Crisis of a Nation-State?
Belgium's Mid-Twentieth Century Crisis: Crisis of a Nation-State? MARTIN CONWAY ______________ Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Balliol College – University of Oxford When was Belgium? Nations, as historians are rightly at pains to emphasise, are not eternal entities but communities bounded by time as well as space.1 The temporal boundaries of the Belgian nation have been the subject of de- bate since at least the time of Pirenne, but that debate has acquired a new prominence in recent years as older and newer generations of historians have focused their attention on the origins, contours and eventual crises of the Bel- gian nation-state (Morelli, 1995; Wils, 1995; Deprez & Vos, 1998; Stengers, 2000; Stengers & Gubin, 2002). The reasons for this renewed interest are not difficult to discern. The profound, and probably incomplete, transformation of Belgium into a federal or confederal entity since the end of the 1960s has for the first time made the Belgian nation-state a finite and therefore em- phatically historical subject. Though political scientists rightly continue to investigate the manifold complexities (and future prospects) of the contempo- rary Belgian polity (e.g. Delwit, 2003), it seems undeniable that the project that was the Belgian nation-state now possesses not only a beginning and a heyday but also an end. For historians of post-1830 Belgium, this should be regarded as a liberation. Instead of being called upon to provide their expert testimony at the interminable trials of the late twentieth-century Belgian state, they are free to investigate the dynamics that gave rise to that state and which sustained it over the more than one hundred years of its existence.
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