Belgium: a bureau d’échange

It was Jean Stecher, the son of a German father and a Flemish mother, who was the first in Belgium to point towards an internationalist patriotism. Stecher, who had a long career at the University of Liège as a literary historian and critic, was an erudite and versatile man; among other achievements, he was responsible for a four-volume edition (1882–1891) of the late medieval poet and chronicler Jean Lemaire de Belges, which became a classic.Reference Gobbers⁶ But he was also a concerned citizen: he felt that the inter-community tensions that had been growing since the mid-19th century between the Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north of the country and the French-speaking Walloons in the south threatened to sweep away the foundations of the Belgian state. In his 70-page brochure Flamands et Wallons, published in 1859, he sought to dispel these tensions by considering the genealogy of Belgian nationality. The old principalities of Flanders, Brabant and Liège, he argued, had cultivated contacts with one another from an early stage, so that the subsequent national unity was historically grounded. Moreover, the three crucial principalities from which the country had originated had all – and this was important – been bilingual. Stecher deduced from this that ‘diversity of race’ (and language) need not be a stumbling block for a nation but, on the contrary, might form its cornerstone. He opposed the communis opinio that each nation needed to represent a ‘natural’ unity of race and language.Reference Stecher⁷

In none of this did Stecher comment about any international orientation as a characteristic of his country. In Flamands et Wallons he was discussing internal relations, the relations between the two races and linguistic groups that inhabited Belgium. His position was clear: the dualism that characterised the Belgian nation state, far from constituting a threat, represented the country’s strength. It implied its individuality (Ref. Reference Stecher7, p. 69). But Stecher did also translate this into international terms: the ‘bilingual existence’ of Belgium, he wrote, implied that

In other words, the dualism of race and language that was characteristic of Belgium distinguished the country from Germany and France. It was too French to be incorporated into Germany, and too Germanic to be integrated into France. This also meant that Belgium was not just ‘the battleground of all Europe’s generals and diplomats’ (although it was that, too) (Ref. Reference Stecher7, p. 6). It was also an independent nation state, by virtue of its duality.

Stecher embodied his own theory. Born and bred in the Flemish city of Ghent, he moved at the age of 30 to Liège in Wallonia and spent the remaining 60 years of his long life there. Thus, his biographers wrote, he knew ‘the two poles of bilingual Belgium’.Reference Fredericq⁸ In the 1840s, he made his debut as a political commentator in Dutch. Under the pseudonym Lieven Everwijn, he wrote, among other things, a biography of Jacob van Artevelde (1846). Later he published exclusively in French. But he regarded it as his task to make Flemish culture known in Liège. He was a fervent advocate of the introduction of Dutch in education, set up a cercle des conférences flamandes, and taught about the history of Dutch literature in Belgium. As a Fleming who was fully integrated in his Walloon setting and was perfectly bilingual, he felt himself to be a mediator between the two races who inhabited his country.

This in turn generated ideas about the individuality of Belgium. Nearly three decades after the publication of Flamands et Wallons, in 1886, Stecher published an Histoire de la littérature néerlandaise en Belgique. The political context had changed in the meantime. The Flemish Movement, bent on emancipating the Flemish in a state in which French was the language of government, had long since ceased to be a purely cultural movement. It was making political demands, and had become radicalised in the process. There gradually arose a Flemish-nationalist national consciousness which – unlike the traditional Flemish loyalism – was hard to reconcile with the old Belgian patriotism. Stecher seemed unconcerned by these developments: in his Histoire he presented a simple overview of the development of Dutch literature in Belgium. But when he reached the end of his book, he repeated almost verbatim what he had written in 1859: diversity of race and language in Belgium need not be a stumbling block; on the contrary, it could become the cornerstone of the ‘national edifice’. This time, the idea was developed further. For Stecher, Belgium was an arena in which the Flemish and the Walloons could stimulate one another in peaceful competition, a place where ideas from North and South were exchanged. In order to promote this national spirit, he argued, further initiatives needed to be taken. More Flemish work needed to be translated into French, and vice versa (Stecher himself had translated the popular Flemish author Hendrik Conscience). A system of education was needed that would be ‘in a sense bilateral’, in which neither the ‘Romanic’ nor the ‘Germanic elements’ had the upper hand.Reference Stecher⁹

Moreover, on this occasion, Stecher associated Belgium’s national character with a special international position. In 1859, he had simply observed that its national duality distinguished Belgium from Germany and France, whereas he now argued that the country’s two literatures and two languages were like two wings, which made its harmonious and lasting flight in Europe possible. What should be the goal of such a flight? Belgium was not permitted to participate in the international power game. It must preserve its neutrality between England, Germany and France, as had already been the case for over half a century. It must ‘only accept from those three peoples what it could appropriate through its own genius’ (Ref. Reference Stecher9, p. 353).

