Finally, Belgium was dissatisfied with her whole position at the Conference. During the war she had acted as one of the Allies and had her representation in the Allied councils. At Paris she was only a small power, limited to three delegates—at first even to two—and excluded from the guiding and deciding group of the Five Great Powers. Even the decisions which directly concerned her were taken by the Council of Ten or the Council of Four. She was outside, while Italy and Japan were inside. Individually her delegates sat on important committees, but there were times when Belgium must have felt far removed from the central tasks of the Conference, in the outer limbo occupied by Liberia, Panama, and Siam. A Belgian told the story of an officer who had lost both legs. “You will always be a hero,” said a consoling friend. “No,” replied the officer, “I shall be a hero for a year and a cripple for the rest of my life.” Belgium felt that the days of her position as a hero were over. You will recall Mr. Dooley on Lieutenant Hobson: “I’m a hero,” said the Lieutenant. “Are ye, faith?” said Admiral Dewey, “Well, I can’t do anything f’r ye in that line. All th’ hero jobs on this boat is compitintly filled be mesilf.”
Let us call to mind so much of Belgium’s history as is necessary to approach her modern problems. Belgium as a separate and independent state has existed only since 1830, but her national history goes back into the Middle Ages. Easy of access from both the Rhine and the north of France, the territory of modern Belgium has always been a highroad of peoples, for migration, commerce, and war, and the natural meeting-point of races and civilizations from north and south. It formed a part of the great middle kingdom created between France and Germany by the partition of the Frankish empire in the ninth century, and with the break-up of the middle kingdom it became a natural object of ambition from both sides. The various feudal principalities which shared this territory in the Middle Ages divided their allegiance between the king of France and the German emperor; and it was not till the fifteenth century that the rise of a new middle kingdom under the dukes of Burgundy brought the region of the Netherlands, northern as well as southern, under a single hand and made them for practical purposes independent of France and Germany. Enlarged toward the east by the Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century, the territories of the Netherlands comprised seventeen provinces and included substantially what is now Holland and Belgium.
By the marriage of Mary, heiress of Burgundy, to Maximilian of Austria in 1477 the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands passed to the house of Hapsburg, and thus to their grandson, the Emperor Charles V. Upon the division of his possessions in 1556 they went with Spain to the so-called Spanish branch of the family, represented by Philip II. Religious and political reasons led to the great revolt against Philip II in 1568, a movement in which the whole seventeen provinces joined. The skilful policy of Philip’s general, Alexander Farnese, succeeded in detaching the southern provinces, which had remained for the most part Catholic, from the Protestant, or United, Netherlands of the north, and from 1579 on the southern provinces led a separate existence under Spanish rule, being generally known as the Spanish Netherlands. In this period they lost considerable territory on the north to the Dutch and on the south to the French.
Upon the division of the Spanish dominions by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Spanish Netherlands were in the following year transferred to Austria, and were known as the Austrian Netherlands until their conquest by the armies of the French Revolution in 1794. They were then incorporated with France (1795) and organized into nine departments, a state of affairs which lasted until 1814.
By the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the northern and the southern Netherlands were reunited, under the rule of a king of the house of Nassau. After a separation of one hundred and thirty-five years the union proved unsatisfactory to the southern population. Marked differences of religion, economic interest, and language produced friction from the start, which was aggravated by the exclusive policy of the Dutch, who, though a minority, monopolized the higher offices and enforced the use of the Dutch language. The revolutionary movement of 1830 kindled a revolt in the southern provinces, and a separate government was organized under a constitutional monarch, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The separation was declared “final and irrevocable” by a convention of representatives of the five Great Powers meeting in London in 1831, and the treaty was accepted by Holland in 1839. The boundaries of the new kingdom were, as we shall see, drawn in a manner quite unsatisfactory to the Belgians.
The treaty of 1839 guaranteed the independence and the neutrality of Belgium, while at the same time it placed restrictions on the new state. By Article VII it was provided that
Belgium ... shall form an independent and perpetually neutral state. It shall be bound to observe the same neutrality toward all other states.
It will thus be seen that, while the roots of Belgian nationality lie deep in the past, the modern state was established in a somewhat artificial form, its boundaries drawn and its international status fixed by the Powers, not by Belgium itself. Its frontiers are in no direction ‘natural’ frontiers. At the same time Belgium is dependent in the closest way upon the outside world. It possesses the densest population of any country in Europe—the same number of inhabitants as the state of Pennsylvania, with one-fourth the area. In spite of a highly intensive cultivation, the soil is unable to produce sufficient food, so that sixty per cent of the consumption of cereals is imported. For this large importation Belgium is unable to pay in minerals, its only considerable underground resource being coal, of which there has been no surplus for export since 1910. It must consequently pay for its imports by exports of manufactured products, for which the raw materials are likewise for the most part imported.
Belgium is thus a highly industrialized country, with a large manufacturing population. Its principal industries are iron furnaces and rolling mills, zinc works, machinery, arms, and tools; textiles, especially cotton goods; glass, cement, and ceramic wares; leather; and chemical products. Commerce is also of the highest importance in the economic life of Belgium. She requires foreign imports of raw materials and foreign markets for her manufactured articles. She has a very large transit trade, en route to and from Germany and northern France. In volume of trade Antwerp is one of the greatest of European ports, abreast of Hamburg and London. The system of railways and canals is elaborate, with the highest per capita mileage in Europe.