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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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“Le confédéralisme, c’est con.” Francophone Visions of Flemish Autochtony
| Panel |
61. Autochtony, citizenship and exclusion - struggles over resources and belonging
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| Paper ID | 666 |
| Author(s) |
Ceuppens, Bambi
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | This paper is part of an ongoing research that tries to put African autochthony into perspective by comparison to its European counterparts, with specific reference to Flanders (Belgium). Given the long history of nationalism in Flanders and the electoral successes of the extreme rightwing Flem-ish-nationalist party Vlaams Belang, it is tempting to identify autochthony with nationalism. How-ever, I argue that the electoral success of Vlaams Belang lies precisely in its capacity to broaden its appeal outside traditional(ist) Flemish-nationalist circles by employing an autochthony discourse.
Francophone observers at the other side of the linguistic border often fail to grasp the appeal of nationalist/autochthony discourses in Flanders; many Flemings see this as proof of the fact that Flemings and Francophones are drifting further apart and that it is impossible for them to continue living together in a federal state.
It is within this context that one must make sense of the quite extraordinary reactions among Francophones to a spoof journal transmitted by the public francophone broadcasting company RTBf at the end of 2006. In it, the channel’s leading anchor man announced that the Flemish region had unilaterally declared independence and that the king had left the country. To back up this claim, the programme brought together, for the very first time, a number of Flemish nationalists from various sections of Flemish society, who are all in favour of Flemish independence but who are not representative of the Flemish political class or Flemish public opinion in general. The programme caused a commotion in Francophone Belgium, which many observers compared to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. This was due to the fact that many Francophones considered the idea of Flemings seceding from the federal state perfectly normal. By contrast, most Flemish observers protested that RTBF had totally misunderstood the prevailing mood in Flanders and wrongly assumed that the majority of Flemings support Vlaams Belang’s demands for unilateral Flemish independence.
In this paper, I shift my attention from Flemish autochthony discourses on francophone perceptions of the same by highlighting how these can be accidentally instrumental in the rise of Flemish au-tochthony and nationalist rhetoric.
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