Stecher found support for his theory among foreigners: had ‘the unimpeachable author of La Terre de Rubens not said that Flemings and Walloons vied with one another to preserve the national customs and traditions?’ (Ref. Reference Stecher9, p. 352). That ‘unimpeachable author’ was Conrad Busken Huet, the Dutch essayist who had lived in voluntary exile in Paris since 1876. In his Het Land van Rubens, an account published in 1879 of a journey he had made a year earlier through Belgium, Huet had noted among other things:

The picturesque landscape through which Huet travelled was in his view a truly national landscape: it reflected the inherently ambivalent unity of Belgium. In the land of Rubens, differences of landscape and language constituted the most characteristic elements of the nation. Stecher is sure to have made note of such passages.

If Busken Huet discerned the Belgian national character in the landscape, Stecher’s work inspired others to still other, surprising, images. In the extensive obituary of Stecher that he published in 1914, Paul Fredericq, the historian and literary historian who had succeeded Stecher in 1879 in the chair of Histoire de la littérature flamande at the University of Liège, recalled that his predecessor had conceived of the unity of Flemings and Walloons as the kinship between ‘children of two marriages, but with the same mother’ (Ref. Reference Fredericq8, p. 414). He also on two counts described the author of Flamands et Wallons and the Histoire de la littérature néerlandaise en Belgique himself as a national trait d’union, a hyphen between Flemings and Walloons. In the first instance, he claimed that Stecher, without losing his Flemish disposition, ‘served as a hyphen between the two races and formed a type of Flemish-Walloon – or, in a word, Belgian – synthesis’. Further on he wrote: ‘Stecher used the sixty years he spent in the capital of Wallonia to serve as a hyphen between Flemings and Walloons’ (Ref. Reference Fredericq8, pp. 412, 528). Stecher connected things that were separate, and that had to remain different, but that undeniably also belonged together.

Strangely enough, Fredericq made no reference here to what was by then emerging as the greatest landmark of internationalist nationalism in Belgium: the Histoire de Belgique by his close colleague – Fredericq having long since moved to the University of Ghent – Henri Pirenne.Reference Vercauteren¹¹ Pirenne was regarded as the monstre sacré of Belgian historians. Like Stecher (and Fredericq) he was familiar with ‘the two poles of bilingual Belgium’: he had started his academic career in Liège, but had quickly been appointed as a medievalist in Ghent. As a national historian, he showed a much greater interest in the outside world than Stecher; whereas the latter had primarily considered internal relations, Pirenne regarded it as impossible to speak of the Belgian nation state without taking into account its position with regard to its large neighbours. Moreover, he did this in a manner that was more positive: whereas Stecher merely sought to show what made Belgium different from Germany and France (and thus what Belgium was not), Pirenne emphasised what the country owed to its two neighbours (and thus what it was).Reference Tollebeek¹²

Pirenne laid the programmatic foundations of the Histoire de Belgique in a lecture given in 1899 about La nation belge. Here, he sought to identify the factors that differentiated Belgian history from other national histories. He referred to the exceptional position of the country: having emerged from the Middle Frankish kingdom of Lothar I (in the 9th century), it was une fusion de romanisme et de germanisme. In addition, there was the fact that national unity had arisen before political unity, so that the Burgundian unification could not be dismissed as an artificial creation. Finally, there was the pax belgica, the long-standing peaceful coexistence between different ethnic groups. These three factors, Pirenne concluded, had given the Belgian people – un peuple de frontière, but also un peuple de milieu – its unique history.Reference Pirenne¹³

