the major parties. Ideas of autonomy sprang up there also. The Tower on the River IJzer was




rebuilt, with support from Christian Democrat politicians, and the yearly pilgrimages to the IJzer were resumed. Thus the nationalist movement gradually re-established itself. In 1954 the Volksunie (People's Union) was formed. This was a party which called for a respectable democratic Flanders in a federal Belgium and it grew quickly into a medium-sized party, under the leadership of the moderate Brussels lawyer Frans van der Elst, who would later become a minister of state. However, the Volksunie also harboured, alongside convinced democrats, former collaborators who regarded themselves as the victims of repressive legislation and of unjust judges. They demanded amnesty and had, as well as a strong dislike of the Belgian state, radical right-wing ideas.

When, therefore, under the influence of the moderate leadership of Hugo Schiltz, the Volksunie joined the government in 1977 in order to push orward the reforms which had already begun, there was a split. The anti-Belgian dissidents formed the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc), under the leadership of the self-taught clerk Karel Dillen, a sympathiser with the ideas of the Conservative Revolution and the New Right. Dillen became the Blok's only mp and the party stagnated for a decade. In 1987 he was succeeded by two younger mps, the lawyer Gerolf Annemans and the for-

mer journalist Filip Dewinter. The latter quickly gained in influence and popularity. He turned the party away from the traditional Flemish Nationalist line and began to attune his propaganda to the social unrest in the cities, in particular to the unease concerning the immigrant issue. He persuaded the party to adopt a radical programme which included in its proposals a policy for sending back non-European foreigners. The Vlaams Blok gained a lot of support with this populist programme of demands among a certain section of the working class, particularly in run-down city areas with an immigrant majority. In 1991 the electorate sent 12 extreme right mps to parliament. In 1994, the Blok became the largest party in Antwerp, where all the other parties were forced to join a united front in order to keep the ‘fascists’ out of the city government. At the parliamentary election of 21 May 1995 the Blok strengthened its position, despite the fact that the King, the bishops and powerful business leaders had warned against a victory by radical right-wing nationalism during the electoral campaign.

The progress of the Blok - which nowhere got the chance to enter government - weakened the Volksunie, which during the eighties had developed in a green left direction which had caused some prominent mps, such as the former party chairman Jaak Gabriëls, to switch to other parties, especially the Liberals but also the Christian Democrats. By 1995 democratic nationalism both in the federal Parliament and in the Council of the Flemish Community (now: Flemish Parliament) had shrunk to a small group.

The increasing polarisation between the right-wing radicals and the democratic nationalists became spectacularly apparent during the 1995 pilgrimage to the IJzer. Lionel Vandenberghe, chairman of the organising committee and the Pilgrimage's most eminent speaker, who belongs to the democratic wing of the Flemish Movement, was strongly heckled by a large group of separatists which included the leaders of the Vlaams Blok. He did, however, receive the moral support of Luc van den Brande, Prime Minister of the Region of Flanders, who was attending the Pilgrimage as guest of honour.

Conclusion

Flemish Nationalism is not a strongly organised and coherent movement. It is a rainbow phenomenon with shades ranging from anti-Belgian, radical right wing, republican and separatist Vlaams Blok via the moderate traditional nationalist right wing of the Volksunie to the federalists who are social democrats in their thinking.

The Flemish Movement began as a social-cultural protest action and developed into a political movement which campaigned for the largest possible measure of Flemish autonomy. These efforts are - with the exception of the separatists - situated within a Belgian state which in 1993 was reformed into a federation of regions and communities and within a European Union in which it is hoped that the regions will have an increasing voice.

It has always been a non-violent movement, embedded in parliamentary democracy. As such it cannot be compared with ethnic-nationalist or fundamentalist movements elsewhere in Europe. The Flemish Movement was originally exclusively aimed against the gallicisation policy of successive

Belgian governments. It still remains opposed to the pro-French attitude of a certain shrinking gallicised middle class and to the gallicised expansionism from within Brussels. It is not imperialist. Flanders has never demanded linguistic rights for Flemings who migrated as farm or factory workers to Wallonia. There have frequently been contacts between Flemish and Walloon proponents of Belgian federalisation.

However, in recent years Flanders and Wallonia have clearly drifted apart. On the Flemish side, the tendency to interpret self-government as broadly as possible has grown - not simply among the nationalists. People want to keep only foreign affairs, defence and the currency federal. There is growing criticism of the division of national funds for social security between the two regions. Flemish politicians argue that their community is disadvantaged. From the Walloon side come warnings that any splitting up or regionalisation of the social security system would mean the end of the Belgian state. This problem, which is characterised by psychological communication difficulties between Flemings and Walloons, contributes not only to a hardening of Flemish Nationalism but also to an undermining of the federal consensus on which Belgium is based.

 

In 1990, Parliament passed a provisional law concerning the division of national funds between Flanders and Wallonia. The Finance Act will be revised in 1999. That could become a crisis point in the internal balance of power in Belgium. All the political parties are already preparing themselves for a potential confrontation.

 

manu ruys

Translated by Lesley Gilbert.

Further reading

hermans, theo, louis vos and lode wils (ed.), The Flemish Movement. A Documentary History 1780-1990. London / Atlantic Highlands (nj), 1992.

lewis, richard mervyn, The Conjugal State. Under what circumstances can inter-community dissension be settled by negotiation? The Belgian example. Bristol, 1995.

mccrae, k.d., Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies. Vol. 2: Belgium. Toronto, 1986.

ruys, manu, ‘Belgian Federalisation’, The Low Countries. Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands 1993-94, pp. 118-124.