How a set of rich cities became a country in 1830

What was here before the country

For most of its history the territory of modern Belgium was either part of something larger, such as the medieval Carolingian Empire, or divided into a number of smaller states. Through much of the Middle Ages it was fragmented into feudal principalities, among them the county of Flanders, the duchy of Brabant and the prince-bishopric of Liège, each with its own ruler, law and coinage.

Those principalities were extraordinarily rich. The cloth towns of Flanders and Brabant traded English wool, Mediterranean goods and Rhineland metals, and Bruges, Ghent, Ypres and later Antwerp grew rich on the traffic. Their wealth was urban and commercial rather than dynastic, which is why the belfries the towns built are on the World Heritage List and the castles of their nominal overlords generally are not. A tower paid for by a guild and a tower paid for by a count say different things about who was actually in charge.

That wealth also bought a degree of self-government unusual for the period. Towns negotiated charters, ran their own courts and militias, and rebelled against rulers who broke the terms, and the pattern of a strong civic layer under a distant sovereign runs through the whole of the territory's history.

The principalities were assembled into a single administrative unit by the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, and that inheritance then passed by marriage to the Habsburgs. From that point the Low Countries were governed from somewhere else for nearly four hundred years, which is the single longest continuity in the territory's history and the reason its civic institutions matured while its national ones did not exist.

Who ruled it and from where

The list of foreign sovereigns is the shortest way to describe the period between the fifteenth century and 1830: Burgundian, then Spanish Habsburg, then Austrian Habsburg, then French, then Dutch.

The Spanish period split the Low Countries permanently. The northern provinces revolted successfully and became the Dutch Republic; the southern provinces, which are roughly modern Belgium, were reconquered and remained Catholic and under Habsburg rule. The Scheldt was then closed to shipping by the Dutch, which ruined Antwerp's trade for two centuries and shifted the commercial centre of the Low Countries north.

French rule after the revolution was destructive in a specific way. During the early period the economy was completely paralysed, because taxes had to be paid in gold and silver coin while goods requisitioned by the French were paid for in worthless assignats, and around 800,000 people fled the southern provinces during that period of systematic exploitation.

The settlement after Napoleon attached the southern provinces to the Netherlands, creating a single kingdom of the Low Countries. That arrangement lasted fifteen years and failed on religion, language and economics at once: a Catholic, partly French-speaking, industrialising south under a Protestant, Dutch-speaking, commercial north.

How independence was won and guaranteed

Belgium became independent on 4 October 1830 after a revolution against Dutch rule. The state of conflict with the Netherlands, short of open warfare, continued for another eight years, and it was settled in 1839 by the Treaty of London, signed between the two countries and the five great powers of Europe: Austria, France, Prussia, Russia and the United Kingdom.

That treaty is the founding document of the country's external position. The powers recognised Belgium and guaranteed its neutrality, which was the price of their agreement, and the eastern boundary was fixed at the same time. A small state was created between larger ones on the condition that it took no side, and the guarantee was worth exactly as much as the willingness of the guarantors to enforce it.

The guarantee worked for three quarters of a century and then failed twice. Belgium's historic neutrality was violated in each of the world wars. During the First World War the German invasion produced the destruction and civilian killings known afterwards as the Rape of Belgium, and the country spent four years largely occupied with its army holding a corner of West Flanders behind the Yser.

The Second World War repeated the invasion and added a domestic wound. The rapid surrender of Leopold III to German forces in the 1940 invasion drove a wedge between the king and the government in exile, and the argument about his conduct continued long after the war and ended with his abdication.

What the empire was

Belgium acquired a colonial empire in central Africa, and the historiography has moved away from the idea that Belgians were reluctant imperialists. The argument now made is that ordinary people came to understand and support the colony, that Belgians sustained the empire in significant ways, and that many became convinced imperialists, evidenced by widespread and enduring popular engagement with it.

That correction matters because the older account allowed the colonial period to be treated as something done by a small elite rather than by a society. The wealth, the institutions, the buildings and the public culture of late nineteenth and twentieth-century Belgium were shaped by the colony, and Brussels in particular carries a great deal of building financed by it.