In the first volume of the French edition of Histoire de Belgique, published in 1900 – the book had originally appeared in German – Pirenne summed up these ideas in a brief preface. He argued that the origins of contemporary Belgium lay in the Middle Ages, when a cultural and social unity had emerged long before political unification. Of what, then, did this unity consist? Pirenne was unable to point to any geographical, ethnic or political substratum: medieval ‘Belgium’ had had no natural boundaries, had been largely bilingual and was split into an odd assortment of principalities and bishoprics. But this was precisely the point: the population of ‘this land of contrasts’ had been subject to the influence of its neighbours like no other. Belgium had been the battlefield of Europe (as Stecher had also said in 1859), but also the forum in which the intellectual culture of the Latin world had encountered that of the Germanic world. It had been the economic entrepôt of North and South, the crossroads between the French kingdom and the German empire. As a result, a Mischkultur had emerged in this central zone, a ‘syncretism’ of the Germanic and Romanic civilisations. In Pirenne’s view, Belgium was européenne dans son fond, or again: un ‘microcosme’ de l’Europe occidentale.Reference Pirenne¹⁴ Its national culture was – to use Fredericq’s term – the hyphen between the great European cultures.

Pirenne’s Histoire de Belgique was thus based on a paradox: Belgium’s originality lay not just in its diversity of races and language groups, as Stecher had concluded, but also in its internationalism. To put it more strongly, the country’s character lay in its openness to foreign influences, which it had successfully assimilated time and time again. The professor from Ghent sought to emulate this. Just as Stecher tried to be a mediator between Flemish and Walloons, so Pirenne presented himself as an intermediary between his French and German colleagues, relations between whom had been tense since the war of 1870. Pirenne’s ambition was later described in one of the many obituaries of him as ‘to be the typical diplomat from a small country’.Reference Ebels-Hoving, Huussen, Kossmann and Renner¹⁵

Outside Belgium, admiration for Pirenne was by now considerable, and the paradox he had observed was also endorsed. For example, the Dutch historian H. Th. Colenbrander published a detailed article in 1907 in which he not only compared Pirenne with renowned national historiographers such as the German Karl Lamprecht and the Frenchman Ernest Lavisse, but also lauded him – not without envy – as the personification of the ‘bureau d’échange between Germanic and Romanic civilisation’ that was his country: thus Belgium’s national identity was that of a bureau d’échange. Five years later, Colenbrander repeated this encomium, on this occasion calling the ‘bureau d’échange’ an ‘experimental garden for European civilisation’.Reference Colenbrander¹⁶

The Netherlands: a salutary skimming ladle

In the Netherlands, similar ideas about the Dutch national identity had been circulating for several decades. They were often formulated in response to pessimistic pronouncements about the country’s future.Reference Aerts, de Liagre Böhl, de Rooy and te Velde¹⁷ One of the central figures here was the historian P.J. Blok, who had been made a professor at the University of Groningen in 1884, and would be appointed to the prestigious chair of the ‘History of The Fatherland’ at the University of Leiden in 1894, as well as becoming private tutor to the young queen Wilhelmina in the same year. As early as 1884, Blok had decried the mood of gloom in his country. He sought to counter the doubts about the survival chances of the Netherlands as an independent state, which he believed to be widespread, by holding up the mirror of their magnificent past for his fellow-countrymen to view themselves in. Starting in 1892, he published an eight-volume Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche volk, a national history which could be seen as the Dutch counterpart to Pirenne’s Histoire de Belgique.

In 1891, an extensive essay by Blok was published about ‘the influence of neighbouring peoples on the development of Dutch society’. The professor argued that the Dutch, living in a country without extensive natural boundaries, had incorporated ‘foreign elements’ in their civilisation to a far greater extent than other peoples since the Middle Ages. This was still the case: the political institutions of the French, the industrial machinery of the English, the philosophical systems of the Germans – all had been ‘welcomed with open arms’. Blok pointed out the disadvantages: due to its great hospitality, the Netherlands had lost ‘much of its distinctive character’ and hence too its ‘ability to resist other nations’. But there was also a considerable advantage to this. Adopting a social-Darwinist line of thinking, Blok concluded that this long history of influence had adapted Dutch civilisation to the new circumstances better than other civilisations:

Whereas Belgium was regarded by Pirenne as a ‘syncretism’ of the surrounding cultures, Blok attributed the Netherlands a distinctive role as an ‘intermediary cultural nation’. Here too, individuality and openness were consistent with each other.Reference Blok¹⁸

Blok was not alone in holding such ideas. In 1883, Busken Huet wrote of the public moralist Johannes van Vloten:

According to this viewpoint, the Dutch character derived from a process of purification of the surrounding, imported cultures.

