B EIJING AND DONGXING
Our Chaguan columnist on a resentment
that persists around the worldnorth v southE
very foreign correspondent’s first
posting should be Belgium. For that
prosperous but quarrelsome kingdom is a
fine place to see, in miniature, some of the
large forces that shape human events
around the world. Notably, pocketsized
Belgium is home to an unusually severe
case of northsouth antipathy. In my near
quartercentury as a foreign reporter in
four continents, one quirk of human na
ture has kept cropping up. People love to
judge, mock or distrust those who live ei
ther above or below them on a map.
Formally, Belgium’s splits are linguis
tic, with its 11.5m people mostly shared be
tween a Dutchspeaking north and a
Frenchspeaking south. In reality, lan
guage is clearly seen as a badge of tribal be
longing. In both Dutchspeaking Flanders
and Francophone Wallonia, it is common
to hear people declare that the country’s
linguistic border—which runs from east to
west, dividing the capital, Brussels—is
nothing less than the frontier between the
Germanic and the Latin worlds.
The stereotypes are harsh. As northern
ers, the Flemish are called hardworking,
dour and thrifty, a race of earlytobed mer
chants and farmers, inhabiting a land of
flat cabbage fields and drab coastal low
lands. As southerners, the Walloons are
deemed wily, lazy and corrupt: a race of
drinkers and dreamers, faded gentry and
public servants employed in vast numbers
by a bloated patronage system. Flemish na
tionalists have little sympathy for French
speaking coal and steel towns once among
Europe’s richest, but now sunk in postin
dustrial blight. In Flanders the grumble is
that Walloons—who in the 19th and 20th
century lorded it over their Flemish neigh
bours—are too arrogant and welfaread
dicted to learn Dutch and move to their
country’s dynamic north.
For outsiders, it can be confounding to
see such animosity crammed into so nar
row a space. It is just 222km (138 miles)
from Belgium’s northernmost town, Meer
le, to Torgny in its far south, or less than
the distance from New York to Boston. The
same chilly grey skies hang over Flemish
and Walloon towns. Yet to hear national
ists on each side talk, their country encom
passes Europe’s extremes, as if a tiny Prus
sia shares a border with a colder Sicily. Bel
gians invoke longago eventsto explain the
puzzle. In 1921, a historian, Emile Cam
maerts, traced his country’s divisions back
to fifthcentury wars that saw pagan Frank
ish tribes from the Germanic north attack
Christian BelgoRomans in the south, only
to be stopped by an impenetrable physical
barrier: the Silva Carbonaria, a longvan
ished forest that ran along the line of to
day’s linguistic frontier.
Northsouth antipathies are much
more than a cultural curiosity. The eurocrisis of 200912 began as a row about Euro
pean banking rules and government debt.
As a Brusselsbased columnist, the beat be
came a blur of emergency summits, as the
flashing blue lights of motorcades ferried
European leaders to another latenight
meeting before markets opened the next
day. For all the focus on bailout funds and
fiscal discipline, it became clear that a less
technical question was also in play: name
ly, did north and south Europeans like each
other enough to share a currency? German
and Dutch newspapers talked angrily of
“Club Med” countries in Europe’s south,
where—they charged—taxdodging lay
abouts retire at 55. Gloomy Eurocrats cited
the fables of Jean de La Fontaine, imagin
ing priggish northern ants condemning
profligate southern grasshoppers to starve.
To be sure, the wealthiest and most pro
ductive regions of the European Union are
mostly in its north and west, with poverty
found in the south and excommunist east.
International surveys of corruption rate
Denmark, Finland and Sweden among the
cleanest countries in the world. Among
western eucountries, Greece and Italy fare
less well, and former easternbloc ones
worst of all.
Over the years, however, I have noticed
a phenomenon that cannot be explained
by international league tables. Within
many countries, strikingly similar north
south stereotypes crop up time and again.
Such prejudices are often defended by ref
erences to climate, topography and history.
Northerners are hailed for hard work and
thrift. Northern agriculture is praised for
its efficiency, which is often linked to an
early abolition of feudalismcreating lots of
small farms owned and worked by sturdy,
selfreliant yeomen. Southern regions are
deemed friendlier but blighted by clannish
corruption and idleness. If southern farms
are less productive, harsher weather is
only one explanation. Another involves
the legacy of vast estates on which hard
pressed, semiliterate peasants laboured
well into the 20th century.
The really startling detail is how often
these stereotypes reset at national borders.
Start in the southern Netherlands. Accord
ing to common prejudice, the Dutch see
their FlemishBelgian neighbours as living
an agreeably soft life, filled with fine food
and drink (though almost any cuisine
looks tasty from the Netherlands, where a
business lunch may consist of cheese
sandwiches and a glass of buttermilk).
Cross the border into Belgian Flanders
though, and national stereotypes place you
in Germanic northern Europe. Keep driv
ing into Frenchspeaking Wallonia and
Belgians reckon you have hit the south. But
head across the international border into
France, and—by common consent—you
are back in a region that is unmistakably48 Holiday specials The Economist December 18th 2021