Leonid Bershidsky aptly remarked last year:” Belgium has been on the devolution path since the 1970's, when the economic disparity between Flanders and Wallonia grew. Flanders, with its oil refineries and chemical plants, fared much better during the global oil crisis than Wallonia, with its steel mills and coal mines. As fiscal transfers from Flanders to Wallonia increased, the regions' economic policies diverged: the French-speaking part of the country blamed its problems on market failures and grew more socialist, while Flanders pursued a more liberal, market-driven line.”

The economic situation in Belgium started to change during the 1950s, when the Flemish labor pool found jobs nearer home and were no longer prepared to work in Wallonia. And in contrast -when Oil was rapidly replacing coal as a fuel- the Walloon economy was running into serious problems. In order to keep the Walloon coal mining competitive, the Belgian government had to give heavy subsidies. By 1958, several billions of Belgian francs were being spent annually on subsidies to the mines of the Borinage region around Mons and the Centre region around Charleroi. There coal was extracted at a real cost of 1,037 francs a ton, while it had to be sold on the market at 835 francs. The difference was made up by the Belgian taxpayers.

In the 1960s and '70s, the steel works along the Brussels-Charleroi Canal and around Liege also ran into problems. They had become completely outdated and were situated too far inland, while new hyper-modern steelworks were established by the Luxemburg steel group Arbed along the Sea Canal to the north of the Flemish city of Ghent. More state subsidies were diverted to Wallonia in order to keep its steel production going, although the price for producing one ton of steel was a quarter higher in Wallonia than in Ghent.

From the late 1960s onwards, thousands of Moroccans were called over to work in the subsidized Belgian steel industry. As the latter came from a former French colony, they had the additional effect of strengthening the Francophone element in Belgium. By the early 1970s, Belgium's immigrant population had risen to 720,000. Some 220,000 of them made up 7.2% of the active population. The arrival of the Moroccans in the Brussels area led to other problems. Traditionally, the Brussels upper class had been Francophone, while the lower and middle classes consisted of Flemings. Because of the frenchification process since 1830, the middle class had gradually become Francophone as well, while the lower classes had remained Dutch. The Moroccans settled in lower class neighbor hoods, like Kuregem, Molenbeek and Schaarbeek, that previously were Flemish. The gradual transformation of these neighborhoods into North-African ghettos drove the Flemings out. By the mid-1990s, the Dutch language in the Belgian capital was all but dead. Brussels, though situated geographically in Flanders, had become an almost entirely Francophone enclave. On this see also the recent article by war photographer Teun Voeten in Politico.

In the autumn of 1960, Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens's government coalition of Christian-Democrats and Liberals concluded that it was madness to continue subsidizing the Walloon mines. The latter had already devoured 120 billion francs. Eyskens announced a bill, the so-called Loi Unique (Single Act), which abolished most subsidies, even though he had won the 1958 elections, especially in Wallonia, with a promise of big spending. According to Andre Renard, the charismatic leader of the Socialist Trade Union in Liege, the Francophones were the victims of “reactionary Flemings.” Renard called for a general strike. “We will strike your government down,” former minister Victor Larock told Eyskens. During five weeks in December 1960 and January 1961, Wallonia came to a complete stand-still. Renard threatened with a Walloon secession if the Fleming Eyskens did not resign. Some 700,000 Walloons joined the strike, which became violent and turned to insurrection when Socialist mayors prevented the municipal police from restoring law and order. Groups of “Renardists” ordered all shops and petrol stations to close down, except those holding a license from the Socialist trade union. Railway stations were stormed, buses and trams set ablaze, trains derailed. People who refused to obey what one Minister called “Renard's dictatorship” were beaten up and landed in hospital. According to a report by the Interior Ministry, 1,500 acts of sabotage and violence were committed. Hundreds of people were wounded and four were killed in riots.

In Flanders there were few disturbances. It was as if the Flemings and the Walloons were living in different countries. This greatly upset the Belgicist establishment, including the King. They wanted Eyskens to back down.

Belgium’s checkered history of Federalism

One of the architects of federalism in Belgium, Wilfried Martens (an ambitious 35-year-old politician, explained in January 1972 what it was all about: “Flanders is not allowed to dominate Belgium because this will cause the country to explode. The federal construct is designed precisely to prevent this happening. This implies that Flanders yield its power.” (Quoted in Hugo De Ridder, Omtrent Wilfried Martens, Lannoo, 1991, p. 4, p. 75. 64.)

