Britannia Radio

Belgium And The Breakup Of Nations

From the desk of Michael Presley on Tue, 2011-09-13 11:40

After Belgium: The Orderly Split-Up is a rather misleading book. Or perhaps it is better to understand the book differently than its title suggests. Ostensibly, it argues for and catalogs reasons why we must expect the legitimate dissolution and transformation of Belgium into constituent parts based primarily on cultural ethnicity. As such, After Belgium is mostly of interest to European political observers. However, this misses the book’s greater value as a coherent and in-depth discussion about the politics of nationhood altogether, a discussion that transcends any one set of local politics. And it is this latter aspect that recommends the book to larger audiences than would otherwise be the case.

Authors Gerolf Annemans and Steven Utsi

After Belgium is the work of Gerolf Annemans and Steven Utsi, members of the Belgian political party Vlaams Belang (trans. Flemish Interest). They present the case that Belgium is essentially a “failed State,” artificial from the beginning, and now suffering the effects of internal contradictions mostly rising from incommensurable ethnic tensions. Tensions that are impossible to reconcile politically, but demand both an orderly and peaceful break-up. From this perspective, the book offers a finely detailed blueprint suggesting a way out.

The authors write that they are Flemish nationalists, however at the same time they distance themselves from purely ideological motivations, either political or religious. They are “conservative” (self-described, after the style of Roger Scruton but not Edmund Burke), yet more importantly are they guided by a definition of nationhood derived from a more traditional, classical understanding. That is, one constituted among an indigenous people sharing an organic, common ethnic, linguistic, and cultural background resisting externally imposed artificial constructions — in fine, nationhood opposed to the modern liberal State.

A sense of immediacy follows the authors as they point out that the dissolution of Belgium will happen one way or the other. Whether it will be done rationally or revolutionary is the question, simply because Belgian governance is rapidly becoming impossible due to the “sheer ineffectiveness” of the present government. The authors write that together both “Flemings and Walloons will initiate acrimonious divorce proceedings without waiting for permission from the guardians of the failed status quo.” With this inevitability in mind, the book begins its task.

Primarily the very existence of Belgium is viewed as unjust in practice, highlighted by current internal political machinations, where even High Court rulings that are favorable to Flanders, instead of being applied, are subject to political quarreling and compromise. Pointing to the core of the current political crisis in Belgium, the authors write:

To understand the essentially unjust nature of Belgium, we should recall that the majority of all Council of State and Constitutional Court judgments on communal differences have been decided in Flanders’ favor. One of the most notorious examples was the CC degree of 26 February 2003, which ordered the annulment of the provincial constituencies, in particular Flemish Brabant. This single decision means that every subsequent federal election has been technically unconstitutional and has made the contentious issue of the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) constituency loom large over each incoming administration. The Belgian problem is about unjust structures, notethnic hatred.” [italics in original].

Coupling unjust political structures in conjunction with a presumed historical inevitability, the authors propose the groundwork for a peaceful restructuring. Alternately, a loose confederation within a greater Belgium, or the transfer of power to a larger European Union based bureaucracy, is untenable. Only the complete separation of involved parties is satisfactory. Why? Simply because one cannot go against nature. Unfortunately, for many moderns "nature" is a very unfamiliar notion, and therefore some may have to undergo preparatory conceptual work before beginning to understand just how unnatural the current situation is. The problem is one of history.

Since the Enlightenment, or even before, the State has been understood as an artificial creation, a product of reasoning men apart from nature — men who themselves were natural only in a very loose sense. Beginning with Hobbes, going up through Locke and Rousseau, and in a project essentially completed by Marx in conjunction with modern Social Science, modern man can be described as fundamentally autonomous, and for the most part each essentially replaceable by any other. Hitherto disparate ethnic groups, while sometimes recognized as legitimate entities in the abstract, have lately been suppressed in favor of more primary notions grounded upon universal human equality, itself a proposition based upon an even more abstract idea of “the rights of man” or, in the case of the Marxists, a collective of individualized (albeit alienated) workers that under certain conditions could be expected to merge into the true Comintern—an event preceding the dissolution of the bourgeois State, altogether. Very odd, indeed. Yet for people accustomed to this kind of abstract unreal thinking, it really didn’t matter if one was Flemish, Walloon, or any other ethnicity. Because everyone was essentially the same, once the last remnants of wrongheaded classical naturalistic thinking (a thinking modified by coercive class consciousness) was overcome, all citizens (and even non-citizens) could henceforth be expected to interact harmoniously. This idea of the natural versus the artificial cannot be underestimated, and shows up in many places. The author’s write:

“Europe should regard Belgian break-up with equanimity. The more multilateral the EU becomes at its highest levels, the more diversification there will inevitably be lower down. Member States will eventually be obliged to rearrange along more natural lines. Europe must not obstruct this process under pressure from some States, or through artificialstructures like the Committee of the Regions." [italics added to show the point].

The authors offer a brief but concise and rich historical overview and analysis of 20th century State succession. Their analysis is global, and not limited to Europe. Annemans and Utsi show that after the downfall of the great empires, such as the Austro-Hungarian, geopolitical map makers effecting newly drawn borders were not particularly cognizant of existing ethnic or cultural groups. This, as we know from hindsight, resulted in problems directly attributable to an ignorance of natural ethno-cultural relations. Here, the important idea is recognition of an indigenous people’s right to self-determination.

Self-determination runs counter to the hitherto prevalent theoretical view of the State, a view we previously described, and one traceable at least back to Hobbes, positing men as fully actualized prior to any civil union, but holders of a natural right which they, to one degree or another, subsequently ceded to the State in order to secure whatever protection could henceforth be afforded by way of the civil covenant. Within this liberal view, as long as the State guarantees the equal rights of all equally, it shouldn’t matter who lives where. Instead, what is important is that equality of right is preserved. Today we are most familiar with this kind of thinking in the “liberal” neo-conservative world-view, and it can be observed in the associated neo-conservative drive to overthrow non-liberal regimes, the goal being that of instituting universal liberal democracy. While not presenting their argument quite in the above manner, it is clear that the book's authors view such a task as both naïve in theory, and unworkable in practice.

Moving on to the practical application of their proposal, they understand that during the formation and evolution of States the potential for violence cannot be discounted, but must be avoided by means of clearly thought out steps agreeable by all concerned. From their historical review we read that,

“peaceful State Succession [enabling] new nations to co-exist on friendly terms can always be predicted by the degree to which democratic traditions were developed, even in a distant past and after an undemocratic intermezzo, like Communist rule.”

Therefore the authors are optimistic. Nevertheless, it is important for the affected parties to avoid unilateral action, as the Kosovo debacle underscored. It is because of this democratic tradition, and because of the non-unilateral nature of their proposal, that they believe the dissolution of Belgium may be effected both peacefully and orderly.

At the beginning we spoke of the book’s potential for reaching a larger audience than those immediately interested in Belgian politics. In keeping with our previous reviews, notably Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy, and Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism, from After Belgium we have a concrete example not only of a “problem of democracy,” but also the sort of European dilemma that concerns Faye, along with possible practical solutions. From a more general standpoint, and apart from the book's immediate aim, it could be very useful as a tool to explore immanent but perennial geopolitical problems in the context of an upper-level or advanced political science curriculum.

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