Decolonisation came quickly and the aftermath was violent, and the relationship between Belgium and its former colony remains one of the country's most contested historical subjects. Public re-examination of the imperial period accelerated in the twenty-first century, and it has taken the form of debates about monuments, museum collections and school curricula.

The point relevant to the rest of this article is that a state which had been governed by others for four centuries spent its first century governing others, and reckoning with that has been a late and unfinished process.

What industry did to the balance

Belgium was the first country on the European continent to industrialise, and it did so from the 1820s onward along the coal seam running east to west through Wallonia, from the French border through Mons and Charleroi to Liège.

The consequences arrived fast and unevenly. Coal, iron, steel, glass and heavy engineering made the francophone south the wealthy and politically dominant half of the new state, drew workers off the land and out of Flanders, and produced the industrial towns of the Meuse and Sambre valleys within two generations. Flanders in the same period was agricultural, poorer and, in the middle of the nineteenth century, badly hit by crop failure and the collapse of its linen industry.

That inequality was read at the time as natural and it explains the political settlement of the young state. The wealth, the parliamentary weight and the language of administration were all in the same place, and there was no obvious reason for anyone holding them to change the arrangement.

The reversal after the Second World War therefore came as a shock to a system built on the opposite assumption. Coal closed, steel contracted through the second half of the century, and the replacement industries located in Flanders on the ports and the motorways. The wealthier half became the half that had spent a century arguing for linguistic equality, and it began asking for something more than that.

What the twentieth century settled at home

Three domestic questions ran alongside the language one and were resolved in a recognisably Belgian way, which is to say by permanent compromise rather than by victory.

The first was religion. Catholic and secular blocs fought over control of schooling for a century, and the settlement reached in the middle of the twentieth century funded both a public network and a Catholic one from the same budget, which is why Belgium still runs parallel school systems.

The second was class. Industrial conflict in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was severe, and the eventual settlement built a dense apparatus of collective bargaining, sectoral agreements and social insurance administered jointly by employers and unions, which is still the framework Belgian wages are set in.

The third was the monarchy itself, which came close to ending in the crisis over Leopold III's wartime conduct and the terms of his return. That dispute divided the country along both linguistic and political lines, and it was resolved by his abdication in favour of his son, which preserved the institution by removing the person.

Each of those settlements survives, each is expensive, and each is defended by the people it protects. Understanding why Belgium is difficult to reform requires seeing that its compromises were reached at real cost and are held by both sides deliberately. Belgium: politics works through what the language settlement became.

Why the language question took over

The Belgium created in 1830 was a French-speaking state. The constitution, administration, law, army and higher education operated in French, while the majority of the population in the north spoke Dutch, and social advancement required the language of the south.

The Flemish Movement grew out of that mismatch through the nineteenth century, campaigning first for the recognition of Dutch in courts and administration and eventually for equality of the two languages. It succeeded slowly, and each success moved the argument to a new boundary.

The economic reversal after the Second World War then changed the balance decisively. Wallonia's coal and steel declined, Flanders industrialised on ports and manufacturing, and the wealthier half of the country became the half that had been the subordinate one linguistically. A settlement designed to protect a French-speaking establishment was now being defended by the poorer region.

The domestic history of Belgium since has been divisions over language and unequal economic development, and that antagonism has driven far-reaching reforms since the 1970s.

What the reforms did

Six state reforms have transferred power from the centre outward, and the country was reorganised into three regions and three communities in the process: Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north, French-speaking Wallonia in the south, and bilingual Brussels between them.

The fourth reform, in 1993 under Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, consolidated everything that came before it and turned Belgium into a fully-fledged federal state. The first article of the constitution was amended to say so, which is as clear a marker as a country can give that its form has changed.

None of the reforms settled the question, and each has been followed by another. The pattern is consistent: pressure builds, a negotiation transfers competences downward, the transfer is written into the constitution, and the argument resumes about what should move next.

What has held the country together through all of it is a set of things that belong to neither community: the monarchy, the football team, the international institutions in Brussels, and the practical difficulty of dividing a capital that sits in the wrong place for both sides. Belgium has been predicted to split for decades and has instead kept renegotiating, which is a different outcome and arguably a more interesting one. Belgium: politics covers the structure the reforms produced.