Such notions were consistent with an age-old tradition in which the mean – Horace’s aurea mediocritas – was regarded as a great good. It stood for moderation, balance, the making of reasonable choices, but also for order, poise and decency. Those who did not seek the mean were enthusiasts and fanatics (Ref. Reference Kossmann and Kossmann19, pp. 48–49). For Blok and Van Vloten, the Netherlands was a moderate country: its openness meant that it was familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the French, the English and the Germans, but it mediated and used the skimming ladle. However, for Pirenne too, the Belgian people were a ‘central people’.

Naturally, not everyone opted for the mean. For example, Busken Huet disagreed with the standpoint of Van Vloten, the subject of his portrait: he tried to identify what sharply distinguished the Netherlands from other countries, what made it ‘eccentric’. In Het Land van Rembrand, the first volume of which appeared in 1882, three years after Het Land van Rubens, he regretted the fact that the Dutch people had ‘continued to slumber in the fields’ for longer than other European peoples. Only in the 17th century – ‘when the sun was already fairly high up in the sky’ – had it ‘raised itself up mightily’ and created a civilisation of its own. This remained the pinnacle of Dutch history: ‘Java and the Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild [a painting by Rembrandt] are in fact our two most persuasive letters of recommendation’, the book concluded.Reference Busken Huet²⁰

By contrast, support for the idea of the mean came from De Gids, the journal established in 1837, whose editorial staff had also included Huet, until he left in 1866 after a series of arguments. ‘De Gids,’ a later commentator wrote, ‘served as skimming ladle and sieve for many years, and thus had the express aim of performing a specifically national, truly Dutch task’ (Ref. Reference Kossmann and Kossmann19, p. 56). The way in which it did so varied. In the 1860s and 1870s, a critical-eclectic culture prevailed. De Gids followed philosophical and scientific developments in France, England, Germany and America, but did not participate in the debates itself. The editors and writers recorded and amended; original work rarely appeared. Did that matter? The editors knew that a small country such as the Netherlands was compelled to be receptive. Only in the 1880s, when fears grew stronger that such an attitude might deprive the Dutch national character of any originality, was an attempt made to be more active. But even then, a balanced – in fact, independent – treatment of elements from outside remained the guiding principle, since only in this way could the Dutch identity be reinforced.Reference Aerts²¹

Flanders: a whirlpool, a tangle

The relationship between national identity and openness to developments beyond the national borders was not just significant in the editorial policy of a wide-ranging journal supported by a social elite, such as De Gids. It was also important to the young artists of the avant-garde journals that appeared towards the end of the century. Van Nu en Straks, launched in Flanders in 1893, is a good example of this. As a ‘programmatic journal of youngsters with innovative aims, created by and intended for a small circle of like-minded people’, Van Nu en Straks was very similar in profile to the avant-garde literary periodicals that had emerged in the 1890s virtually everywhere in Europe. The artists who set up the journal wanted to act as interpreters of their own times, and at the same time prepare for the future. They stood for undogmatic openness, differing in this from their predecessors of the 1880s. In the pages of those periodicals, a violent clash between conflicting directions was fought, centring not just on artistic choices, but on political and ideological party and also coterie-building. By contrast, the ‘Van Nu en Straksers’ took a ‘synthetic attitude’.Reference Aerts, de Bont, Reymenants and Vandevoorde²²

This was connected with the way in which modern times were understood in many of these fin de siècle periodicals. The ‘Van Nu en Straksers’ wanted to put the years of polemics and violent engagement behind them, to subdue the ‘ferment’ that the clash of directions had brought with it. They realised that this would not be easy: the ‘new intellectual or cultural unity’ for which they strove would only be achieved when the commotion had completely died down. The ‘higher life’ would only become possible when the ‘high fever’ had abated. But this did not stop the ‘Van Nu en Straksers’ from mustering together all that was new in their journal and forging a synthesis of it there. They stood for ‘receptive modernity’ (Ref. Reference Aerts, de Bont, Reymenants and Vandevoorde22, pp. 29–31).

