Opinion Editorials, October 2007
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The End of Belgium?
By Herwig Lerouge
October 1, 2007
Almost four months after the elections of June 2007, Belgium still has no government. No solution is in sight. This situation was predictable. Even though the negotiating parties (the Christian-Democrats and the Liberal Parties) agree on social and economic issues, they differ on the way they can best be implemented. Separatist parties try to create among the population a weariness with this crisis hoping it will end up in resigned support for the independence of Flanders. Today the future existence of Belgium has become a matter of open debate. However a broad reaction is emerging, among trade unionists, artists and academics, also in Flanders (1).
Belgium is a federal state, consisting of three language communities (Flemish, French and German). Six million people speak Dutch (the Flemish) and live in the northern part of the country. 3,5 million speak French and live in the South (the Walloons). In the Brussels-Capital region, half of the people speak French at home, a quarter speak French and Dutch. 10 percent of the votes in the Brussels-Capital region go to the Flemish parties. The people living in Brussels can choose whether they want to rely on Flemish and/or French community institutions, such as schools and cultural centres. A large number of Brussels inhabitants are not native Dutch- or French-speakers at all. There is also the German-speaking community, which has about 70.000 inhabitants.
Each language community has its own Parliament and government. They are responsible for the control of culture, education, some aspects of public health and care.
Besides that, there are three regions (Brussels capital, Flanders and Wallonia) that are responsible for controlling economic development, infrastructure, environment, housing, agriculture, regional transportation, energy and water distribution, some aspects of employment... They also have their governments. In Flanders, the institutions of the Dutch-speaking community and the Flemish region have merged. The regions and the communities overlap but do not coincide: the French-speaking community lives in the Walloon region and the Brussels-Capital region. The Flemish community is present in the Flemish region and in the Brussels-Capital region.
Then there is the federal government that is in charge of constitutional questions, foreign affairs, defence, justice, finance, labour law, social security and public health, income and industrial taxes, employment, immigration, public enterprises....
This leaves the country with seven governments and parliaments.
Growing regionalist tendencies
This complex structure has resulted from the increasing influence of nationalist (regionalist) tendencies. Up to the seventies of the past century, Belgium was a centralised state. But from the seventies on, different institutional reforms were made under the pressure of nationalist tendencies especially in Flanders, but also of some regionalist parties in Wallonia with demands for more cultural autonomy in each language community and for control over local economic development. This has led to the federalisation of the country.
The major political parties are the Liberals, Socialists, and Christian-Democrats. In the course of the federalisation process, they split along linguistic lines. They are complemented by regionalist parties such as Spirit which is allied to the socialist party in Flanders, NV-A, an ally of the Flemish Christian-Democrats and the racist and nationalist Vlaams Belang in Flanders. Their French-speaking counterpart is the Front Démocratique des Francophones (FDF). The green parties (Groen! and Ecolo) are also split along linguistic lines. The only party that remains national is the PTB - PVDA, the Workers Party of Belgium.
Belgium is today a federal state but without federal political parties. Apart from the PTB there are no Belgium-wide parties: there are only Flemish, French and German parties. A Belgian who lives in Wallonia can never vote for or against a Flemish politician, even if this politician has been his prime minister for eight years. And vice versa. This means the political agenda of the federal elections is more and more influenced by regional interests. At the last federal elections, the main Flemish parties were running on a demagogical chauvinistic agenda, and made promises that if elected they would defend some specific Flemish interests that are not in the interests of the French-speaking community. The French and Dutch-speaking communities have in the last thirty years become more and more isolated from each other. There are no more shared national media, few shared institutions and no form of bilingualism. Even the trade unions have been affected by these tendencies. Recently the socialist metal workers union split on a linguistic basis.
A wave of Flemish nationalism has taken hold of most parties in Flanders in recent years. This is a big victory for Flemish separatist parties. Their vision of Flanders - as a people rather than a geographic region - has had a dramatic influence on the country's politics. "We feel that the point of view of our party is very quickly becoming something close to a majority view," said Frank Vanhecke, chairman of the fascist Vlaams Belang. "Our views are now given their affirmation by the other Flemish parties. So our party can only win."
