...Continued
from top
Starting on Saturday, for three weeks, it will be Europe's football community - hooligans and all. So what's new? There is, however, something immensely symbolic about this event. The quadrennial European Football Championship - held in England in 1996, and this time shared between Holland and Belgium - is arguably the toughest of all the great sporting competitions. True, there is no Brazil or Argentina, as in the World Cup, but also there are none of the easy-meat Asians or Australasians either. And there are certainly no gold medals for beach volleyball or synchronised swimming.
Nine full members of the EU, most of a 10th (England), four wannabes, one don't wannabe (Norway) and one not-a-hope-in-hell (Yugoslavia) have qualified for this tournament. Almost every game will be alive with political and historical resonance, of old alliances and enmities (and new enmities in Yugoslavia's case) - great sweeps of the last millennium reduced, as almost everything is these days, into the 90 minutes of the continent's great game.
And it is taking place in Europe's cockpit, where the great battles have always been fought. It even starts in Brussels, where the new battles are fought: by ministers and bureaucrats arguing over fishing quotas and tax harmonisation. Out of a mixture of idealism, calculation, fluke and necessity, Belgium and Holland are the two countries at the heart of the new Europe, the most communitaire of us all, the ones that have come closest to slipping the surly bonds of nationalism completely. Yet this event is a negation of all that: a celebration of national rivalries with undertones or (in the case of England v Germany) overtones of violence.
The two countries have very different responses to it all. On the Dutch side of the Albertkanaal is Maastricht, a city as Euro-minded as any, famously so. Yet the streets, the shops and even some houses are now decked out in orange, the national colour, with the slogan "Hup Holland!" In Belgium: nothing. For sure, in the cities staging matches, such as Brussels and Liège, there are banners relating to the tournament. The Belgians are as keen on football as anyone else. But nowhere is there any visible clue that the country might be taking part as well. This is very significant. "The Belgians," as one former resident put it, "are very, very odd people indeed."
Traditionally, if we think of Belgium at all, it is regarded as boring (like Canada and New Zealand, which are also overshadowed by more potent neighbours), a country without even three celebrities you could name. This is nonsense: think of Simenon, Hergé, Jackie Ickx, Eddie Mercx, Jacques Brel, Johnny Hallyday plus that chap who throws custard pies. And the killer Marc Dutroux.
Consider just the country's three most famous painters. There was René Magritte, who was famously weird. There was Anton Wiertz, 19th-century painter of massive crazed canvases, who was very weird indeed. And there was Paul Delvaux, my own favourite, who painted dream-like scenes of naked women, often in railway stations. For any boy who has never got over the loss of his Hornby-Dublo, this is very exciting art. But only a Belgian could make a career out of it.
The strange underside of Belgium is acquiring increasing recognition. The country was carved out of the Netherlands in 1830, using the religious divide between Catholics and Protestants as the marker. But, as religion has faded, the linguistic boundaries have become much stronger. Over the past 50 years, the Flemish (ie, Dutch) speakers in Flanders have asserted themselves more and more - politically, economically and linguistically - against the French-speakers of Wallonia and Brussels.
This is a very live conflict indeed. Go to Antwerp and ask directions in French - you will be greeted with a dirty look and stony silence. Switch to English and you get a warm smile. Simultaneously, there has been growing recognition inside and outside Belgium that this has led to a more general dysfunction. Tony Judt, in a devastating indictment in a recent New York Review of Books, added the 1999 scandal of dioxin leaking into the food chain to a list of "money laundering, graft and kickbacks in high places, political assassinations, kidnapping, paedophilia, child murder, police incompetence, and wholesale administrative corruption." In the country of the Heysel disaster, no one has much faith that Belgium's three squabbling and competing police forces will cope if Euro 2000 turns violent.