For Van Nu en Straks, this ‘receptive modernity’ was also a national project. The editors strove to create space in which a new, true-to-character Flemish literature could thrive, an autonomous literature that would no longer be dependent on traditional Belgian letters. However, this literary nationalism was no obstacle to an interest in the outside world. On the contrary, Van Nu en Straks had considerable international ambitions. The editors did not (just) want the journal to function as a skimming ladle or sieve. They were not content with importing and purifying developments in France or Germany. On the contrary, they wanted to contribute to European culture themselves. Naturally, they knew that language constituted an impediment here, and that Flemish prose or poetry could not be read abroad. However, what Van Nu en Straks had in mind was a literature – a national literature – that stood on the same footing as the great European literature, and hence also participated in it (cf. Ref. Reference Aerts, de Bont, Reymenants and Vandevoorde22, pp. 31–32).

In all these endeavours, it was no longer Belgium, but Flanders that was prominent. The artists who ran Van Nu en Straks no longer cared about the unity of Flemings and Walloons, in the way that Stecher had done in his Histoire de la littérature néerlandaise en Belgique of 1886. They did not feel the need to legitimise the existing Belgian state, as Pirenne did in his Histoire de Belgique. They followed – and at times set – the course of the Flemish Movement. This was true, in no small measure, of August Vermeylen, the young writer who was continually trying to appraise modern times. Vermeylen too lived in high expectations: ‘The times we are living through are terrifying and beautiful’, was how he opened the ‘Aantekeningen over een hedendaagsche richting’ which he published in 1893 (quoted in Ref. Reference Aerts, de Bont, Reymenants and Vandevoorde22, p. 33). He was aware of the high fever, but rather than shattering his optimism, it urged him on.

The publication in 1896 of the ‘Kritiek der Vlaamsche Beweging’ in the first number of the second series of Van Nu en Straks immediately gave Vermeylen a controversial reputation as a Flemish loyalist. It could not be disputed that the author of this much-discussed article favoured the Flemish cause. But the article also contained much criticism of traditional Flemish loyalism. Vermeylen opposed a defensive and closed Flemish Movement, which regarded ‘love for the fatherland’ as more important than openness to the international world, and which saw linguistic emancipation as an end rather than a means. But this did not mean that he advocated a modern, nationless cosmopolitanism. The depiction of the ‘Van Nu en Straksers’ – Vermeylen, but also figures such as Herman Teirlinck – as ‘deracinated urbanites’, which was promulgated by a subsequent generation of littérateurs, is heavily biased. Indeed one can go further, and say that Vermeylen did not wish to abandon an essentialist nationalism, a nationalism that continued to believe in an essence of the Flemish people, even deeper-lying than language, and that held that the Flemish people must be able to develop towards this essence which was its own.Reference Beyen, de Bont, Reymenants and Vandevoorde²³

However, as well as an essence, Vermeylen also attributed a mission to the Flemish people. That mission related to the need to participate in international cultural exchange in Europe. Flanders’ specific mission, he wrote in 1900, was ‘to remain rooted in our own soil, but to incorporate the cultural life of our neighbours so that it acquires a life of its own within us’ (Ref. Reference Beyen, de Bont, Reymenants and Vandevoorde23, pp. 267–268). It was a striking resemblance: at precisely the moment when Pirenne was defining Belgium as the trait d’union of the great European cultures and discerning its individual character in that very trait, Vermeylen (who was also wont to speak of an ‘intermediate land’) was describing the vocation of Flanders as the processing and assimilation of foreign cultural goods. Thus, he was forging an open and tolerant Flanders, which, although well ‘rooted in its own soil’ and true to its own values, was also prepared to accept a Mischkultur. The (paradoxical) question was (and remained) how the Mischkultur could be reconciled with the ‘original’ essence.

