New York, New York

Last week saw the opening in Manhattan of Flanders House, “a unique portal” and “gateway to Flanders”, with offices in the prestigious New York Times Building. Present at the official opening were Flemish minister-president Kris Peeters, Flemish minister for the economy Patricia Ceysens, and Scala, a Flemish girls’ choir. Geert Bourgeois was not invited. The Flanders House was originally his idea, but since he had resigned as a minister in the Flemish government, there was no Big Apple trip for him.

Bourgeois cares a lot about the image of Flanders abroad and with the international community at home (Flanders Today is also one of his ideas). As a region, Flanders is responsible for tourism, the economy and exports, he says, all of which Flanders House aims to promote.

However, the opening was not met with unanimous applause. Karel De Gucht, the federal minister for foreign affairs, called it “nothing but a prestige project for Bourgeois”. De Gucht argues that Flanders House is “of very limited use”. It costs a great deal – €500,000 a year – but will have only a small impact on the image of Flanders.

“If the Flemish government was as strapped for cash as the federal government, it would never even consider a project like this,” De Gucht sneered. A better way of putting Flanders on the map, would be to organise a large exhibition of paintings by Ensor, Rubens or Magritte, he argued.

More fundamentally, he raised the question of whether Flanders should have its own diplomacy. He was peeved at Peeters’ remark that Belgian diplomats in the US had not done a proper job in informing the Flemish government about the situation at General Motors. With a large assembly factory at risk in Antwerp, there is a lot at stake here.

In the end, Peeters felt obliged to defend Flanders House. We are not here to wave flags, he said; our approach is very pragmatic. This, in turn, angered Bourgeois, who, as a nationalist, has been accused in the past of flag waving. “Has no one ever noticed that on the Belgian level everything ends in deadlock?” he retorted.

There is something odd going on here. Everyone involved in the dispute is Flemish: Kris Peeters, Karel De Gucht, Geert Bourgeois and even the Belgian ambassador in the US and the consul in New York. The discussion is founded on the old sentiment that Flanders has to emancipate itself, especially in areas like diplomacy, which were traditionally dominated by French speakers.

But somehow Flanders has moved far beyond that. And what is true for New York is also true for Belgian diplomacy: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

(March 3, 2009)