Why Putin wants credit for Belgium's independence. By Matthew Yglesias

Why Putin wants credit for Belgium's independence

A telling glimpse at a strange worldview

We have a lot of new subscribers this week, so naturally we wanted to welcome you all with… a long post on the history of Belgium? Huh. But don’t worry, we’ve got something on TikTok for you tomorrow.

Also, a reminder that our DC happy hour will be next Wednesday, March 20, at 6pm. Paid subscribers should look out for an email with details later this week.

And now for something a bit different.

Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted a weeklong “World Festival of Youth” event in the town of Sirius, Russia with young people from many different countries around the world. I don’t totally understand the purpose of this event. But it featured an appearance by Putin, who during the course of answering a question from a Belgian student, remarked “Belgium, you probably know about this, you appeared on the world map as an independent state, thanks in no small part to Russia and Russia’s position.”

I’ve seen this glossed in a few places as a straightforwardly false claim. And it certainly sounds pretty silly.

But I do think that, in the context of the 1830 revolutions in both France and Belgium that led to Belgium’s detachment from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, it is true that “Russia’s position” was critical aspect to Belgium’s emergence as an independent state. It’s also true, though, that Russia was not acting as some great friend of the Belgian people. On the contrary, Russia initially supported the Netherlands, and it was widely expected that Russian troops were going to march in and squash the revolt. Instead, a revolt broke out in Poland, and the Czar deciding that crushing the movement to free Poland from Russian rule was more important than crushing the movement to free Belgium from Dutch rule.

So Russia’s “position” — i.e., its unwillingness to send its army to fight the Belgian rebels — is, in fact, a major reason for Belgium’s independence. But, again, that’s because they were too busy conquering Poland, not because Russia supported the Belgian national movement.

This bit of discourse was kind of a silly tangent, but I believe that I happen to be in the 99th percentile of American knowledge of Belgian history and I think it’s a sort of interesting, if tangled, historical web. And I also think this whole episode is indicative of Putin’s broader mindset. As with his ideas about the history of Ukraine, there are true facts behind Putin’s interpretation of Belgium’s history. But his interpretation is very much based on the perspective of the pre-1917 Russian Empire.

And that, in turn, is very much the issue with Russia’s relations with the United States and our European allies.

In our worldview, the contemporary Russian state is the successor to the Russian SFR, which is one of 15 states that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But in Putin’s view, Russia is the successor to the Russian Empire, a significantly larger entity that encompassed those other 14 republics, along with Finland and most of Poland, and at the peak of its powers was able to exert decisive influence on questions like “should Belgium be a country?”

In the beginning, there was Burgundy

With any question about history, you can go back arbitrarily far in time, but I think the best place to start to understand the origins of modern Belgium is in 14th century Europe. This was a time before modern nationalism, and really before modern centralized states, a time when all of western Europe owed allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. European politics had a feudal architecture with lots of nested lines of allegiance, very weak central authorities, and non-contiguous landholdings by influential noble families. It also featured pre-modern linguistics.

That’s to say that while hard language barriers certainly existed between romance-speaking and germanic-speaking towns and villages, within those two large domains, you were looking at a situation of dialect continua.

The language spoken in Normandy was similar to — but different from — the language spoken in Paris. The languages spoken in southern France were clearly related to the languages spoken in northern France, but they were more closely related to the languages of Catalonia. Dante Alighieri’s influential writing in the dialect spoken in Florence would become the basis for the language we now know as Italian, but residents of Naples and Milan and Venice didn’t speak that dialect. There was no mass communication and no mass education, so the question of linguistic standards didn’t really exist in the way we would understand it. Educated people, regardless of where they lived, were expected to learn Latin, so elites were not very interested in the question of what language was spoken in which villages. The contemporary Belgian intuition that the political system should be deeply interested in who speaks French and who speaks Dutch was totally alien — in part because essentially nobody spoke standardized forms of those languages anyway.

In this very different context, the House of Valois Burgundy established a significant patchwork of possessions, some of which owed allegiance to the crown of France and some of which owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire. And Charles the Bold, who ruled all these lands by the mid-15th century, had big aspirations to turn this hybrid domain into a proper kingdom. That quest brought him into conflict with both the Swiss Confederacy to the south and east of Burgundy proper and also the dukes of Lorraine and Bar, whose possessions (in pink on this map) separated the two parts of Charles’ domain.

