[whataretheysaying] Mary Madigan: While people are talking about Vlaams Belang...

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Posted by Mary Madigan:
While people are talking about Vlaams Belang...
http://whataretheysaying.powerblogs.com/posts/1193927397.shtml


   [1]A short history of Belgium thanks to [2]Dave J.

     Six months in Brussels in 1997 and I've been predicting the breakup
     of Belgium ever since. It's not a question of if, but only when and
     how.

     The relatively quick and dirty lesson: in the 1400's, the four
     ruling Dukes of Burgundy dynastically brought the low countries
     more or less under one ruler. The last of them, Charles the Bold,
     went off to try to conquer Switzerland (no one ever tried that
     again) and was killed. Burgundy itself reverted to France, but Mary
     of Burgundy, Charles's daughter, kept the low countries and married
     into the Hapsburg line: that's how the area came under the rule of
     Hapsburg Spain in the 1500's.

     William of Orange-Nassau then led a rebellion against the Spanish
     that coincides with the Reformation. He bled them dry and sort of
     won: the Protestant parts became the United Provinces, roughly what
     we call the Netherlands today, and as a compromise the southern,
     Catholic parts stayed under Habsburg rule but were transferred from
     Habsburg Spain to Habsburg Austria (Charles V had ruled both, but
     when he abdicated Spain went to his son while Austria went to his
     brother).

     A few hundred more years, and Napoleon invades. He puts the United
     Provinces and the Austrian Netherlands together into one Kingdom of
     Holland with (naturally) one of his seemingly endless number of
     brothers on the throne. Then Napoleon is defeated in 1815, and at
     the Congress of Vienna the Allies decide to keep this one state
     more or less together, with some shifting at the edges, as the
     Kingdom of the Netherlands, under the House of Orange-Nassau.

     Then in 1830, coinciding with the July Revolution that drove out
     the restored Bourbon monarchy in France, the southern (Catholic)
     parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, what had been the
     pre-Napoleonic Austrian Netherlands, revolted against the Dutch. I
     say nobody else wants it in jest: the only ones who really wanted
     it were the French. Nobody else wanted the French to have it,
     though. So, the Dutch decided it wasn't worth the bother of trying
     to keep it, and so, again with a few things moved around at the
     edges, the Kingdom of the Belgians was created in 1831. Britain
     guaranteed the new state's perpetual neutrality, and a Saxe-Coburg
     prince, cousin to the British royal family and uncle to the
     eventual Queen Victoria, was chosen to become its first king,
     Leopold I. Leopold later arranged Victoria's marriage to Prince
     Albert, another Saxe-Coburg prince and Leopold's nephew.

     But it's all been downhill from there. Flanders, the northern half
     of Belgium, speaks Dutch ("Flemish," but it's barely even a
     dialect, certainly not a separate language). Wallonia, the southern
     half, speaks French. And then there's Brussels, capital of Belgium,
     historically and still legally also the capital of Flanders,
     officially bilingual but in practice Francophone, but surrounded by
     Flanders. 100 years ago Brussels really was bilingual. In the 19th
     century, French was the language of the elite, Wallonia as the
     industrial rust belt was wealthy, and Flanders was agrarian and
     rural and a backwater. In WWI, many Belgian units would go into the
     field with Flemish soldiers and French officers, giving orders in
     French, and getting completely annihilated.

     Now the old situation is reversed. Socialist Wallonia is a rotting
     industrial economic basket case; free-marketeering Flanders has a
     high-tech, finance and service-oriented economy, and rapidly
     growing wealthy, yet still perceives the Francophones as running
     the country, to their detriment. And now, of course, Brussels
     itself has a large and growing Muslim population, mostly Algerian
     and Moroccan, but also Turkish.

   We theorize that the problems in the Middle East are based on their
   history; a mess of tribes living under the flags of ersatz "countries"
   that were patched together by colonial powers.

   But a lot of the [3]extremism we see in the Middle East was nurtured
   by Europe, where fascism and communism were born. A lot of those old
   resentments are still strong.

References

   1. http://whataretheysaying.powerblogs.com/posts/1193422070.shtml
   2. http://www.secondbreakfast.net/
   3. http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-eiteneier-s06.htm