Page

The institutional agreement signed on October 11, 2011 is an essential part of a larger agreement, one which appears to have ended a long political crisis, and which has permitted the Di Rupo government to be installed. This institutional agreement has not even been formally approved (in statutory language). The agreement includes a change in the status of the electoral constituencies of the Brussels-Hal-Vilvorde communes (BHV). The agreement is intended to bring to an end the traditional wrangling over linguistic rights which has embittered relations between the two large linguistic communities of Belgium. Even if we only bring up the last “episode” of conflict over these arrangements, which took place nine years ago, it may be said that the question is as old as the original determination of the linguistic borderline.

On May 23, 2003,  the Constitutional Court issued a decree that was quite ambivalent, as it turned out, with regard to the BHV arrondissement. The Flemish nationalist movement, soon joined by a political majority of the parties of Flanders, interpreted the decision by the “Constitutional judge” as requiring a division of Brussels-Hal-Vilvorde into Brussels-Capital and Hal-Vilvorde. And the people holding this position expected Hal-Vilvorde in effect to migrate on linguistic grounds, to merge with the electoral districts of Leuven, becoming part of the province of Flemish Brabant. They speculated that the original linguistic borderline of 1962-63 might no longer be complicated by the existence of a bilingual commune that compromised the “seal” of the Flemish border. Flanders, with a simple closed border around its teritory, would thus stake a strong claim to recognition of the changed linguistic borderline as a political borderline around Flanders as an independent nation, arising from a future partition of Belgium itself.

The French-speaking community, for their part, rejected the court’s decision and rejected anything like a simple cutting apart of BHV, something that would leave 80-100,000 Francophones, residing in certain areas just outside Brussels, living in an enclave outside Brussels but inside Flanders. (Brussels for a time was “connected” by a gerrymandered corridor to Hal-Vilvorde.) The Francophones also objected on behalf of the residents of certain communes located in the periphery of Brussels, which have long been known as communes that officially recognize the Flemish language, but which allow business with the government to be transacted in French: “communes à facilités.” The population of 5 of these communes is overwhelmingly French-speaking (Drogenbos, Linkebeek, Rhode-Saint-Genèse, Kraainem and Wezembeek-Oppem).

Under the provisions of the institutional agreement of October 2011, the electoral district known as BHV will indeed be divided, “however, we will make sure to reinforce the fundamnetal rights of its citizens and to resolve national political difficulties [on this point].” Essentially, the Francophones were able to get this concession, that all six of the “communes à facilités” will be grouped together in a new electoral district that will be created, to be called Rhode-Saint-Genèse, whose residents will be able to vote “in that [same] district for the same candidates as the voters of the 19 communes of the Brussels Region.”

The problem of the BHV electoral district is of “long term strategic importance,” in the opinion of constitutional scholar Behrendt Christian (ULg) in section 5, which concentrates on the arrondissement that has been hassled over so much. It is in fact the last electoral district that complicates the linguistic borderline.

Its very existence represents a sort of weakness of the borderline if one considers that line as the real result of partition. In measured terms: as long as there are well-determined parts of the territory of Flanders where there exist political conditions that recognize French-speaking citizens as such, there will always be doubt about where any real future boundary between parts of a divided Belgium will run.

In fact, Behrendt argues, international law with regard to the examination of this problem does not make a principle of automatically letting the former administrative limits of a former State (in this case Belgium) be retained. To the contrary, a different borderline or boundary may be drawn, to the extent that solid arguments can be adduced in its favour. Behrendt also cites a former professor of international law, Eric David (ULB), with regard to this point. “International law does not require that the boundaries of successor States (...) necessarily correspond to internal administrative boundaries established by the predecessor State,” although it is admitted that “such internal borderlines often reoccur as the external boundaries of the new State.”

From the point of view of the French-speaking community, Behrendt concludes, the long term strategy concerning BHV should be to try to maintain or strengthen  all the existing regimes in various communes that recognise in one way or another the interests of French-speaking citizens. The Sixth reform of the State, as agreed, still included 5 procedural forms of recognition of the rights of French-speaking citizens in the “communes à facilités”:

1. Linguistic accommodations as such (the ability to conduct public business in French);

2. The existence of primary schools where French is the language of instruction;

3. The right to vote for candidates that stand for election in Brussels;

4. Special procedures for monitoring jurisdictions, as concerns the nomination of town mayors (bourgmestres).

5. Special judicial procedures allowing the use of French in court.

If Belgium is divided up, French speakers will point to these accommodations in negotiating for a decision about borderlines that does not simply permit the absorption of the “communes à facilités” by the State of Flanders.