Charles was, in fact, very bold, but he ended up faring poorly on the battlefield. He died while besieging the city of Nancy, and he had no male heirs, which led to the disruption of the Burgundian holdings. The French king got the idea of rushing in to try to seize Burgundian land while saying Charles’ daughter, Mary, should marry his son to properly unify everything. But much of the Burgundian nobility didn’t like this idea, and Mary instead married Maximilian of Austria, the leader of the Habsburg dynasty. This set off a war for the Burgundian inheritance that saw the southern parts of the domain (plus Picardy) join France while the northern parts (except Picardy) became Habsburg possessions.

Then Mary and Maximilian had a son, Philip, who married Joanna, daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. Joanna’s brother, older sister, and nephew all died, so Joanna became heir to both Spanish kingdoms, while Philip was heir to both Austria and the formerly Burgundian Low Countries.

This meant that the son of Philip and Joanna, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (aka King Carlos I of Spain), ended up ruling a huge non-contiguous European Empire, as well as the lands of New Spain across the sea.

In this context, the fact that some people in the Low Countries spoke varieties of Dutch while others spoke varieties of French was not a particularly salient source of complication. People in the Habsburg domains spoke all kinds of languages, and the whole situation was extremely complicated. Charles eventually abdicated, dividing this mess of possessions into two halves: a “Spanish” half that went to his son and an “Austrian” half that went to his brother. The Burgundian Netherlands were somewhat arbitrarily allocated to the “Spanish” side of the family.

Wars of religion

That’s all very complicated. But the core theme that will recur is that France wanted to conquer the Low Countries, and the Habsburgs stopped them.

By the time of the division of the Habsburg domains, meanwhile, the Reformation had resulted in multiple rounds of fighting inside the Holy Roman Empire. At the time, rulers seemed to feel it was very important to establish religious uniformity within their domains. The Habsburgs were the quintessential Catholic, counter-reformation dynasty, and they worked hard to repress Protestantism wherever they ruled. This worked well sometimes and less well at other times, contributing in particular to a major rebellion among Protestants in the Low Countries starting around 1566. This long war essentially pitted the Habsburgs’ military strength against the reality that waging a war so far from Spain was logistically quite difficult.

Protestants, organizing themselves as the Dutch Republic, gained the upper hand in the northern part of these realms and secured a truce in 1609 that created a basically independent entity.

Then in 1618, Austrian Habsburg anti-Protestant policy in the modern-day Czech Republic provoked a different rebellion, touching off a larger war between the Austrian Habsburgs and what was initially a coalition of Protestant German states. That war, the Thirty Years War, eventually saw Denmark and Sweden intervene on the Protestant side, but then also the breakdown of the truce between the Dutch and the Spanish Protestants. Eventually France, which was Catholic but feared that the Habsburgs would completely dominate Europe if they won, entered the war on the anti-Habsburg side. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia cemented the Dutch Republic’s independence, but left the Spanish Habsurgs in control of the mainly Catholic southern part.

And so things stood until Charles II of Spain died without children. He stipulated that his heir should be Philip of Anjou, a grandson of the French King, but a strong anti-French coalition led by Austria and Great Britain opposed that on the grounds that this would leave Spain much too powerful. By this point in time, religion was no longer a driving force of European power politics, so the original source of the division between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands was mostly moot. But ultimately, Philip did get to become King of Spain, on condition that the Bourbon Dynasty promised to never unify the Spanish and French crowns. And beyond that, as a matter of anti-French containment, the Spanish Netherlands were detached from Madrid and re-assigned back to Austria to prevent France from getting too strong.

The balance of power

The Anglo-Austrian alliance fought another war against France in 1740-1748, one that ultimately did not change anything in the Low Countries.

It did, however, end up changing Austrian geopolitical calculations. So in 1756, Austria and France formed an alliance with the goal of not fighting each other anymore and instead checking the rising power of Prussia. Nobody thought too much about the Austrian Netherlands during the Seven Years’ War or during the French participation in the American War of Independence. But the French Revolution badly disrupted the Franco-Austrian alliance (King Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette, was Austrian).

At a critical moment during the revolution, the King and Queen decided they didn’t want to be constitutional monarchs after all and tried to flee Paris to reach the Austrian Netherlands and mount a counter-revolution with Austrian support. They were caught and eventually executed, and then there were a lot of subsequent wars between France and various British-led coalitions. But because of the prior Franco-Austrian alliance and because the Netherlands is far away from Austria, the Habsburgs were not particularly well prepared to defend this territory. France conquered the Austrian Netherlands fast in 1794, Austria formally relinquished its claim in 1797, and across a lot of military back-and-forths, this territory remained under solid French control all the way through Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. That posed the question of what to do with these lands once the war was done.

Britain was now very concerned with containing France.