At first, the “Renardist” idea of federalism, which after Renard's death in 1962 had been adopted by the powerful Liege branch of the Socialist Party, did not receive the support of the Belgicist establishment nor of the King. But, by 1968, the establishment had been alarmed by a number of developments that convinced them the Flemish influence was growing. The real traumatic incident for the Belgicists was the conflict over Leuven. The pride of this Dutch-speaking town was its university, the oldest in the Netherlands, which had been established in 1425 by Duke Jan IV of Brabant. The university was run by the Catholic bishops.

Originally the academic language had been Latin, but in the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Latin had been replaced by the vernacular, which in Leuven according to the bishops was ... French. Gradually, some courses had been organized in Dutch as well, resulting in the 1930s in a bilingual university. In 1966, the students demanded that their university based in Flanders should become a Dutch university. Cardinal Suenens reacted in the fashion of his predecessors Van Roey and Mercier. In an authoritarian pastoral letter, the bishops “ordered” the professors and students to accept that Leuven be partly French, and warned that they would “not tolerate” any dissent. Times had changed, however, since the days of Van Roey and Mercier: the rigid commands of the bishops were no longer accepted. The pastoral letter led to widespread indignation. The students went on strike, backed by the majority of the professors and Flemish public opinion. The Leuven letter caused the bishops to lose much of their authority in Flanders, not only on political, but also on religious and moral issues. Some even went so far as to argue that the Flemish submissiveness to the Catholic Church in the past had been Flanders' undoing. When the Flamingant banker Lode Claes became a Senator for the Volksunie in 1968, Baudouin invited him to dinner in Laken. Asked by the King why the Flemings had protested so little against their humiliations since 1830, Claes answered: “Because they are Catholics, Your Majesty. If only 15 per cent of them had been Protestants, then the whole history of Belgium would have been different. Their Catholic meekness plays them false.” At this Fabiola abruptly put down her knife and fork and left the room in silence but visibly angry, and did not return. (Luc Pauwels and Pieter-Ian Verstraete, Vlaamse macht: In herinnering aan Lode Claes (1913-1997), 1998, p. 11.) Lode Claes was never again invited to Laken.

In the spring of 1968, after months of student agitation and numerous protest demonstrations, the bishops finally gave in. All Francophone courses at Leuven University were abolished. The Belgian establishment suddenly realized that it could no longer count on the Church, the institution that had so far been its most forceful ally in keeping the Flemings in check. The shock was so great that the Vanden Boeynants government fell over the Leuven affair after Flemings and Walloons within the cabinet started quarrelling, and the political parties split along linguistic lines. For the very religious Baudouin, Leuven came as a double shock. It was a sign of Flemish rebellion against both Catholicism and Belgicism. The old Belgium la Belgique de papa, as it came to be called - was dead. It was time to design a new one.

Thus between 1970 and 1993 Belgium was transformed, through four revisions of the Belgian Constitution, into a federal state where democratic majority rule was neutralized. The process was completed a few weeks before King Baudouin died of heart failure in July 1993.

The 1960-61 strike against the Single Act had focused on more than the reintroduction of the subsidies to the mines. Andre Renard, the leader of the strike, made political demands as well. He saw federalism as a means towards preventing the Flemings from meddling in Wallonia's affairs and 'suffocating its social experiment and anti-capitalist reforms.' The Belgian Federation would have to provide the money, but Wallonia would be free to decide what to do with it. (Alain Meynen, "Economic and Social Policy since the 1950s." In Els Witte, ed. Political History of Belgium From 1830 onwards, 2001.)

Renard was a political genius - probably the greatest one that Belgium ever had apart from Emile Waxweiler and Hendrik De Man. He perceived that the emancipation of Belgium's Dutch-speaking majority within a unitary state would inevitably lead to “reactionary Flanders” imposing its will on Wallonia. Therefore, he proposed to turn Belgium into a federal union of a Flemish and a Walloon state, with both states assuming an equal status at federal level. This would give the Francophones a 50% say in government instead of the 40% that they would eventually end up with in a unitary Belgium. If Brussels were also to become a constituent state of the federation, the Francophones would even have a permanent majority position of two-to-one, as Brussels was now overwhelmingly Francophone.