The definition of this mission had already led to a European outlook. Vermeylen explored this outlook in an essay on ‘Vlaamsche en Europeesche Beweging’ which was originally published in 1900 and later became famous. The core of the argument consisted of a formulation that has been repeated thousands of times since then: ‘In order to be something, we must be Flemings. – We want to be Flemings in order to be Europeans.’ In this way, Vermeylen – as part of an artistic and Flemish loyalist avant-garde – summarised a new variant of the internationalist nationalism. The Flemish, he reasoned (in an unmistakeably romantic tradition) must first recall their own essential nature. Then they must enter the bureau d’échange, in order to acquire the best of European culture there and at the same time show that they could contribute a culture of their own at European level. The Flemish Movement had thus become far more than a vehicle for linguistic battles, and the literary avant-garde far more than an artistic coterie.

The internationalist nationalism that was encapsulated in Van Nu en Straks and in the writings of Vermeylen did not lead to an intellectual construct like the Histoire de Belgique. But, even before the Great War, it spread and branched out. The essay-writing and journalism of Karel van de Woestijne – a key figure in the artistic avant-garde of the fin de siècle period, but still highly regarded as a poet after the turn of the century – was one of the channels through which it spread. Van de Woestijne felt alienated from the old fatherland. For him, Belgium was the land of mediocrity. In 1914, for example, he wrote in an article about Emile Verhaeren: ‘And even in Belgium, in the divine-innocent Belgium where poets usually enjoy the pleasures of the incognito within the narrow but safe bounds of a mediocritas which is not always aurea – even in Belgium it is said, since the noble kindness which is given by the King, that in Emile Verhaeren we have a littérateur of consequence.’Reference van de Woestijne and van de Woestijne²⁴ This was not the happy mean of Blok and Van Vloten, or of Pirenne. The Belgian mediocrity of Van de Woestijne stood for short-sightedness, bigotry and immobility. The poet had reacted by turning to Flemish loyalism (and anarchism) at an early stage. In the mid-1890s he was working on the literary weekly Vlaamsch en Vrij.Reference Beckers and Musschoot²⁵ Two decades later he was still opposing those who wished to preserve peace and quiet on the Belgian domestic scene by leaving Flemish aspirations unanswered.Reference van de Woestijne and van de Woestijne²⁶ However, like Vermeylen, he was not without his criticisms of the Flemish Movement. For example, he rejected the one-sided political orientation of the Flemish loyalist meetings.

What Van de Woestijne also rejected was an overly simplistic conception of Flemish identity. In the collection Kunst en Geest in Vlaanderen, which was published in 1911, it was no coincidence that he chose the essay on Verhaeren, originally dating from 1906, in which to explain what he regarded as a Fleming: for it was Verhaeren, a Fleming who wrote in French, who made it clear that a Fleming is ‘not so much someone on Flemish soil and of Flemish parents’, but someone who has received a special European training. Verhaeren himself demonstrated the extent to which

There was vacillating between double natures: for Van de Woestijne, Flemish individuality lay precisely in the combination of its ‘original nature’ with Latin culture. Other images were offered to clarify this: Flanders, it was claimed, was a

or again, Flanders was

The images showed how far removed the ‘Van Nu en Straksers’ and Van de Woestijne were from the editors of De Gids. The latter perceived (and idealised) their country as a place of peace and balance, whereas the former observed around themselves a seething, whirling flux, a ‘rapid spinning’. In the Flanders of Van de Woestijne, Pirenne’s Belgian microcosm became a whirlpool:

Eight years after the Verhaeren essay of 1906, Van de Woestijne summed up once again, using analogous images. The Flemish, he now said, had the privilege of being the ‘cultural melting pot of Europe’: ‘Latin and Germanic culture flow together there, swirl together, are absorbed into a single eddy.’ The relatively straightforward Germanic Flanders of Stecher, which he had combined with the Romanic Wallonia in Belgium, here became a Germanic-Latin contamination of European culture in its own right. It brought Van de Woestijne into a ‘wonderful rapture’ (recalling the high fever of the ‘Van Nu en Straksers’). The old Belgian patriotism seemed to him ‘still good enough for commercial travellers’. He felt pride.Reference Van de Woestijne and Van de Woestijne²⁸

This latter was a confession, made at a time when Flanders and Belgium had been invaded and occupied by the Germans. In the ‘Dagboek van den oorlog’ which he published in instalments in the Dutch newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, Van de Woestijne looked back at the development of his national consciousness: he was a Fleming who did not recoil from the international tangle in which he believed he lived, and derived his identity from that openness. But the horrors of war, he wrote, had changed him, had given him a different identity:

