MULTINATIONAL COUNTRIES: THE BELGIAN WAY

Map of the Belgian communities.

The Belgian political system is based on the concept of national communities, as defined by the languages spoken by its inhabitants. It is important to understand the link between language and nations/tribes/peoples. In Belgium, those languages are: French (to be more precise the Walloon dialect of French that is spoken in the south -Wallonia-, shown in pink), Dutch (to be more precise, the Flemish dialect of Dutch that is spoken in the north, i.e. the part that is usually -if somewhat improperly- called Flanders, shown in orange) and German (two small areas that are adjacent to Germany, shown in green). The shaded area is simply Brussels, the seat of government. (Wikipedia, English edition, May 2022)

 

 

 

Map of the Belgian regions. The Belgian political system is also based on the concept of regions. There are three regions, usually named Wallonia (pink), Flanders (orange) and Brussels (blue). The last one corresponds to the capital city of the country, a mainly French-speaking city surrounded by mainly Dutch-speaking suburbs. As for the first two regions, they regroup the territories of the old provinces. In Belgium, the word 'province' is simply the name given to an administrative unit based on the national language of most of its inhabitants. All those administrative units are either French-speaking provinces or Dutch-speaking provinces. The only administrative unit that was the home of two nations at the same time (Brabant) was broken in two parts, according to language and culture. The northern part became North Brabant (Dutch) and the southern part became South Brabant (French). It is worth noting that the political structure known as Belgium was (quite artificially) set up in 1830, mainly to serve as a bulwark and buffer between post-revolutionary France, severely defeated at Waterloo in 1815, and a rising, growing pre-German unification Prussia. (Wikipedia, English edition, May 2022).

 

Most countries on Terra are binational, trinational or more. Russia is made up of dozens of nations, large and small. Same thing for China. India is a treasure trove of hundreds of languages and nations, each nation having usually its own language. The island of New-Guinea, made up of two Indonesian provinces and part of the country of Papua-New-Guinea, has one of the highest degrees of linguistic diversity on Earth. Three main linguistic families are represented on the island: the Papuan family (the oldest known wave of migration to reach the island), the Austronesian family (comprising all the Malagasy, Polynesian, Micronesian and Malay populations that descend down from the Formosan part of the Taiwanese population and that constitute mainly the second great wave of settlement) and the Indo-European family (represented by the ubiquitous English language brought by European colonization, Dutch and German having left a lesser impression upon the linguistic landscape).

The linguistic richness of Papua-New Guinea (an island that reminds one of a little Africa anchored at the intersection of South-East Asia and Oceania) is a reflection of what exist on the continent of Africa, a place where linguistic fragmentation has no equal. A small country like Bénin, with less than 12 million inhabitants, has 40, 42 or 44 different languages, each spoken by a specific tribe, nation or people. There are so many languages that the citizens of that country are not too sure of the exact number. The same apply to most of Black Africa, whether Cameroon (between 100 and 120 languages for a population the size of Canada) or the Democratic Congo (over 300 different languages, for a population just above a hundred million persons)). The same thing can be said of Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia, etc. Rare are the countries that are inhabited by a very small number of tribes: Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, etc.

Most countries of Asia and Latin America also have usually more than one people inside them. Japan is an instance of that, at least if you don't take the Ainu people into account. The Corean population is split between North Corea and South Corea, plus autonomous districts in neighboring China. The Arabic-speaking universe (mainly northern Africa and western Asia) is so large and diverse that some dialects are difficult -and sometimes impossible- to understand for other members of that universe.

In fact, to be honest, the Nation-Sate ideal is mainly a creation of the western world, the result of centuries of internecine warfare and conflict. Germany and Italy were united along linguistic-national lines, while Austria-Hungary was broken around the same lines. Even today, though, a country like France is home to more than one language. The number of different languages spoken there, mainly in the geographical margins, is surprisingly high: French, of course, but also Breton, Basque, Flemish, Catalan, Corsican (essentially an Italian dialect), Alsatian (essentially a Germanic dialect). Polish was the language of the ancestors of hundred of thousands of people of Lorraine, who had moved there to work in coal mines.

Binational or trinational countries like Canada are not unique and two instances can be found in Western Europe: Belgium (two main communities, French/Flemish) and Switzerland (three main communities, French/German/Italian, the Romanche community living in the Grisons and not yet assimilated by the German part of that canton being very, very small). Relations between all the national communities living in each of those three countries (Canada, Belgium and Switzerland) can be described in a continuum going from bad to tepid to good.

