Stanford Politics

Late March saw a spree of large-scale, successful terrorist attacks, including the murder of dozens in Ankara, Turkey; Lahore, Pakistan; Baghdad, Iraq; and Brussels, Belgium. To many, the Brussels attack, conducted months after the bombing of Paris, was particularly shocking, as it occurred in a country deep in the heart of Europe, far away from the Middle East. However, Belgium’s vulnerability to terrorism has been well-documented among security experts. The country’s fractured history explains how such an attack was possible in a developed country widely believed to be far from terrorism’s reach. Belgium’s deep ethnic and linguistic fractionalization provides a case study in how polarization makes effective governance impossible, to the point of raising the question: should Belgium split up?

Answering such a question requires a basic understanding of how Belgium came to be. Nestled between France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany, Belgium was officially declared independent in 1830, and is a young country by European standards. Throughout the Middle Ages, the area that would become Belgium was composed of provinces, each controlled by a lord or duke. Located near the traditional major European powers, Belgium was the site of frequent conflict between many a foreign king, from nations including France, Germany, Austria, and Spain.

After the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the great powers of Europe famously met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to restructure Europe. Their goals were to shore up the monarchical order and prevent France from gaining so much power ever again. To do so, European diplomats developed plan to place strong powers near France to prevent it from bulldozing over its neighbors. They united the provinces of the region, called the Low Countries, under William I, to provide such a buffer, creating a new entity called the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. However, William, a Calvinist, was a poor fit for the mostly Catholic peoples of the area, so in 1830, after years of economic depression, the Catholic southern peoples began a revolt that turned into the Belgian Revolution, eventually jettisoning the Protestant Netherlands and leaving the south to become Catholic Belgium.

It is the artificiality of this national origin that cripples Belgium’s politics today. Many of the provinces of the region had been in off-again-on-again war for centuries, and political loyalties were sharply divided. The idea of ‘Belgian’ unification was a political ploy by European powers to stand against France, not a creation based on a common ethnicity or otherwise deeply shared history. After 1830, France proposed an extended partition, one in which the southern, Francophone Catholic provinces would become part of France, while Dutch-speaking Catholics who live in what is now northern Belgium would have their own separate country. But the other great powers remained suspicious of France, and the plan was rejected.

Belgium contains two distinct cultures, and the two are so disconnected as to almost seem two separate countries. Dutch-speaking northern Belgium is known as Flanders, while French-speaking southern Belgium is known as Wallonia. The geographic division between the two areas is a nearly flat horizontal line cutting right through the middle of the country, with the only exception to the rule being the city of Brussels, a mixed city that also serves as the de facto capital for the European Union.

Historically, Wallonia was the wealthier and higher-status province, spawning resentment among the Flemish, but in recent decades, the tides have turned, and it is currently Flanders that is the wealthier and more advantaged region. In 2007, polls demonstrated 40 percent support for Flemish independence. After the 2010 election, it took Belgian political parties more than eighteen months to form government due to Belgian politics being divided not only along ethnic lines but also along political lines within the ethnic lines (there exists no national political parties, and so highly unstable coalition governments are the norm). Far-right nationalist parties flourish, and European periodicals have speculated and recommended for years that Belgium will, and should, “call it a day“. Yet Belgium continues to exist, and polling on dissolution of the state ebbs and flows; there are even attempts at nationalism in what Wallonia’s regional prime minister once labeled “almost an obligation to coexist.”

A nation-state functions when its citizens’ in-group is merged with its political identity. The government of, say, South Korea is able to perform its duties because the people of South Korea view it as a legitimate institution for performing the duties of legislation and rule. The people of South Korea are bonded together through common cultural (historical, linguistic, etc.) ties and agree that they constitute an in-group, and are thus okay with being part of the same political unit as other Korean people, because other Korean people are also part of that in-group. In Belgium, however, though the nominal government is the ‘Belgian’ government, loyalty to the identity of Wallonia or Flanders precedes Belgium as a whole, and so forming an effective national government is nearly impossible.

Because Belgium’s two primary ingroups are forced to share the same national political unit, both groups’ identities are under constant pressure to assert themselves. Outgroups are created through “proximity plus small differences,” but the existence of two in-groups within the same state of Belgium means that the two must constantly interact with (and thus react against) the ever-present threat of each other. Intellectuals have long warned of the viciousness of intra-ethnic conflicts between ethnicities that are physically close and generally similar, but still different enough for people to make sociological distinction, and day-to-day life in Belgium includes myriad examples of almost comical clashes. Just a few instances of these clashes include some Flemish municipalities imposing legal penalties on children who speak French on playgrounds and some French-speaking nurses refusing treatment to Dutch speakers.

The tragedy of Belgian hyperpolarization has made it the European hub of Islamic terrorism. Muslim immigration to Europe has been infamously troubled, and Muslims across countries like France are often poorly integrated into society, walled off into essentially separate neighborhoods and locked away from opportunity by discrimination and lack of assimilation. This difficulty is compounded in Belgium by the lack of a cohesive national culture into which to integrate. Molenbeek, a neighborhood in Brussels, has become the poster child for failed integration, and European security agencies know it as nucleus of radicalization and ISIS activity. Belgium’s schism means that there is no national consensus on how to deal with the problem; in fact, the country is so divided that security responsibilities have been thrown down to hyper-local institutions. The city of Brussels has six different police forces aligned with different Mayors that do not coordinate, an example that is all the more incredible when one considers that this number is down from a high of 19 separate police forces.

A Belgian counterterrorism official once told Buzzfeed, “We just don’t have the people to watch anything else [besides international investigations]and, frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links, as well as pursue the hundreds of open files and investigations we have. It’s literally an impossible situation and, honestly, it’s very grave.”

That statement was made one week before the Brussels terrorist attack.

Belgium acts as a case study of the tremendous difficulties of resolving ethnic tensions within a nation-state, a theme many might recognize in other countries as well. Another prominent example is Iraq. During the process of decolonization, European countries infamously left behind national boundaries that had little relation to the cultures and histories of newly independent peoples. The nation-state of Iraq is structurally hampered by the competing interests of three major groups, the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, rendering the country’s fledgling democracy with infighting as ISIS took advantage of its power vacuum. The people in these countries are not better or worse than people anywhere else. They have just been put in an unsustainable situation. When a nation was established without organic cohesion in mind, when people’s loyalties lie with a subgroup instead of the nation as a whole, and when the divisions lie along relatively neat geographic lines, one must wonder: at what point should a nation decide that it might just be better for everyone involved to separate?

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Andrew Granato, a junior studying economics, is a staff writer at Stanford Political Journal.