Thus so-called activism was also rejected: collaboration with the German occupier was excluded for Van de Woestijne (Flanders was not exclusively Germanic in any case). Others did opt for activism, however. The poet Paul van Ostaijen – one generation younger than Van de Woestijne – was among them. For them, collaboration with the occupier offered more possibilities than affiliation to the Belgian state for the purposes of experiencing a separate identity as a Fleming and, in this way, gaining access to the ‘international brotherhood of peoples’ of Europe. Van Ostaijen too made a link between individuality and openness.Reference de Ridder, Bemong, Truwant and Vermeulen²⁹

The Netherlands: a Joan of Arc

Unlike Belgium, the Netherlands was not directly involved in the First World War. But it too sought a firm foothold ‘in a world cast adrift’.Reference van Ginkel³⁰ Even before the war, the country’s political impotence had become entirely clear. The image of the Dutch people as an ‘intermediary cultural nation’ that Blok had developed in 1891 to some extent represented a cultural-nationalistic sublimation of the consciousness of political weakness. Blok experienced a brief moment of elation at the successful Lombok expedition in the Dutch Indies in 1894, but the course of the Boer War in South Africa had quickly shown him that the political and military power of the Netherlands had waned considerably. During the war, the difficulties experienced by the Netherlands, among other things as a result of England’s blockade policy, led him to warn the big states that his country was still a significant state, but this proud impotence failed to impress.Reference Tollebeek³¹ Even so, optimistic voices were also to be heard in the decades leading up to the war. After all, during this age of imperialism its overseas possessions made the little Netherlands an important colonial power too. From this perspective, there was no reason to see the Netherlands as an exhausted nation.Reference van Sas and van Sas³²

It was in this context that another new variant of the Dutch internationalist nationalism was developed. Its auctor intellectualis was the Leiden professor Cornelis van Vollenhoven. Harking back to the native tradition of Hugo de Groot, this professor at law endeavoured to define a mission for his country that reflected not only the predilection for balance, which was deemed characteristic of the Netherlands (no whirlpools or tangles here), but also the ‘international age’ that had dawned. In his ‘Roeping van Holland’, originally published in De Gids in 1910 and reprinted in 1913, Van Vollenhoven wanted to ‘push forward’ public opinion.Reference te Velde³³ He wanted to convince his fellow-countrymen that the Netherlands still could and should play an international role, as it had in the 17th century. What then did this role consist of? In view of the large-scale military conflicts that were continually erupting, the Netherlands needed to work to maintain peace. Rather than the development of international jurisprudence or disarmament, this meant the Netherlands playing a key role in ‘the question of global organisation’ and in the establishment of the global military force that was indispensable for it.

Why should this role in particular fall to the Netherlands? Van Vollenhoven apparently thought that the country was destined for such a role by Providence, but also pointed to the experience it had acquired of organising peace conferences, for example. However, the most important argument was related to the specific nature of the Netherlands, with what made it different from other states. The Netherlands, it was argued, was able to play a peace-making role in a world riven by conflicts because, as a small state, it was able to transcend its own interests in a way that was impossible for the major powers. It could assume this role because, unlike other small states (such as Belgium), it was not bound by neutrality. Moreover, the Netherlands was a distinguished country, with ‘worthy origins and an historic past’, rather than some parvenu that might incur the suspicion of wanting to become a great power itself through its initiatives.Reference van Vollenhoven³⁴ Thus, international politics again seemed to have the potential to confirm the Netherlands in its own identity. Van Vollenhoven was optimistic. Taking a decidedly less patronising attitude towards commercial travellers than the poet mentioned earlier, Van Vollenhoven expected support from the whole nation: ‘barbers, hoteliers, booksellers, gardeners, students, dockers and nursery school workers’ must all contribute to the national resurgence. Nobody should be daunted by the task:

The message Van Vollenhoven was preaching was an exceptionalist, almost sacred one.Reference Boogman and van Sas³⁵