They're bad in Canada, because that country was build upon the ruins of New-France, with two French colonies being transferred from one kingdom to another kingdom, then their population being gradually and deliberately reduced to a minority state by the use of waves and waves of emigration from the British Islands and also by repression, in the sense that all the Prairies provinces of Canada were integrated and anglicized through the use of military force, the crushing of Indian and Métis resistance, and the very symbolical hanging of the francophone leader Louis Riel.  To put it simply, the West, from the Rockies to the Red River, was made Anglo-Canadian by Anglo-Ontarian political and military strength, while British-Colombia was taken from the native peoples by the British Empire, through the force of the British navy and army, somewhat like New-Zealand.

This being said, Belgium, in comparison, has better relations between national communities. Those relations can be described as tepid, that is to say not to good, not too warm. The country is as artificial as Canada, having been created in 1830 as a buffer between France and German-speaking Prussia. French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish don't really like each other that much. The first was reviled in the past by the second, because it was felt to be lording over it, benefiting from the prestige and strength of France compared to the Netherlands. Then the Flemish part of the population, more populous but poorer than the Walloon part, slowly took the ascendant, remaining more numerous and becoming wealthier, while the French-speaking part of the population stayed lower in numbers and had to deal with the decline of a coal-based economy. All that background, of course, cannot be conducive to good intercommunal relations. One has only to read Simenon police novels to see how little love there is between the two communities living in the Belgian kingdom. Those relations are nos as violent as in Canada (where blood flowed many times in the last centuries: the crushed rebellion of the Patriotes, the Ontarian conquest of the Prairies, the deadly terrorists actions coming from cells of the Front de libération du Québec, the deadly terrorists actions on the lives of Parti québecois elected representatives -in 1976 and 2012-, etc.)

The lower volume of blood spent, in Belgium, compared to its equivalent in Canada, though, doesn't mean that those relations are warm, friendly, and brotherly. They're simply not.. To make them more bearable, the Belgian political structure was redesigned and redefined a few years ago. The concept of 'national communities' was introduced and applied in an effort to decentralize the kingdom and make things better (see maps above).

In the case of Switzerland, things are again quite different. Three elements probably explain why the intercommunal relations are relatively good, as opposed to bad (Canada) or tepid (Belgium). Those elements are the following:

1. TIME SPENT TOGETHER (that country has much older roots than Belgium and Canada, which mean a longer history of cooperation and sense of belonging, and it was also build bit by bit, through a slow and mainly voluntary process of accretion, not by right of conquest or by the design of foreign powers);
2. RELATIVE ECONOMIC EQUITY (wealth inequity is less visible in that country, in the sense that, contrary to Belgium and Canada, there's less perception that the other national members are richer and wealthier, French Canadians and Belgian Flemish having long felt relegated to a lower social and economic status by their richer, well-to-do, wealthier neighbours);
3. LINGUISTIC SECURITY (all three national communities are part of much-larger, politically-strong and culturally-rich linguistic entities, meaning simply that Italo-Swiss do benefit from the existence of a larger and independent Italy, as the Germano-Swiss do from Germany and the Franco-Swiss, by France, hence eliminating all fears of assimilation or domination from a more powerful neighbor).

In the case of Canada, it is possible to improve matters and to make this country a better place for all its inhabitants, not just its European ones or its English-speaking ones.  One possibility of making relations better, between the francophone and the anglophone parts of Canada, and also between the First Nations and the Latter Nations of Canada, would be to choose the Belgian way, that is to say to redistribute the political cards (read: political powers) among all the national communities that made up Canada (and that includes the Algonquins, the Micmacs, the Crees, etc.), in a kind of New Deal that will benefit all those who felt wronged  by the long history of this British kingdom of a country.

The better understand the whole idea, it must be recalled that the settlement oc Canada can be divided into four great parts, four waves: A) the fist wave (the gradual arrival of the many Amerindian nations through the  millennia), B)  the French wave (New-France), C) the British wave (English Canada), and D) the present wave (the one that is designed to help Canada reach eventually a population of 100 millions inhabitants, according to the startling and mind-boggling plans of the ruling Liberal Party of Canada).

To put it simply, the Belgian way of doing things can right the wrongs created by:

•  the French (who founded the colonies of Acadie and Canada, on lands previously occupied exclusively by the ancestors of the present First Nations) and
• the British  (that is to say the members of the third wave of settlement, who captured the ancestors of both the first and second waves of settlement and put them in a political cage called the Kingdom of Canada,, reducing them both -through centuries of deliberate and conscious efforts- to the status of smaller and smaller ethnic minorities)...

 

Let's REFORM this Godforsaken, 

minus 40-degree country,

with an obsolete,

outdated and monarchical

political system

that came straight

from the Middle Ages

and that needs to be discarded

once and for all!

 

 

Long life to the Canadian Republic to be created one day!

Vive la république canadienne à venir!

 

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