And they supported Prussia obtaining a lot of territory in western Germany to help accomplish that. Austria didn’t really want the responsibility of keeping France out of the Habsburg Netherlands, but also didn’t want to see Prussia further aggrandized. So the victorious allies decided to unify the former Burgundian Low Countries with a unified Kingdom of the Netherlands that would incorporate both the Catholic and Protestant areas. The thought was that this unified kingdom would be strong enough to fend off France and, in particular, to achieve Britain’s goal of making sure nobody ran too much of the coastline on the opposite side of the English Channel.

This is where Russia finally joins the chat.

1830 and all that

As you’ve probably heard, the main reason France was defeated in these wars is that Napoleon invaded Russia and Russia beat them (I enjoyed last year’s Napoleon movie, even though it doesn’t explain anything about what happened; Dominic Lieven’s book “Russia Against Napoleon” is very good).

But the upshot is that while Britain ruled the seas after the Napoleonic Wars, Russia was clearly the strongest power on land. What’s more, while Britain had consistently opposed Revolutionary France, it also maintained a much more liberal political system than the powers of continental Europe. It was Russia that, on an ideological level, was committed to counter-revolution as a process and that appointed itself as a guarantor of the reactionary order. This was a big theme across a couple of generations of European politics, but it faced a pretty stark challenge in 1830.

People said that the restored Bourbon regime in France had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” and tried to govern in an uncompromisingly reactionary way. That led to a revolution in Paris, which installed a prominent relative of the king on the throne with a promise to engage in a more liberal form of rule. That, naturally, set the reactionary powers of Europe on edge.

Meanwhile, over in the Netherlands, King William I had created a bad situation for himself with his new domain. The General Assembly assigned the southern provinces exactly half the seats, even though they contained a majority of the population, and the ministers and the national administration were overwhelmingly from the north. Southerners were liable for public debts that had been incurred by the previously separate north. William tried to create a state-run school system, which the south didn’t like. He also wanted Flemish schools to teach Standard Dutch, which wasn’t really what Flemish speakers spoke; at that time, most of the Flemish elites (like elites all over Europe) spoke French. William also wanted to have influence over the appointment of Catholic bishops. This all led to a revolt that mixed separatist politics, Catholic politics, Francophone politics, and liberal politics.

This raised the prospect both of French annexation of at least the French-speaking areas (which Britain didn’t want) and of Russia stepping up to help William reconquer his rebellious provinces. Instead, the great powers met the London Conference and decided that Belgium should become a separate country as depicted in this satirical cartoon. Both Hollande and “Free Belgium” are chained up on the sidelines while the great powers decide things. Also, Russia is stomping on the corpse of Poland.

That’s because the very same Congress of Vienna that created the Kingdom of the Netherlands also allocated the majority of Poland (illustrated in dark green below) to Russia. There was also a smaller share of Poland under Prussian rule, and a medium-sized bit under Austrian rule. But the Russians got Warsaw, and they were more ideologically committed to crushing Polish nationalism than the Austrians were.

So the Eastern European version of these 1830 upheavals was centered in Poland — the November Uprising of Poles, Lithuanians, and some Belorussians and Ukrainians against Czarist rule. Russia felt overstretched and believed that crushing Polish independence was more important than helping William, and that is what set the stage for the compromise: an independent Belgium ruled by neither France nor the Netherlands, with all powers agreeing (at British insistence) to respect Belgium’s neutrality.

What have we learned here?

This is a lot of words about Belgian history, most of which has very little import today. Of course, those who know about the origins of World War I will recall that the multi-party guarantee of Belgian independence did turn out to be consequential there.

But otherwise, nobody really cares about any of this.

I do think it’s telling, though, about Putin’s vision of himself and his vision of Russia. All throughout this period of history — not only in the 1830 rebellions but, crucially, during the liberal revolutions of 1848 — Russia served as the ideological custodian of illiberalism on the European continent. And Russia was a true empire. Many of its citizens spoke Russian, of course, but many of them did not. The empire conquered lands in Central Asia, did settler-colonialism across Siberia, ruled Finland and most of Ukraine, along with parts of present-day Moldova and Poland and the Baltic states. The Russian empire also rejected, in principle, the concepts of both liberalism and national independence in favor of old-fashioned ideas of dynastic rule.

The fact that Putin identifies with this tradition obviously does not prove in any decisive way that if he subdues Kiev, he’ll come for Warsaw and Helsinki.

But it aligns with the reality that he’s not even trying to reassure anyone that his concerns are localized to the Donbass. He is proudly donning the mantle of the reactionary czars and their agenda of illiberalism without boundaries. He’s bragging about the brutal suppression of Poland — specifically in a context where the point is that had Russia not been busy fighting the Poles, the Belgians would have been crushed.