Moreover, to become the biggest party in the country and obtain the post of prime minister, the Flemish Christian Democratic party CD&V formed a cartel with NVA, a small separatist Flemish party. On the French side, the French liberal party MR formed a cartel with the small Brussels French Party FDF, which is a radical party of the French speaking community in Brussels. These two radical French and Flemish parties are making the negotiations much more polarised. But all parties, certainly in Flanders are, to different degrees, infected by this chauvinistic virus. The Flemish Christian-democrats won the election. Their leader, Yves Leterme, was until recently the prime minister at the Flemish level. He received 800.000 votes behind his name. He says now these people voted for his explicit Flemish-agenda. This is a very exaggerated interpretation. Christian-Democrats are historically supported by the very strong Christian workers union ( 1.7 million members). This Union is not at all in favour of more autonomy for Flanders and is today waging a campaign for maintaining solidarity between the workers of different regions. Nevertheless, especially the younger leaders of this party, who hardly know their colleagues of the French speaking party of the same obedience any more, take a very nationalist stand.
A hidden agenda
It might seem that the Belgian crisis has to do with linguistic questions. In the Flemish border municipalities around Brussels, the percentage of inhabitants who do not speak any Dutch, but French or even English is very high. They are often well-paid employees, looking for suburban green areas. Dutch-speaking inhabitants of theses municipalities claim that they are no longer able to afford living there. But the same thing happens in Brussels where ordinary Belgians (French and Dutch speaking) are driven from their homes by richer European institutions personnel. Flemish nationalists make a linguistic question out of this. They want to abolish certain special rights that were granted to the French-speaking inhabitants, which formed a minority when these municipalities were attributed to the Flemish region in 1962. There is irritation from the French-speaking Belgians in these municipalities because local administrations are making the lives of those who don't speak Dutch unnecessarily difficult. Flemish nationalist politicians also want to put an end to the fact that the 19 municipalities of the Brussels Capital region and the surrounding Flemish municipalities of Halle and Vilvoorde where many French-speaking people live, form one election district, called Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde. In this district the inhabitants of the Flemish municipalities can also vote for French parties, which is not possible in other Flemish boroughs. The Flemish parliament has demanded the immediate split of this election district, with Halle and Vilvoorde becoming part of the Flemish electoral districts. This would reinforce the Flemish character of these municipalities, but it would deny the existing rights of the French-speaking people in those communes. Some French-speaking politicians don't want to negotiate about the split, others do if the Flemish are willing to give up some officially Flemish boroughs around Brussels that are dominated by French-speaking inhabitants, which would be added to the Brussels-Capital region. The Flemish politicians present this case as non negotiable.
This question has some influence on Flemish public opinion as there is a history of discrimination against the Dutch language in Belgium. When the Belgian state was created in 1830, the Constitution provided for a unitary state where in fact the official language was French. This language was seen by the ruling bourgeoisie, in Brussels and Flanders as a factor in achieving national unity. All schools, the government and municipal services, courts, etc. used only French in official documents. French was the language of the dominant classes, both Flemish and Walloon. The aristocracy and the bourgeoisie spoke French, while the common people spoke Flemish, Walloon, Brabantish, or various other local dialects. The democratic demand of the Flemish people was rejected, also by the French speaking Flemish bourgeoisie who used their knowledge of both French and local languages as a weapon to occupy all important official positions. So there was no national oppression from a foreign bourgeoisie, but a violation of democratic rights of the Flemish people by the ruling bourgeoisie. This led to a « Flemish Movement », mostly petty bourgeois that grew in importance. This movement succeeded (much too slowly) in imposing the introduction of Dutch in the country's official life. Since the nineteen thirties this problem has been officially solved.
