Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 9, 1993 TAG: 9305090252
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL HAVEMANN
DATELINE: ANTWERP, BELGIUM LENGTH: Long
Simultaneously, in another corner of this Dutch-speaking town, a more sinister variety of Antwerp's culture is on display in a tavern called the Lion of Flanders. Supporters of the far-right Vlaams Blok, Antwerp's most popular political party, are explaining why they want to close their city to outsiders - especially Moroccan and Turkish immigrants and French-speaking Belgians.
"We're in favor of letting people have their own culture in their own country," Gunter Cauwenberghs, 32, a furniture repairman, says with a not entirely pleasant smile. "We treat immigrants with hospitality: They can come and they can go."
This is a tale of two cities, Antwerp past and Antwerp present - one a wide-open, cosmopolitan stew of nationalities; the other a defensive, intolerant center of ethnic and linguistic animosities.
Europe is home to bloodier rivalries, from civil war in the Balkans to seemingly perpetual terrorism in Northern Ireland. Belgium is no Yugoslavia, and Antwerp is no Sarajevo. Nobody has died here. Yet Antwerp's designation by the European Community as Europe's cultural capital has served to underscore that even Europe's traditional centers of commerce and learning are being washed by currents of bitterness and antipathy.
Antwerp must have been a spectacular place four centuries ago, a city where: Portuguese merchants traded East Indian spices for German silver; Italians set up some of the world's first foreign bank branches; the stock market became a model for London's. It was in Antwerp that the incipient art of printing blossomed and where such masters of Baroque painting as Anthony Van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens lived and worked.
What a contrast with Antwerp today.
The Vlaams Blok, heavy with Nazi coloration, stunned Belgium's political Establishment in the most recent national elections in 1991 by capturing 25 percent of the vote in Antwerp. In all of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium, the Vlaams Blok took 10 percent of the vote and sent 18 of its leaders to the Belgian Parliament.
That Antwerp alarms Eric Antonis, who is directing the celebration of Antwerp as Europe's 1993 cultural capital. It is the Antwerp of 400 years ago that he is trying to recapture.
"Antwerp was really an open metropolis in the 16th century, a marvelous city where foreign traders and artists flocked," Antonis says. "We would like to try to open the city again."
One part of Antwerp 93, as Antonis' program is known, directly resurrects Antwerp's past: the Jordaens exhibit, a re-creation of Rubens' workshop, an exhibit of intricately carved wooden altar frames that were made in Antwerp.
Beyond that, Antonis, himself a Fleming who grew up 25 miles from Antwerp, hopes to re-create the spirit of Antwerp's former glory with what amounts to practically a year-long festival of contemporary arts. Against the opposition of many Flemish political leaders, who urged him to put mostly local talent in the spotlight, he has assembled an international cast.
The performing arts program, for example, has drawn choreographers, composers, playwrights and theater groups from all over the world. Avant-garde performers from 14 cities, only one Belgian, will appear on a barge that has been converted into a stage.
It is symbolic that the Ark, as the converted barge is called, will be moored on the Schelde River. The Schelde provides Antwerp with its port, which is its economic heart.
Antwerp's fortunes have ebbed and flowed with the port. The city languished throughout the 1700s, when the port was closed during a long period of religious wars. It rebounded when the port reopened in the 1800s. The port remains open today, Europe's second-biggest (after Rotterdam's). But the recession that is gripping the rest of Europe has not bypassed Antwerp.
So robust was Antwerp's economy in the 1960s that there were more jobs available than there were workers to fill them. During that period, the region actively sought foreign workers, especially from Turkey and Morocco.
Then came the 1973 Arab oil embargo and a decade of economic stagnation. The immigrants stayed but the jobs disappeared. Antwerp's official unemployment rate is now about 11 percent and rising, and that figure misses those who have given up looking for jobs or who can find only part-time work. The Flemish Employers Association estimates real unemployment at more like 20 percent.
This climate nurtures resentment of outsiders. The Vlaams Blok became Antwerp's leading political party in the 1991 elections, outpolling both the Christian People's Party and the Socialist Party, the top vote-getters elsewhere in Flanders.
Why is Antwerp, among all Flemish cities, the Vlaams Blok's stronghold? Marc Swyngedouw, a sociologist at Belgium's University of Leuven, looks to the aftermath of World War II, when several hundred Flemish Nazi collaborators, mostly from rural Flanders, converged on Flanders' biggest city in search of anonymity. They began the political movement that gave birth to the Vlaams Blok in 1979.
Like other right-wing parties throughout Europe, the Vlaams Blok draws its political support mostly from the down-and-out, from those who feel most threatened. A voter survey after the 1991 elections found that 60 percent of Vlaams Blok supporters named immigration as the paramount political issue.
"These people have an acute sense of political powerlessness, a feeling that they can't change things," Swyngedouw says. "The Vlaams Blok offers a false utopia for them: If you kick out the immigrants who are coming here to take your jobs and get rich on your social security system, all your problems will be over."
Steven Bosselaers, an unemployed 24-year-old freshly out of the Belgian army, finds nothing false in the Vlaams Blok's message. "We respect other people's identity," he says. "We don't say one people is better than another. We say that the only way to preserve people's identity is to keep them apart."
The Vlaams Blok's immediate villains are the Moroccans and Turks, even though they make up only about 6 percent of Antwerp's population of about 900,000. So far, the Vlaams Blok has not threatened Antwerp's most celebrated minority group: the approximately 20,000 Orthodox Jews who hold down most of the jobs in the diamond district.
"But we are a little uneasy," says Louis Davids, editor of the Belgian Jewish Weekly. "We never know what the future might bring."
Right now, with the Vlaams Blok the ascendant party, the message from Antwerp is one of intolerance and exclusion.
Jo Van Cauwenberghe, who teaches ethics in three Antwerp high schools, says pressure is still building as immigrants from Eastern Europe join Moroccans and Turks in Antwerp's foreign ghettos. "A good civilization ought to be able to accept all this," Van Cauwenberghe says. "Can Antwerp? I hope so, but I'm worried."
by CNB