Belgium is now at the centre of Nato. But, says Paul Belien, its politicians have some very strange and dangerous ideas about collective security.
Belgium, although a small country, has traditionally played an important role in European politics. When Britain, France and Germany cannot agree on who should be given top posts in important international organisations, they often pick a Belgian because they feel he is equally close to all three.
Although Belgian politics is in in itself rather insignificant, it becomes more important when one takes into consideration that contemporary national politicians in Belgium have a greater chance of becoming international functionaries than their French, German or British colleagues. Hence it is important that Belgian politicians be properly screened. If the Wall Street Journal Europe had not published an article last March which revealed who the Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene really was (Paul Belien, Dehaene: Right At Home in the EU, WSJ-E, 21 March 1994), Mr. Dehaene might have ended up succeeding Jacques Delors. Unfortunately, Bill Clinton was too stupid to discover who Mr. Willy Claes was, and too unprincipled to veto his appointment to the secretary-generalship of Nato.
Belgians have become extremely dangerous people to appoint to leading political positions because the current generation of Belgian politicians has been infected with a notion of neutrality which places them outside the Western Alliance. In the past, the Belgians were aware of their unique geographical position in between the three major nations of western-Europe, and they were careful to maintain equally friendly relations with Germany, France and Britain as well as America. The Belgians remained neutral within the Atlantic Alliance, and this served them well.
All this changed when the Social Democrats joined the Belgian government in 1988. During the missile debate in the early 1980s, the Social Democrats, like those in many other countries, defended a position of neutrality between the Soviets and the Americans, i.e. a neutrality outside the Western Alliance. Unlike their British or German counterparts, the Social Democrats in Belgium crawled back into government in the late 1980s. They were able to influence Belgian defence and foreign policy, where they continued their anti-American policy which, because Britain was one of the most outspoken allies of the Americans in Europe, soon became an anti-Anglo-Saxon policy.
Unlike Britain, where Labour, after much pain, managed to neutralise the extreme Left radicals within the party, the Belgian radicals took over the Socialist Party. One of these is the present Belgian minister of foreign affairs, the 39-year-old Frank Vandenbroucke. He is an intolerant young ideologue, who became party chairman in 1989, and led his party from one electoral defeat to another (losing many of the traditional Socialist electorate to the Vlaams Blok). These electorial disasters did not undermine his position, however, for all this time he was patronised and protected by the real party leaders - Louis Tobback, the minister of the interior, and Willy Claes - the minister of foreign affairs - who also appointed Mr. Vandenbroucke to succeed Mr. Claes when the latter recently moved to Nato.
As a student, Frank Vandenbroucke, the son of wealthy professor, had joined the Revolutionary Workers League (RAL). In 1976, the 21-year old "Comrade" Vandenbroucke, then an economics student at Louvain University, became a member of RAL's politburo. RAL was the Belgian branch of the Trotskyite Fourth International. Its emblem was the figure four surrounded by a hammer and sickle. In December 1975, the vice-chancellor of Louvain University asked political student organisations to sign an agreement in which they promised not to bring any weapons, such as cudgels, lead pipes or chains, on to the university premises. RAL refused to sign. The League declared its adherence to "the dictatorship of the proletariat."
"We are no pacifists. In the opposition against the violence of the employers armed warfare is one of the means employed for the liberation of the workers," the League's weekly magazine Rood declared in September 1977. Like many extremist organisations (whether they belong to the Right or to the Left), RAL was also virulently anti-Israel. In November 1977, it declared Israel to be "a state born of terror and sustained by terror." When in July 1976 Israeli commandos liberated Jewish hostages at Entebbe airport, Rood condemned the action as "an act of state terrorism." Lenin was RAL's hero. "It is difficult not to put a man like this on a pedestal," said Rood in October 1977. The journal was also renowned for defending terrorist groups such as ETA, the IRA and the Baader-Meinhof gang. "Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin are dead," stated Rood in October 1977. "They ware 'suicided.' The real terrorists are the German employers and those who serve them loyally under the flag of Social Democracy."
