From 'poor Flanders' to 'Flanders being held back by the poor': economic imbalances and socio-psychological adaptations

In the last two decades, people within and outside Belgium have become accustomed to Flemish nationalist demands to split the country on account of the excessive financial transfers that this rich region would channel to poorer Wallonia. Such calls for independence are often accompanied by a representation of the Flemish nation as endowed with an extraordinary work-ethos, frugality and entrepreneurship that would explain its “formidable” socio-economic development. This narrative plays a key role in justifying the Flemish nationalist rejection of state solidarity on the basis of meritocratic considerations, since—it is argued—Wallonia should simply adopt the same values of Flanders in order to improve its welfare. Yet, the self-understanding of Flanders as a rich and dynamic region is a quite recent artefact. For most of Belgian history, more precisely between the country’s foundation, in 1830, and the mid-1960s—when the Flemish economy overtook the Walloon one in terms of GDP per head— Flanders has rather been the poorest region of the country and often been portrayed as a reservoir of cheap unskilled workforce for the factories of more advanced Wallonia. The rapid economic development of the northern region in the post-Second World War period lies at the core of this identity transformation. This paper aims to look precisely at the years between 1950 and 1980 when, most of this transition took place. Yet, it does not make a functionalist argument whereby the renewal of the Flemish identity was an automatic reaction to the new economic leadership of the region. On the contrary, relying on a constructivist understanding of national identity (Greenfeld, 1992; Calhoun, 1997; Brubaker, 2004) and on social identity theory (Tajfel, 1978), it aims to look at how socioeconomic development and the collective Self were (re)-interpreted in those decades of major transformation. More precisely, it will look at: what elements of the previous self-representation lingered on in the new one and how they were endowed with new meanings; what new positive characteristics were added to the previous ones; what parts of previous self-understandings of the Flemish nation were progressively abandoned; how this interacted with different phases of the socio-economic development of the region. The paper will also specifically examine how, from the 1970s onwards, previous accusations against the francophone elite of deliberately keeping Flanders poor were adapted into denunciations of fiscal exploitation of the Flemish nation through the system of social security. To avoid ‘ideational functionalism’, the paper will look at three specific sets of actors that have contributed to the re-formulation of the Flemish identity: economists working on the fiscal relationship between Flanders and the rest of the country; political parties (nationalist and non-nationalist), who contributed to the spread and politicisation of specific representations of the Flemish nation; and newspapers, as proxies for more popular discourses about socio-economic development and cultural narratives.