The Unbearable Lightness of Borders
Luc Devoldere | Chief Editor
Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, 1959) is an artist and compulsive walker. In 2004 he walked along the Green Line through Jerusalem with a tin trailing green paint. The Israeli General Moshe Dayan drew the border on a map with a green pen after the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. The motto of Alÿs' filmed performance was: ‘Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic’.
‘Borders’ are the theme of this edition. The inspiration for it is the commemoration of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which was proclaimed exactly three hundred years ago. This European peace treaty put an end to a century of unremitting war on the old continent. It also laid the foundations for a new distribution of power. Spain lost its global power, to the benefit of England. France consolidated its victories on its northern border. While the Republic of the Netherlands stood by and watched. The de facto border between the Kingdom of France and the Southern Netherlands - to become the Austrian Netherlands in 1713 - was established. A border that has barely changed since then. Today it is still the border between Belgium and France, between Flanders and France, and here in Flanders, where I am writing this, between the Dutch and French languages.
Borders shut off, shut up and shut out. They limit and keep dull. According to the mantra of false cosmopolitanism, that is. But suppose all borders were contingent: they are where they are, but could have been drawn differently. Those who constantly want to discuss them and tinker with them open up a Pandora's box. Borders do indeed limit, but only in the sense that they determine what we are and are not. They make the ‘other’ possible. And isn't the paradox of borders that you must accept them if you want to transcend them? Recognised borders are the best conceivable vaccine against the epidemic of walls, said Régis Debray in Éloge des frontières (Gallimard, Paris, 2010).
Our subject then is borders: historic borders such as the Roman limes once was. We follow the northern border of the Imperium Romanum from Katwijk at the Dutch coast to Xanten in Germany. We examine the language border in this book, too: a line that was drawn across Belgium fifty years ago, in 1963. It has ensured pacification and stability. We wonder whether there is a border in the Netherlands between the Randstad and the rest of the country, and between the Netherlands above and below the Great Rivers. We also investigate the border in Ostend that people seeking asylum and happiness in the United Kingdom come up against. Who are these people? What drives them? We examine the new mental border, too, the fault line in Western democracies between the well and less well-educated. And, finally, we look at the border between the Latin (‘Romanitas’) and Germanic (‘Germania’) world in this book. Is it all in the mind, or not? Do the Southern Netherlands - or Belgium - constitute a transition between the two?
As we work right on the border between Flanders, Belgium and France, we have decided to cherish borders, to allow ourselves to be honed by them. Let us, above all, learn to live with them. In Europe, after all, we have no other choice.
In the rest of the yearbook, as usual, we present writers and artists. The renovation of the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam are covered; the Gruuthuse manuscript is there, too, alongside the Majorana particle and the election results. We take a look at the cities of Oudenaarde and Sheffield, the establishment of the Dutch monarchy in 1813, the development of the stock exchanges in Bruges, Antwerp and Amsterdam, and the complexities of the name of the language spoken in the Low Countries. Tolle et lege, again.
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