In 1978 Comrade Vandenbroucke applied for a position as assistent lecturer at Louvain University and, despite his involvement with the RAL, he got the job. Shortly afterwards, however, he defected from the Fourth International to the social democracy he despised so much and became a member of the Socialist Party. In 1982, he went to work for the party's think-tank. He justified his switch by pointing out that his Trotskyite groups was doomed to political impotence and was "unable to change any social or political system." If one wanted to change the system, one had to work from within.
In the mid 1980s, Mr. Vandenbroucke was active in numerous so-called "pacifist" groups protesting against the deployment of American Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe. He adopted a strong anti-American and anti-Nato position. In 1985, he became a socialist member of parliament and was elected president of the party in January 1989. When the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed in the early 1990s, he was asked whether he did not feel compelled to examine his own conscience. "No," he said. "Stalinism had stolen our name, but that is no reason for me to change mine."
For a man like Mr. Vandenbroucke, Stalinism is to blame for the failures of socialism, not Marx or Lenin. He affirmed this in a newspaper interview in May 1991. "The collapse of the Berlin Wall has proved that Stalinism is not freedom, but capitalism does not necessarily bring prosperity," he said. Not socialism - nor even communism - was to blame for the misery in Eastern Europe, but Stalinism. Moreover, as capitalism cannot solve the present problems, one must now try real socialism.
When Mr. Vandenbroucke's party joined the Belgian government in 1988, the party's leading politician, Willy Claes, became Belgium's vice-premier, and the country broke its solidarity with the West. In October 1988 it declared that it would oppose any arms modernisation by the Alliance so long as Nato did not agree to a "comprehensive concept of disarmament." The first thing Mr. Vandenbroucke did when he became party president on 14 January 1989 was to veto the deployment of Lance missiles on Belgian territory that very same day.
A year later Belgium distanced itself from its western allies during the Gulf war. Mr. Vandenbroucke vetoed sending Belgian soldiers to the Gulf. When in September 1990 the British army asked to sell them some of its ammunition stocks to prevent their troops from running out of ammunition in the Arabian desert, the Belgian government (with the present Nato secretary-general as its vice-premier) refused stating that Belgium "gave absolute priority to a diplomatic solution" to the Gulf conflict.
Belgium also started pampering terrorists. In January 1991 the Belgian government issued a tourist visa to Walid Khaled, a well-known Palestinian terrorist. He took a stroll around the Grande Place in Brussels, was arrested by the police and set free by the government. Earlier that same month, the Belgian government released from jail another Palestinian terrorist who had thrown a grenade at a group of Jewish children in Belgium ten years earlier. Belgium also refused to extradite IRA and ETA terrorists to Britain and Spain. In November 1988, it set free Patrick Ryan, an IRA arms-supplier who had been arrested in Brussels and whom the British government had asked to be extradited to London. Although a Belgian court recommended that the government comply with Britain's request, the cabinet let him go.
Whenever the government was criticised for taking up "neutral" positions between the West and its enemies, it brushed the arguments aside. It said it was acting on behalf of Europe and against "Anglo-Saxon" dictates. As criticism came mainly from America and Britain, the Belgian politicians in the end began to believe their own conspiracy theory. When in September 1993 the Wall Street Journal published an article which was critical of Belgium's huge foreign debt (see also: Paul Belien, Belgium's Politicized Press Narrows Public Debate, WSJ-E, 14 Sep. 1993), the minister of foreign affairs, Willy Claes, told a Belgian newspaper that the article in the American paper was part of "an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy" to destabilise the Belgian economy just when the country was presiding over the European Community's Council of Ministers. "In this Anglo-Saxon world," Mr. Claes said, "there exist organisations and people who prefer to keep a divided Europe, condemned to play a secondary role in the great economic arguments, instead of a well-structured Europe."
Apparently, the Americans devoted little attention to Mr. Claes's conviction of a great British-American conspiracy to keep Europe down. Barely 12 months after his anti-Anglo-American diatribe, the Clinton administration got him elected Secretary-General of Nato. If there is a conspiracy, it is probably of another nature. When Mr. Clinton was elected in November 1992, the former Trotskyite Frank Vandenbroucke was jubilant. "This man is our ally. We should make him a member of our European Party of Social-Democrats," he said in an interview.
Today, Mr. Vandenbroucke heads Belgian diplomacy and his protector, Willy Claes, the Western Alliance. Thank you, Mr. Clinton.
