Ideological Polarization and the Belgian Experience

Writing the history of ethno-nationalism through 19^th-century tweets.

MAARTEN VAN GINDERACHTER

Maison du Peuple of the P.O.B. (Belgian Workers Party), CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons  

 

As I am writing this, early October 2019, it’s been 5 months since the last general elections in Belgium. No new government is yet in sight. It feels like 2010-2011 all over again, when it took over a year and a half to form a national government. This time, however, Belgium does not feel as the odd cousin in the Atlantic family of well-behaved functioning democracies. In the age of Trump and Brexit ideological polarization has made governing by compromise near impossible in many western liberal democracies. Suddenly, the Belgian experience no longer seems to be the exception to the rule. The discord between Belgium’s Dutch-speakers and French-speakers now appears as just one manifestation of the many potential societal divides that need to be managed in a liberal democracy, rather than an idiosyncratic Belgian quirk. All over the globe the rise of populist ethno-nationalisms has opened up the cracks and fissures of the liberal-democratic status quo.

Given the current zeitgeist, taking stock of ethno-nationalism’s past manifestations has taken on a new urgency. And where better to start than in Belgium, the little kingdom by the North Sea fragmented by ethno-linguistic rivalries? Obviously, the current Mexican stand-off between Dutch- and French-speaking politicians plays into the cliché image of Belgium as an artificial invention of international diplomacy, a country only held together by the monarchy, the national football team, waffles, chocolate and beer. Belgium is a supposedly superficial and unnatural juxtaposition of Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, a view  that goes all the way back to the country’s foundation as an independent state in 1830. Even Leopold von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld, the German prince who became the first king of the Belgians, was pessimistic: “Belgium does not have a nationality and given the character of its inhabitants it will never have one.” Many contemporaries casted doubt on the viability of the country. Rather than a reflection of the weakness of the young nation-state or the inevitability of ethno-linguistic discord, their naysaying was a response to the geopolitical uncertainties Belgian independence had created. Because of its central location in Western Europe – the “keystone of the European order” in the words of the French king Louis-Philippe – the Belgian territory was avidly looked upon by France, Britain, Prussia and the Netherlands. It was easier to deny the country’s viability than to annex it.

The image of Belgium as an accident waiting to happen or as a lost cause from the start has been refuted by academic research. Flanders and Wallonia are by no means more natural or more ancient than the so-called artificial Belgian nation-state. The ethno-linguistic divide only became a separatist wedge issue after the First World War. As the paragon of European modernity, nineteenth-century Belgium was even a frontrunner in nation-building. Densely populated and urbanized, covered by a network of busy railroads, canals and highways, it was the first industrialized country on the continent. Its liberal constitution protected the freedoms of religion, press and association, and supported a thriving civil society. In short, a framework to mass-produce citizens was in place.

All over the globe the rise of populist ethno-nationalisms has opened up the cracks and fissures of the liberal-democratic status quo.

The viability of Belgium and the draw of nationalism in general have been debated from any number of angles, but one has been conspicuously overlooked: the perspective of ordinary people. Historians have generally examined processes of national and ethnic identification through the lens of elites and institutions. To give ordinary people their due, my book The Everyday Nationalism of Workers focuses on the grassroots supporters of the socialist Belgian Workers Party at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

To restore the voice of the ‘voiceless masses’, I’ve used a very peculiar source, a kind of 19^th century precursor of today’s twitter. In the 1890s ordinary industry workers sent each other public messages, baring their deepest or – just like in modern tweets – shallowest thoughts:

“Crooked Charles is bonkers [...]. Instead of a seat in the town council he’s got a seat reserved in the nuthouse”.

“Friends, what about it? Shall we give that blue dunce who sends his children to the brethren’s school a concert with tin pipes”

“I am glad to have received The little whip [...] I read it at the gents’ [...] And then I sent it to its destination”[1]

These are the wry, humorous words socialist workers from the Flemish-speaking city of Ghent levelled against the establishment and their ideological opponents more than 100 years ago. “Crooked Charles” was Charles de Hemptinne, the catholic owner of one of the largest textile mills in Ghent and - as witnessed by the above quote - the butt of at least one disgruntled worker. The ‘blue dunce’, a non-identified liberal free-thinking bourgeois, was threatened with a charivari, a performance of rough music, because he sent his children to a catholic school of the Congregation of the Brothers of Charity. And finally the catholic workers’ movement’s journal The little whip would go the way of all excreta: down the drain, used as toilet paper.

The Everyday Nationalism of Workers» upends common notions about how European nationalism is lived and experienced by ordinary people—and the bottom-up impact these everyday expressions of nationalism exert on institutionalized nationalism writ large.

These curiously direct workers’ voices have been preserved in an exceptional working-class source: the so-called ‘propaganda pence’. The ‘pence’ basically functioned as a subscription list. Supporters gave money to the socialist party and at the same time contributed a short written statement in colloquial language, usually no longer than a few short lines. All messages were subsequently published in a dedicated section of the party paper. Because of their succinctness, mundanity and expressiveness, the propaganda pence can be usefully compared to today’s tweets. Workers used them to speak their mind and to communicate.

A close examination of these tweets (I examined a sample of 27,000) disproves both the academic and popular narrative. Belgium’s industrial precociousness did not translate into an early nationalization of its population, but neither were Flemish and Walloon ethnicity more natural categories of belonging. The impact of official, top-down nation-building was very uneven in pre-WWI Belgium. Socialist workers exhibited a low degree of nationalist loyalty across linguistic lines. Many Flemish-speaking BWP supporters felt a weakly developed civic allegiance to Belgium, while they did share a sense of Flemish ethnicity that at times had anti-Belgian undertones. Various French-speaking workers, by contrast, espoused an ethnic, exclusively francophone interpretation of Belgian nationhood.

These diverging identification patterns, however, were not a ‘natural’ or ‘logical’ reflection of ethno-linguistic difference. Rather, they resulted from clearly identifiable social and political processes within the specific historic context of the fin de siècle. The new system of plural voting of 1893 and proportional representation of 1899, in particular, induced socialists to interpret democratization trends and divergent electoral outcomes in ethnic terms.

In the Belgian case, but also in a broader European perspective, ethno-nationalism was not a direct or ineluctable translation of ethno-linguistic difference. By comparing the Belgian experience to Imperial Austria, I argue that the post-WWI breakthrough of small nations, the so-called ‘Wilsonian moment’, was the contingent outcome of a sudden shift. The unprecedented disruption of the First World War transformed ethnicity from a social category among many others to the pre-eminent basis for collective identification and action.

 

[1] Vooruit, February 14, 1890, pp. 3–4; June 2, 1893, p. 4; May 5, 1899, p. 3.

 

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Maarten Van Ginderachter is Associate Professor of History at Antwerp University. He is the co-editor of National Indifference and the History of Nationalism in Modern Europe (2019) and Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (2012).