Other countries would get angry about the scandals. But here they see them not as an indictment of some aspect of their country, but of the country itself. "I get annoyed by the masochism of the Belgians," says Rob Gollen, the Brussels correspondent of the Dutch newspaper De Volksrant. "There's an astonishing lack of national self-confidence about them. If something bad happens, they always say, 'I'm ashamed to be Belgian.' "
It is said that the country is united only by the football team and the royal family, but you don't see many pictures of the king either. Walking around a Belgian city, you sense that the national symbol is a complete lack of one - except perhaps the net curtain, a barrier far more powerful and durable than the Iron Curtain. In comparison, a British home is Liberty Hall.
An Englishman who moved into a Brussels flat and took the nets down to be washed reputedly received three anonymous notes through his letter box in 24 hours, all saying tartly: "In Brussels, we cover our windows." On a coolish June morning, every house in the country seemed to have the nets drawn or its shutters three-quarters closed, as though they were holiday homes in winter or Sicilian homes during an August siesta. Some places have smoked glass instead, like a star's limousine.
The nets mean what they say: outsiders are not welcome. Benti Banach, a Maastricht-based journalist lives across the Albertkanaal in Belgium, because he has found a nice village and the property is a little cheaper (richer Dutch people cross over because there are tax advantages). Even though he has no language problem, the barriers are impenetrable. "I've lived here for four years, and I've never been inside my neighbour's house," says Banach. "He's very friendly, very nice. But he doesn't invite me. That's normal here."
The Belgians go in for more public jollity. The characteristic sight in a bar or restaurant is a gathering of fat bourgeoises, cheerily downing beers or stuffing themselves with moules frites and laughing loudly. Dutch bars seem to comprise elderly couples glowering at each other or -if you pick the right one - younger men staring into space even more silently, and inhaling the private pleasure that is illegal everywhere else. "The Belgians are more capable of enjoying life than we are," says Rob Gollen, "but they do it in their own circle, not with strangers."
Traditionally, the Dutch - like the French - joke that Belgians are dim. In return, the Belgians find the Dutch fussy, over-organised, dogmatic and a little domineering. Brussels drivers are almost Neapolitan in their impatience. In Holland, you are more likely to be mown down by a speeding cyclist. Belgium's Dutch-speakers consider themselves guardians of the language too. They speak it more sweetly, less gutturally, and they import phrases far more reluctantly, preferring to find literal translations, especially when those phrases are French.
In Brussels, a visiting motorist soon discovers a city with worse signposting than Kampala. You might think Europe's capital would have signs pointing everywhere from John o'Groats to the Urals. It is impossible even to find one to Belgium's second city: Antwerp/Antwerpen/Anvers. It is as though the authorities contemplated the difficulties of the various relevant languages (French, Flemish, the German spoken by a minority in Eastern Belgium, and the Euro-glish that has taken over the whole continent) and decided it was easier not to bother.
It all comes back to the same problem. Since the war, national identity has dwindled to be replaced by loyalties only to family, locality, language and Europe. "Belgians are no longer proud of their country," says Jean Stengers, emeritus professor of history at Brussels University. "This is a weakness but it also shows they have separated themselves from old national feelings. There is no jingoism."
And one can't help finding this a little admirable. Should Belgium do well in the football (as host teams often do), it will be fascinating to observe what effect this has on the national psyche, if any. Will the people rouse themselves? I hope not. Their indifference may be largely based on self-disgust and mutual antagonism, but post-nationalism makes a wonderful contrast to the chauvinistic hysteria into which the rest of us will shortly descend.
It is fashionable to abuse Belgium, which deserves much of what it gets. But remember why it is always considered boring. The elements are in place to make this Ulster, the Balkans or the Middle East. And nothing happens. It has been compared to an intersection where the cars all head straight for each other . . . but they don't crash, they just stop and block each other's passage. This is success of a kind.
It has even brought out in me a loyalty I had almost forgotten. My father was born in Antwerp before being washed to England on the tide of 20th-century history, aged two. I must be qualified to play for the Belgian football team; indeed, were it Wales, I would probably have been invited by now. A country without unseemly jingoism deserves my support. Hup Belgie! Allez Belgique! Come on, Belgium!