Why is Belgium in the Guinness Book of World Records?

Because, like us all, it is handcuffed to its history

Welcome back to this week’s The Global Jigsaw. First of all a HUGE thanks to all those Patrons of Pallavi who signed up as founding members or regular paid subscribers. I’ll send you a video of me dancing to Jerusalema as a special thanks. Now who can resist that thought? I encourage the rest of you to subscribe too – and that Jerusalema video could be yours too.

This week’s post is about the overwrought relationship between language and national identity. You will travel with me to the tiny, often overlooked, country of Belgium, to learn about a nation so wracked and wrought by language that it almost never has a national government. In fact, Belgium is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest time a country has functioned without a government.

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Few relationships are more overwrought than that between language and national identity. This holds true from Catalonia and Spain, to Tamil Nadu and India. But these phonic fracas are but a candle to the sun of the granddaddy of all linguistic squabbles: the Flemish-French faceoff in Belgium.

I lived in Brussels, the capital of Belgium (and the headquarters of the European Union) for over three years, between 2009 and 2012. They were befuddling times.

A friend would tell me to meet them at the Arts Lois metro station, but when I exited the subway, the signs proclaimed it to be the somewhat abusive sounding Kunst-Wet. I would go to the central train station to buy a ticket for Courtrai and come back with one for Kortrijk. And on and on.

Bilingual Brouhaha

The source of all this confusion was that Brussels was officially a bilingual city. All street and direction signs displayed names in both French, the language of the country’s southern Walloon region, and Dutch, the language of the country’s northern region of Flanders.

Brussels, the conflicted child of the marriage between Flanders and Wallonia, was geographically situated in Flanders and had historically been a Dutch-speaking city. However, having emerged as the capital of Belgium post 1830, it was gradually acculturated to the French side of things. In the 19th century, 80 percent of Bruxelloise spoke Dutch. Today it is French that is spoken in about 80 percent of homes in the city.

Usually, a statistic like this would suffice to clarify the linguistic status quo of a place. But Belgium was a country wracked by language, wrought by language, possessed by language. And so all data was grist for the demagoguery of idiomatic politics.

I only needed to casually mention the curious linguistic status of Brussels to a local and they would begin to babble irrepressibly, like an uncorked bottle of champagne allowed to run to bitterness.

Did you know that between 2000 and 2006, the proportion of monolingual Dutch families shrank from 9.5 percent to 7 percent? No? Well, you obviously haven’t lived in Belgium. Linguistic sensitivities were such that language impartiality in Brussels was pushed to absurd extremes.

 For example, there was a kerfuffle about which should come first on public transport signage, the Flemish or French name? Bus companies cunningly solved the problem by using rotating signs so that offense was avoided. It got even sillier. Because it proved impossible to find the exact equivalent number of Flemish songs to French, only neutral English, Spanish or Italian songs were piped through in Brussels’ metro stations.

Belgium in the Guinness Book of World Records for the wrong reason

But the linguistic angst of Belgians was not a joking matter. In April 2010, about a year after I’d moved to the country, the five-party federal coalition government collapsed over what sounded like a particularly nasty virus to the uninitiated: the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) problem.

This very same affliction had caused an earlier collapse of the government in 2007, which had left the country without a government for 194 days. And I would experience firsthand, an even more spectacular 541 day-long absence of government that lasted until December 2011.

In fact, Belgium made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest time a country functioned without a government, smashing the previous record that had been held by Iraq, which was government-free for 289 days in 2010. (In 2020, Belgium broke its own record, this time for 592 days without a government!)

So, what was BHV-  this government-toppling scourge? It was merely an electoral district where voters had the choice of plumping for either a Dutch or French speaking politician. That’s it.

The Grand Place, Brussels. Pic: Stephanie LeBlanc

To understand why this fact had such earth-shattering consequences for Belgian politics we must first come to grips with one of the most bizarre political systems in the world. Belgium, with its grand total of 11 million people and 30,500 square kilometers of territory (by contrast the single Indian state of Madhya Pradesh is spread over 308,000 square km and houses well over 73 million people) has a dual federal system with six centres of authority.

The Belgian constitution divides all powers between governments for three territorially based regions, Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels, which have separate, directly elected, parliamentary-style legislatures. In addition to the regions, there is a further separation of powers between three disparate communities, which are defined linguistically rather than territorially, comprised of Flemish, French and German speaking groups.

Separate electorates

It was really very difficult to get one’s head around. It helped to think of my history lessons in school in India and how under the British Raj separate electorates were instituted for Muslims and Hindus, so that Muslims could only vote for Muslim candidates and the same for Hindus.

Political life in Belgium was effectively entirely segregated along linguistic lines. There was no national, pan-Belgian constituency.  Since the 1960s all the country’s political parties had split into separate French-speaking and Flemish entities. As a result, Dutch and French-speakers were unable to cast a “national” vote, even if they wanted to.