From the sixties on, we have been witnessing a revival of Flemish nationalism. However the language problem has become a minor issue and a pretext. Flemish nationalism has become the ideology of the new bourgeoisie in Flanders that emerged from the sixties as the Walloon region went into economic decline and Flanders gradually became one of the most prosperous regions in Europe. Flanders is today doing much better socio-economically than Wallonia. GDP per capita in 2005: Belgium: 27.700 Euros - Brussels 54.905 - Flanders 27.300 - Wallonia 19.800. The figures about Brussels are misleading. Brussels has many poor people, but also many companies whose employees live in the Walloon region and, especially, in Flanders. Most large Belgian companies have their head-office in Brussels, which is where the sales and profits are officially put into the books. Unemployment rate in 2007: Belgium: 11.8% - Brussels 20,4% - Flanders 6.9% - Wallonia 11.8% . This has not always been the case. In 1949, unemployment in Flanders was 19,5% for 5,2% in Wallonia. In the sixties Flanders caught up with Wallonia. As every capitalist country, Belgium experiences the uneven development of capitalism. Traditional Belgian monopolies that controlled the Belgian coal mining, steel and glass industry withdrew their investments from the South of the country because there was more money to be made elsewhere, in the North. As the reserves of iron in the South were exhausted, they relocated their steel industry to towns near the harbours, as in Ghent and Antwerp (Europe's second port behind Rotterdam). Transport costs were lower there as were wages. New chemical, petrochemical industries were attracted to these areas with much public money. This created a stronger medium size bourgeoisie in Flanders with mostly subcontracters of big multinational firms. The consequences were dramatic for the traditional industrial regions in the South. In Charleroi, Liège and La Louvière unemployment is today around 20 percent. The same happens as in many traditional industrial areas in Europe (Nord - Pas de Calais and Lorraine in France, Liverpool and Wales in Great Britain).
The Flemish bourgeoisie wants to break the solidarity
The roles were inverted. In the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, 750.000 Flemish workers went to Wallonia to make a living. Today Wallonia needs Flanders. Given the inequality in economic welfare, there are significant financial transfers from Flanders to Wallonia and Brussels. The financial transfer through the fiscal and social security systems from the Flemish to the French-speaking is estimated at 3 to 6 billion Euros annually. There are no official figures. This amounts to more than 1000 Euros per person annually, 3 or 4 percent of Flemish GDP. Most of it goes through the fact that the workers in the richer regions, where there are more jobs contribute more than what they get to the funding of pension, unemployment, national health care and family allowances funds, which are still organised on a federal level. In reverse; poorer regions get more than whet they give, because of course there are more unemployed, ill people. The poorer regions don't coincide with the linguistic frontier. There are also poor regions within Flanders and rich regions within Wallonia. But nationalist parties always talk about these questions in linguistic terms. The reference is made to the "North-South transfers". These transfers are not large compared to inter-regional transfers within Europe. The South East of Great Britain contributes 12,6% of its income to national solidarity. Flanders contributes to an amount of 3,6%. The transfers went in the other direction in the past. But by agitating on this subject, Flemish separatists try to create the impression that Flanders can do everything better by itself, if it no longer has « the burden « of these transfers. They thus hope to create a mass basis for their separatist agenda. Today the overwhelming majority of people, also in Flanders, are against separation and an independent Flemish state.
Homogeneous competencies
The successive institutional reforms have also created a lot of divided competencies. The leader of the organisation of Catholic hospitals complained that a hospital manager was confronted with 15 different administrations that had something to do with health care. Some of them are on the level of the federal government, others on the regional level, others on the community level and still others on the provincial or communal level. This could often be solved by concentrating competencies on the federal level again. But nationalists use this confusion to demand that everything be brought to the Flemish level, to « give Flanders the means to implement its policy ». They call this homogeneous competencies. The same goes for the employment policy. There are different authorities that are in charge of this area. A federal institution is in charge of criteria and amounts of unemployment allowances, of deciding to exclude jobless people from these allowances. A regional institution is in charge of professional training, placement of unemployed. This situation is taken as a pretext by Flemish bourgeois parties, including the Social-Democrats in Flanders, to demand the transfer of all competencies in this area to the Flemish region.