‘Roeping van Holland’ offered a legal conceptual framework for an international interpretation of the identity of the Netherlands. The cultural-nationalistic tradition of Van Vloten, Blok and De Gids lived on alongside it, however. Its main exponent was the historian Johan Huizinga, professor at Leiden, friend of Van Vollenhoven and, until 1932, editor of De Gids.Reference van der Lem³⁶ After the First World War, in the 1920s, Huizinga presented, in a series of lectures, contemporary Dutch culture as a culture which ‘more than any other, through its position, inclination and history, [had] the capacity to understand foreign nations and absorb and process their gifts’.Reference Huizinga and Huizinga³⁷ The words conveyed a self-confident spirit, and in the early 1930s Huizinga – like Pirenne before the war – increasingly turned into a cultural ambassador, who spoke not just about the Netherlands’ national character, but also called for international cooperation. Gradually, however, concerns came to predominate about the future of the country in a Europe over which dark clouds seemed to be gathering once again. In 1933, Huizinga argued that its geographical position in Europe (a Mittlerstellung between Western and Central Europe), its cultural openness and its political impartiality made the Netherlands the ideal intermediary between the great states and thus entitled it to an independent existence.

Epilogue

From Stecher to Huizinga, via such varied figures as the serious-sentimental Blok and the ‘strong and bitter’ Van de Woestijne, it is a motley crew of historians and critics, writers and jurists (ref. Reference Van de Woestijne and Van de Woestijne28, p. 506). All shared the idea – in varying forms and degrees of systematisation – that their nation (or, in the case of Flanders, their subnation) derived its identity from its attitude with regard to, or its demeanour in, the outside world. All took the view that the country’s openness in this respect was exceptional. Their intellectual constructs gave those who created them, and their readers and listeners, faith in the future of their country. They encouraged and engaged, and by doing so maintained their credibility for a long time. But they too were undermined, because the political and social context in which they had emerged changed: they became less relevant as new theories proved more persuasive.

In Belgium, Pirenne reiterated in 1912, at the celebration of the 25th anniversary of his professorship, what he had said in the years around 1900: Belgium had been born of the collective efforts of the Romanic and Germanic cultural spheres, was therefore an essentially open and hospitable land, and was thus uniquely placed to mediate in international conflicts. Two years later, the Great War broke out. Pirenne had to deal with a series of blows: the death of one of his sons on the battlefield, the euphoric reception of the war among much of the German intelligentsia, and his own deportation in 1916 (together with Fredericq) to Germany. All of these things made it impossible to continue presenting Belgium after the war as the product of the Romanic and Germanic cultural spheres. Pirenne now placed Belgium firmly in the Western Europe of France and Great Britain, where – he emphasised – nations had always been open and cosmopolitan, unlike the closed and racist German nation. Accordingly, he again presented himself – just as he had before the war – as a true internationalist. But that internationalism had now become an abortive internationalism: Pirenne broke off all contact with his German colleagues, kept them out wherever he could, and supported initiatives that might restrict their influence. The ‘diplomat from a small country’ had become a champion of a policy of exclusion. To call Belgium a ‘syncretism’ no longer sounded convincing.

In the Netherlands, the idea that the national character was associated with great openness towards other cultures was now rivalled by another theory. Huizinga had proposed it back in 1909: the country’s individuality had been at its greatest in the period in which Dutch civilisation had been most obviously distinct from general European civilisation. In the early 1930s he described that culture. It was the culture that Busken Huet had celebrated in Het Land van Rembrand, the culture of the 17th century. When the new war broke out, Huizinga set to work writing Nederland’s beschaving in de zeventiende eeuw (1941). In this work too, 17th-century culture was described as a freak, a unique, creation, original in its inimitability. In the darker days of the war, comfort came not from the openness of the intermediary, but from the closure of the familiar – the Garden of Holland.Reference Krul³⁸

Thus, the old construct crumbled away in both Belgium and the Netherlands. Not that it disappeared: it was constantly revived even in the decades after the Second World War. After all, was Belgium – or Brussels – not positioned at the centre of Europe? And was the Netherlands not a model nation, which was able to serve ethical principles and world interests without any agenda of its own? The 19th-century internationalist patriotism had a long life. But it also became threadbare, a cliché that continued to crop up in political marketing, but which had lost conviction. The hyphen of national culture had faded away.