A citizen could only vote for the candidates on the electoral list linked to her place of residence. So, a person who lives in Flanders is in practice unable to choose a French speaking candidate, with the reverse holding true for a resident of Wallonia.

Back to the infamous BHV, a voting district that while technically in Flanders had a substantial number of French speaking residents. In other words, it was an example of an area that belonged to the Flemish territory but that had a substantial French community resident in it. The electoral roles for the district did not offer French-speaking candidates and so Francophone residents of the region had been permitted to vote on the electoral lists of nearby Brussels.

So, what was the problem?

Well, the Flemings didn’t like it.

Why?

Because they believed such permissiveness would only lead to the creeping Frenchification that had already claimed Brussels as francophone (by allowing French speakers to reside in Flemish areas but vote for Francophone politicians in Brussels who had little stake in representing Flemish interests.)

It was over the inability to decide how to split BVH into politically acceptable, linguistically-divided, voting regions that Belgium’s federal government kept collapsing during the years I lived there.           

We are all handcuffed to our histories

Belgians are not inexplicably bizarre. Like all peoples they are handcuffed to their history, and it is in this history that the embittered roots of all this linguistic acrimony lie.

From its inception a language apartheid was applied in Belgium, where a French-speaking elite in both the southern and northern parts of the country sought to impose French as the sole language of education and government. French, the language of the Belgian aristocracy came to symbolize everything refined and intelligent, while Dutch, the language of northern peasants, was treated as a coarse, country-bumpkin cousin to be kept out of sight.

It wasn’t until the Belgian state was 50 years old that the first speech in Dutch was heard in the parliament building in Brussels. The discrimination against Flemish speakers sometimes had tragic consequences. For example, in 1873 a murder trial ended with the wrongful conviction and execution of two Flemings.

After their heads had been offed, another person confessed to the crime, and it was subsequently found that the defendants could not understand French, that their attorney knew no Dutch, and that the francophone judge had relied on a mistranslation of a conversation overheard by a jailer.

Replacing a lighthouse with a candle

Over the following decades, Dutch speakers painfully clawed back linguistic equality for themselves. But it wasn’t a privilege conceded by the haughty French-speaking elite easily. It was only in 1893 that Dutch was recognized as Belgium’s second language (although 60 percent of Belgians used it).

In the 1920s, when the University of Ghent was debating becoming exclusively Dutch speaking, a Walloon MP claimed in all earnestness that replacing French culture with Flemish culture was like “replacing a lighthouse with a candle.”

Dystopia

But stepping back from the micro-level ins and outs of the great Belgian drama, I couldn’t help feeling that the country, for all its cobbled streets and scented chocolates, was dystopic when it came to negotiating pluralism. In some ways Belgium represented an extreme failure of generosity and complete inability to cope with what, from an Indian point of view, was minimal diversity.

In India we balance more than 20 official languages and almost all Indians are multilingual. The diversity that citizens negotiate daily is moreover scarcely confined to the linguistic. We are a country of lily-white Kashmiris and coffee-hued Malayalis; of fish-eating Bengalis and herbivorous Gujaratis. In our “Hindu” country, there are almost as many Muslims as in all of Pakistan. With no single language, ethnicity, religion or food India’s existence is immensely more complicated than Belgium’s.

Trees like fists and speculoos biscuits

 As much as Flemings and Walloons claim irreducible differences, to my Indian eyes they are remarkably alike. They are uniformly afflicted by terrible weather; eat the same brand of “speculoos” biscuits and share a love of grumbling about how Belgium’s PR is outmatched by its neighbours. “French fries are really Belgian,” moan the Walloons. “The best “Dutch” tulips are actually grown in Belgium,” the Flemings insist. They are moreover, culturally Catholic, having emerged from the carnage and chaos of the reformation and counter-reformation with a common ecclesiastic glue.

 What makes a country aside from tangled history? Of Belgium, the writer Luc Sante says:  

Baked goods. Churches. Weather… Shrubbery. The colour gray…. Brickwork…. Silent children, unassertive houseplants…. Comic strips… Gherkins... The perpetual imminence of rage, blasphemy, running amok. Trees like fists. Rheumy eyes. (Quoted from The Factory of Facts)

First, I could die happy reading Sante’s writings. 

Second, surely Walloons and Flemings have more in common than Punjabi Sikhs and Keralan Christians. And if India has successfully, albeit imperfectly, imagined and created a unified nation out of its multiplicity of peoples, languages and religions, then Belgium can too.

I just wish languages were used to communicate and build bridges rather than to fight over. I’ve said it before on another context, but Esperanto really does need another chance!

Ciao for this week…but please do consider subscribing (only $5 a month folks – price of a nice cup of coffee). And if your purses won’t stretch that far – could you just spread the word by sharing? Signing up remains free  . And, as usual, please do let me know your reactions/comments in the section below.

Peace out.

P