Flemish emancipation movement

Strangers to Flanders may find some facts highly difficult to understand:

1. The differentiation of the emancipatory cultural and political struggle of Flemish people against a French-speaking ruling minority, from a so-called "war" between Flanders and Wallonia (which never happened as the struggle for Flemish emancipation is an example of peaceful battle). In fact, during 15 centuries of history there has never been any armed conflict between the North and the South. One might say there are today from sociological and ethnic point of view 5 kinds of Belgians: (1) The Dutch speaking majority in the North ("Flanders"), (2) the French speaking in the South ("Wallonia"), (3) French speaking people, mostly from Flemish origin, in Brussels and some around Brussels and some important Flemish cities, who do not consider themselves as Walloon nor as Flemish, (4) a tiny German-speaking minority near the German border, in territories added to Belgium after the World Wars, and (5) various migrant groups (‘ethnic-cultural minorities’) with widely varying degree of attachment to their countries of origing, and to the Belgian communities, the Belgian state and European Union.

2. "Language struggles in Belgium" always refer to cultural and social emancipatory struggles of Flemish people within Flanders against the French-speaking minority in Flanders, including Brussels (and more recently, of German-speakers who want to rid thenselves of the Walloon stranglehold). Those struggles only sought to allow Flemish people to use, within Flanders, their own Dutch language in education, justice, social life and politics. Wallonia was never involved in this social and cultural emancipative struggle.

3. The difference between 'Dutch' and 'Flemish'. In some modern reference works published outside of Belgium, the language of the Flemish people is often identified as a separate language akin to Dutch. The fact is, however, that the languages of Flanders (the Southern Netherlands) and the Netherlands (or the 'Northern Netherlands') are one and the same. Historically and politically, the term "Netherlands" referred to the 17 Provinces of contemporary Benelux, including the Lille Region in the North of France. There exist, as everywhere, some dialectic differences, but they are considered by some – mostly citizens of the Netherlands – minimal and localized (just as the differences between American and English accents) and are not considered significant. However, to the Flemish population the difference is all to obvious, especially in intonation. Moreover, the official Dutch Language is closer to the southern than to the northern dialects, due to the fact that the Christian Bible (the basis of the official language) was translated mainly by southern immigrants to the North.

4. Part of the confusion between "Flemish" and Dutch may stem from the fact that Dutch was banned from official life in Belgium during the 19th century and the early years of the 20th. As a consequence, it was not often heard in official public life (although poets and authors published their highly-qualified work in Dutch, and as all ordinary Flemings used it as their daily ‘language’, or even more its dialects, in this period). Moreover, the ruling French-speaking minority preferred to call the language of mostly poorly educated people "Flemish", in an attempt to drive a wedge between the language spoken by the Dutch and the Flemings. During the 19th century, many leading Belgian figures, and even in the 1920s the archbishop of Belgium, enraged by the then new tendency to switch to Dutch in Flemish schools, called 'Flemish' "unfit as a vehicle for scientific, religious, cultural and artistic values." Even as late as around the year 2000, some French-speaking nationalists and also the controversial Flemish writer Marc Reynebeau used this reasonning in their writings in order to try to justify the gross and unnecessary discriminations imposed by Belgian governments during the first century of Belgian history.