Tag: history

The Improbable Minority: Flanders and the Fluidity of Minority and Nationality Questions, 1919-1944

On By MoH TeamIn Conferences and PublicationsLeave a comment
A map of Greater Netherlands (ADVN, VPR 141)

What is Flanders? This provocative question lies at the core of a new publication from the Myth of Homogeneity project just appeared in Contemporary European History. The publication argues that answering this question can move this European region from the margins of international historiographies on the inter-war period to the centre of an alternative account of minority and nationality questions after the First World War.

Scholarship on minorities in the inter-war period have largely ignored the Flemish question. One obvious reason is that the Flemish accounted for a majority of Belgium’s population. This article, however, argues that the domestic and international historiography would benefit from considering the Flemish a minority, albeit a peculiar one. It suggests that the Flemish question embodies the contradictions of an age in which the nationality question ‘morphed into the minority question’ (as Holly Case has pointed out) without disappearing altogether.

The article traces the evolution of different understandings of Flanders in the Belgo-Dutch-German transnational space. Within this context, different understandings of the Flemish population coexisted from the end of the First World War until the 1940s: as a region of Belgium with cultural ties to the Netherlands; as an oppressed nationality and a majority in Belgium that fought for linguistic protection and equality like many minority communities across Europe; as a nation endowed with a right to self-determination; as the smaller part of the Greater Netherlandic nation; as low Germans (Niederdeutsche) and thus members of the broader German Volk. Most of these understandings located Flanders at the frontier between majority and minority, and the Flemish question between a minority question of the inter-war years and a nationality question of the pre–First World War age.

The article follows the evolution of these understandings during the inter-war period, focusing particularly on understandings that were pursued by radical Flemish nationalists and their German allies. It shows how Flemish radical nationalists criticised their moderate counterparts for making claims of linguistic equality and protection that, in other European countries, were the prerogative of minority communities. Yet, with their thought and action, Flemish radical nationalists also unwittingly steered the Flemish population into a minority position, by either defining it as part of a Greater Dutch nation, or striking an alliance with Nazi Germany that eventually threatened the existence of the Flemish population as an autonomous group altogether.

The publication finally shows how such understandings challenge traditional conceptions of minorities, majorities, nationalities and kin states. It further contributes to a broader shift in historiographies of nationalism and diversity in inter-war Europe by moving focus from East to West and considering minority questions as a pan-European phenomenon.

Article citation: Dalle Mulle, Emmanuel. ‘The Improbable Minority: Flanders and the Fluidity of Minority and Nationality Questions, 1919–1944’. Contemporary European History 35 (2026): e14, doi:10.1017/S0960777325101124

The Myth of Homogeneity in the Vatican Archives (again)

On By MoH TeamIn DocumentsLeave a comment

The MoH team goes more in depth into the Vatican’s approach to Western European minority questions

For many European minorities, churches were a safe heaven in the interwar period. In the most repressed areas, religious instruction and service in the mother tongue of minority populations were the only moments when members of such groups could freely speak and study their language. Yet the duality of the Church, as an institution devoted to the spiritual care of its worshippers, and the Vatican, as a state with diplomatic relations with other states, considerably blurs any simple portrayal of the Catholic Church’s role in promoting the defence, or the repression, of minority rights. The most surprising aspect, however, is that until now the Church has been remarkably absent in major works on the interwar minority question.

In order to fill this gap, Emmanuel had already spent two weeks at the Vatican Apostolic Archive in April 2022. Back then, he had found substantial material showing a rift within the Catholic hierarchy. On the one hand, there was the lower clergy on the ground in minority regions, which was often in favour of supporting the linguistic rights of local populations and ensure that religious service and instruction be given in the vernacular language (as prescribed by the religious doctrine). On the other, one could find the higher echelons of the Church, which were more responsive to the diplomatic pressures exercised by ‘nationalising states’ determined to enforce linguistic homogeneity and thus saw priests who defended minority languages as dangerous nationalists and irredentists. 

In 2022, however, Emmanuel did not have sufficient time to consult also the documents of the Archives of the Vatican State Secretariat. This contains the internal communications of the State Secretariat (the equivalent of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs), while the Apostolic Archive contains the correspondence with the Nuncios (the equivalent of state diplomats abroad). These documents will contribute to shed light on the internal rift within the Church, especially in the context of the radicalising 1930s, when the rise of Nazism, the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, the 1939 Option agreement in Italy and the development of extreme-right nationalist forces in Flanders and Eupen-Malmedy increased the salience of issues revolving around nationhood and belonging. 

The material gathered during the next two weeks will form a cornerstone of the last chapter of Emmanuel’s new monograph The Myth of Homogeneity: Minority Questions in Interwar Western Europe and will hopefully provide sources for further academic articles.