Many years ago I told my high school French teacher that before starting college, I would spend a year improving my French. I would be a foreign exchange student, I told her, and would live for a year in Belgium.
Her facial expression didn’t change. I vividly remember her cool reply:
“Maybe you will get the opportunity to visit France while you are there.”
Madame was a hardcore Francophile, like every high school French teacher. I remember being confused that her passion for describing the specifics of French civilization to our class did not include any enthusiasm for neighboring Belgium. We memorized the chateaux of the Loire Valley and the notable churches of Paris, but overlooked the kitschy grandeur of Brussels’ Atomium and the world’s greatest chocolatiers.
Wherefore this bias? Couldn’t a France-lover appreciate that one of her students would learn French full-time, as well as pound Hoegaardens before noon and marvel at the quasi-medieval spiritualism of Jan van Eyck? The answer was no. This is Belgium we’re talking about.
When anti-bourgeois poet Baudelaire called America “the Belgium of the West,” he didn’t intend it as a compliment. There’s a quality to the country that provokes indifference in outsiders. It even provokes indifference in insiders. I heard a rumor of a poll that showed a majority of Belgians would prefer to live elsewhere. Whether a Belgian speaks French, Dutch or German, she lives in a marginal region just outside of France, the Netherlands or Germany.
To the north of Belgium lies a land that does not at first appear as liminal Belgium. But the Netherlands has its own related syndrome. The nation began with the elevation of urban commerce, which encouraged an efficient and practical disposition. Trade required seaports, causing a high degree of internationalism. The Netherlands has been hybridizing itself for as long as it has existed. Its Golden Age took place once it had mastered how to import things.
The similarity of the national language to English has accelerated Dutch membership in a community of surrounding nations. Europe speaks English to itself as it integrates and the Dutch have a head start. The post-Brexit scuttlebutt even had Amsterdam replacing the City of London as a world financial center. It didn’t happen, but due to the opportunism and the chameleon quality of the Dutch (not quite German, British or French), the notion did not stretch the imagination.
This blog will explore a region with a layered identity. BeNeLux has been occupied by Spanish Habsburgs and American multinationals. It was also the occupier of Indonesia and the Congo. A firm position in the Global North ensures material wealth, although the local brand of liberalism/cosmopolitanism has settled into a seemingly permanent crisis. Benelux kicked off European unification and bears the weight of that confused project.
I will embark on this critical project with the tongue-in-cheek premise that this place is simultaneously central and marginal to world affairs. I don’t believe that residents of the Benelux countries have a cultural identity crisis. But my abiding interest in their cultural identity might mean that I have one.
Further reading: Simon Schama, “The Unloved American,” The New Yorker, March 2, 2003 (source for Baudelaire’s quip).