If these demands were met, this would of course mean the split up of the country. There would be no more unique regulations on unemployment : an unemployed worker in the South would benefit from a lower allowance than his colleague in the North. The latter would perhaps already lose his allowance after one year. Older and ill persons would no longer be taken care of in the same way. In Flanders and in Wallonia. Christian-Democrats also demand more fiscal competencies for Flanders, especially the right to fix lower tax rates for corporate taxes. This would of course lead to a fiscal competition between the North and the South and to a downward spiral of tax rates for corporations.
The background : The dispute about the Lisbon agenda
What is new and what has given a very strong backing for separatist views is the fact that these demands are openly put forward by a large fraction of the Flemish bourgeoisie. The Flemish bourgeoisie is quite open about their reasons. They have made their traditional list of demands known (lower taxation for business, further cuts in labour cost, further flexibility, longer working hours and a longer career for workers, suppression of all early retirement systems ) in the run-up to the elections. They want a radical reform of the labour market as is proposed in the Lisbon agenda. They want it all over the country, but they reckon it would be easier to already obtain it in Flanders if the labour market policy is regionalised. They hope that in Flanders they will get rid of the strong federal trade unions and the stronger tradition of class struggle in Wallonia. The push towards more Flemish autonomy does not differ from the same tendencies in most of Europe's richer regions. It is an expression of the crisis of imperialism, where competition is getting harder and harder and where the stronger capitalist groups want to get rid of most social achievements of the working class as quickly as possible. When Urbain Vandeurzen became chairman of VOKA, the leading employers association in Flanders, he said he wanted « a strategic transformation programme for Flanders with the aim of strengthening the economic position of Flanders in Europe ». « Although Flanders is one of the wealthiest and most competitive regions in Europe, our region faces a number of tremendous external challenges, including relocation challenges to Eastern Europe and new competition and opportunities related to the growth economies in China and India ». On the New Years reception of his organisation in 2007, he also said the Flemish employers were only prepared to tolerate the annual transfers of funds from Flanders to Wallonia for a further ten years on the condition that Wallonia agreed to « the entire labour market policy being regionalised and the parties in Wallonia should therefore not wait too long before starting discussions on a new state reform. What has repeatedly failed to work at federal level should simply be attempted at Flemish level: making modern pay instruments possible for company managers, creating greater leeway for the development of competencies and at lower gross costs. That is what is at stake in the state reform. The Flemish negotiators should not be satisfied with small steps in the state reform ». Other employers organisations in Flanders had already said they wanted to get rid as soon as possible of any early retirement system. They demanded the introduction in Belgium of the Danish model of limitation of unemployment allowances in time which does not exist in Belgium. He also criticised the national wage agreement (IPA) concluded by federal employers organisations (VBO and Unizo) and trade unions. This contained an agreement on an indicative wage increase of 5% in 2007-2008. He said that that agreement proved that « at federal level it is not possible for employers to be given any more breathing space ». Trade union leaders are convinced that if wage and employment policies are regionalised, Flemish employers will no longer accept collective regional or sectional conventions but only negotiate on a factory level. They will only accept conventions if they are in the interest of the capitalists. So, the whole agenda for more autonomy hides an unprecedented attack on the social achievements of the working class in Belgium. It is an agenda for splitting the organisations of the working class and for organising competition between the workers of the different regions. With different wages, different social security systems, different tax rates, corporations will have the leisure to oppose the workers of one region to the other, to blackmail them with relocation.
Another part of the Belgian bourgeoisie, organised within the Belgian Federation of Employers (FEB) is reluctant to grant more autonomy for the regions. They fear a long period of political instability, many bureaucratic complications and confusion on regulations: one out of 8 Belgians works in another region than where he lives. They fear that their international credibility will be damaged. They argue that all the Lisbon measures can be taken without all of these complications. Bourgeois parties in the Walloon region support this view and point out all the measures they are taking to bring their region up to the level of the Lisbon agenda : exclusion of long term unemployed from social benefits, tax cuts for corporations, actions against combative union sections.... They point out that the electoral victory of the right wing liberal party in Wallonia can hasten the reform of the labour market also in Wallonia. So the issue is not decided.
