Multiple democracies in one country: Belgian narratives of democracy, 1830–1950

Abstract

Narratives of democracy have played an important part in Belgium’s self-understanding ever since the country gained its independence in the 1830–1831 revolution. In the more or less official historiography created by the Belgian political and intellectual élites, collective actors of lower and middle strata much rather than monarchs and aristocrats were presented as the forerunners of the Belgian nation. This situation stimulated a proliferation of alternative, and often dissident, democratic narratives among those who saw themselves as the true heirs of these collective actors. Left-wing Republicans and at a later stage Socialists used their narratives to criticize the oligarchic character of the existing political structures, but remained firmly within the Belgian framework. The democratic narratives fostered among Catholics in Flanders, on the contrary, were based on a more fundamental tension with the mainly Francophone and secular Belgian State. Since the First World War, this tension developed into a consistently anti-Belgian and anti-parliamentary narrative of democracy within the emerging Flemish Nationalist subculture and party. By analysing these divergent narratives, this essay thus shows how the initially democratic self-understanding of the Belgian state substantially mortgaged the creation in the long run of stable and unifying national discourses.