During the summer of 1989, Vanden Boeynants negotiated a coalition of Christian-Democrats and Socialists with Andre Cools and other leading Renardists. They agreed to rewrite the Belgian Constitution in a federalist sense. The 1970 Constitution confined the borders of Brussels to 19 urban municipalities. The Flemings insisted on confining Brussels, because the outward movement of wealthy Francophones from the capital to the surrounding green countryside of Flemish Brabant was causing the number of Francophones there to rise steadily. Francophones who moved out of the 19 municipalities would have to accept that they were moving into Dutch-speaking Flanders. In the capital itself, where by 1970 the number of Flemings had dwindled below 30%, half the top jobs in executive functions and the public services were set aside for Flemings. In return, Flanders accepted the application of the same principle at national level. In future, half the Belgian cabinet would consist of Francophones. The same' parity principle' applies for judges in the Supreme Court, army officers, Belgian diplomats and leading civil servants. The Flemings regarded this as a victory because, until 1970, the Francophones held more than half the top jobs, even though they comprised only 40% of the population.

The parity rule also came to apply with regard to government infrastructure investments. As a result, Wallonia - larger than Flanders in area and less populous - boasts a great number of highways that are hardly used. The oddest trade-off happened in 1979 when in return for Wallonia allowing the Flemings to establish a Dutch-language primary school in the village of Komen, a 10 kilometre strip of highway was constructed between the Walloon villages of pecq and armentieres. In 2001, the Francophone Socialist leader Elio Di Rupo vetoed the construction of a new railroad in the harbor of Antwerp because the state did not have the money for equivalent works in Wallonia. When Flanders proposed to pay for the Antwerp railroad exclusively with Flemish money, Di Rupo remained unmoved. He believed that even this arrangement would undermine the parity or “solidarity” principle that not a single franc was allowed to be spent in the north if the south did not (or could not) spend one as well.

Another novelty of the 1970 Constitution was the so-called “bolt mechanism.” This implied that for all future changes to the Belgian institutional framework, not only an overall two-thirds majority in Parliament was needed, but also a 50 per cent majority in every language group. This bolted the door to democratic majority rule in Belgium. In order to ensure that a measure did not pass, it was sufficient that 44 of the 87 Francophones amongst the 212 delegates in the Chamber of Representatives voted against it, even if the other 168 MPs were all in favour of it. The Constitution of 1970 turned Belgium into a country dominated by the majority within the minority - in other words, by the Renardist Left in Wallonia. The Flemings accepted this because they had been able to define the borders of Brussels and guarantee for themselves half the political power in the capital. But the latter proved to be a Pyrrhic victory, because of the two Trojan horses of Belgicism that were beginning to enter Brussels in the early 1970s: the immigrants and Europe.

The integration of thousands of Moroccan immigrants in Brussels was severely hampered by the fact that these North-African newcomers did not see the point of learning Dutch in a city that was predominantly Francophone. The bilingual status of Brussels, however, meant that most jobs required at least a basic knowledge of Dutch. Soon, the Flamingants were blamed for blocking the upward social mobility of the immigrants. Under the pressure of immigration, the Flemish politicians were compelled to renounce the protected status of Dutch in Brussels. In 2001, the parity in Brussels was abolished, although at national level it was not.

The Flemish economy continued booming until 1973, when it caused the Belgian GNP to grow by 6.5 %. Then, the party was oyer as a result of the international recession. By 1975, Belgium's economic growth had fallen to 1.8%; by 1981, it stood at 1.9%.

Yet by 2003, Flanders, with 58% of the Belgian population, financed 64.3 % of Belgium's social security benefits and received only 57.6% in return. During the 1990s, it paid the Francophones an annually increasing sum, equalling 3.5% of Flemish CDP in 1990, 3.8% in 1999 and 4.2% in 2003. Paradoxically, these “solidarity payments” proved to be exactly the reason why Flanders could not fill up its 30,000 job vacancies: the 250,000 unemployed in Wallonia refused to accept Flemish jobs because the Flemish taxpayers were already providing them with a handsome income for doing nothing.

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