A strong movement for solidarity and democracy
Any move towards new regional competencies is against the interests of the working people in Belgium. On a social level An end to the transfers from North to South will throw one of four Walloons into poverty. Each inhabitant of the South will lose 1.000 Euros a year on the average. Those who lost their job, are old or ill will be hit the hardest. All the people in the South will have to pay higher social contributions or taxes or face less social security or public service. But even if the North should get richer, this will not benefit working people there. Their employers and political parties are preparing harsher regulations on unemployment allowances, longer working hours, more flexibility, a longer working career. As the population in the North is growing old more rapidly, their pensions are under threat without the solidarity of the younger population in Brussels. Flemish factories may cut jobs as a consequence of a shrinking market in Wallonia. One fourth of « Flemish exports » goes to Wallonia today. Not to speak of the competition between workers that will follow and lead to a downward spiral in wages and social protection. There will be no more federal collective agreements that benefit all of the workers, also those in smaller factories.
On a political, ideological and organisational level
More regional competencies will aggravate the distancing between the workers and their organisations Instead of tending towards a very necessary unification of worker's struggles on a European level, we will see a splitting up of worker's unity on a regional level in Belgium. Trade unions will split up and stand weaker in face of the attacks . In Belgian history social progress was only achieved by struggle and by unity. Each time the bourgeoisie succeeded in dividing the workers between nationalities, the battles were lost. The idea of class collaboration on a nationalistic basis will grow. There will be a period of exacerbated nationalistic agitation which can destroy class conscience among the workers. The estrangement of workers of the different regions will grow still stronger. Therefore the Workers Party of Belgium has taken from the beginning of its history a firm stand against the federalist evolution in Belgium and worked for the unity of the working class and the Belgian people. Of course democracy demands that the rights of minorities be protected everywhere. Therefore the WPB demands that the Brussels region be extended on the basis of the real socio-economic region of Brussels. Within this region, a strict bilingualism should be respected and promoted. Both languages should be taught at school. There can be no discrimination whatsoever.
The WPB also supports the demand made by some anti-separatist circles to introduce a federal electoral conscription where politicians who take responsibility on a federal level have to present themselves to voters in the whole of the country. This could be a weapon against growing nationalist demagogy in electoral periods. The WPB also demands that all essential areas like social security, employment, health care, wage policy, transports be dealt with at a national level. Federalisation has caused inefficiency, confusion and waste of money along with division among the people. Alongside the trade unions, the WPB strongly opposes the regionalisation of any area of social security and supports the preservation of solidarity between the regions through these mechanisms. Labour law and collective bargaining should also remain on a national level. Instead of talking about the « flow of money from the North to the South », the WPB puts on the agenda the immensely greater flows of workers' money to capital owners. During the last twenty years 10% of the GDP has been transferred from workers to capital owners. Every year; 1,5 billion Euros flow unduly from social security funds to pharmaceutical multinationals, because the Belgian social security pays far too much for medicines. If these flows or transfers were stopped, problems like the ageing of the population could easily be solved.
To confront these problems we will need strong and unified trade unions and a class-conscious working class. The counter-offensive has started. This week saw the start of very broad campaign « Save solidarity ». It was initiated by hundreds of trade union organisers, who got the support of many well known artists, academics, journalists, writers. In two days, the petition has gathered over 15.000 signatures (1). The two big trade unions have given it their full support. The two big trade unions continue to declare their opposition to a split in labour market policy, national wage negotiations and social security. They correctly see any of these as a fast track to losing all workers' gains of the past. There is no doubt that this initiative can contribute to radically change the climate and create a wave of solidarity that even political leaders will have to take into account.
Herwig Lerouge is Editor of the magazine "Etudes marxistes" published in French and in Dutch ( www.marx.be ). He is member of the CC of the Workers' Party of Belgium ( www.ptb.be ,www.pvda.be )
(1) www.sauvonslasolidarite.be ,
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