The Armrest of Europe: On the Complete Strategic Importance of Belgium

So, let’s talk about something beautiful, touching, impressive and deep. Something scary, terrifying, contradictory and horribly difficult; something with horrible secrets, half-truths and lies, but which, on the whole, is absolutely beautiful. Something you can’t stop praising—not only for what it is, but for the ideas it represents—because, in a way, it is an example of how good things can, or could, be.

Because in a world that is wonderfully, and sometimes excruciatingly, real, there are some places that step outside the mere concept of reality and become something more. Anyone who has walked for a little while through the streets of Rome knows exactly what I’m talking about, because Rome was there long before us and will be there long after us. After we’re dead. And that’s probably sad in a way, because death will always be sad. But it’s also wonderful to walk around the Colosseum and feel stone that was so rough in its day but has become soft through millennia of people touching the same stones you touched, then going away with the memories, and flying into the mystery of death after that, but leaving their memory—the testimony of their actions—in a shiny, palpable way. The Colosseum is one wonderful place in which all of humanity holds hands, time be damned.

And its walls, marked by centuries of graffiti, tell the story of so many people, so many loves, that all found themselves subjected to the overwhelming beauty. And for an instant, through a little drawing on a wall, became an eternal testimony to some of the best things in all of human nature. But the same Colosseum saw gladiators and beasts and slaves killed in the bloodbath that this beautiful monument to humanity used to contain. Because the great Colosseum is a testament to our love of beauty and to the absolute brutality of our nature. There’s something mythical about it, because in it all of our collective nature became apparent and unapologetically real.

There’s an unnamed process that turns horrible tragedy into solemn beauty using only time and the power of the sunset, and there are places, sometimes whole countries, that end up representing the best of humanity as a whole, not because of their perfection—there is no perfection on Earth—but because the ideas, the ideals and the hope they represent tend to endure through violence and heartbreak and, in the end, flourish again.

There’s a tragic quality to humanity that turns love and pride into violence and death, and there are places, crossroads of civilization, in which those clashes tend to happen. Geographic anvils where the hammering of history is no mere text in a book but memory; places that saw the downfall of Napoleon, some of the worst battles of the Great War, the legendary stand of the Screaming Eagles during the Battle of the Bulge, every achievement and failure that has come out of the European Union, and every day that NATO has been the ultimate ward against warfare in Europe.

Belgium is, like France and England, central to Western civilization. We all live in countries that try, to the best of their capacities, to replicate some version of the post-Revolution French Republic and all its beautiful ideas of equality, freedom and brotherhood among men—and making barricades and burning stuff when things are not great—and it doesn’t matter where you live: you’ve been at war with those damned red coats, and you have the chance to look at Belgium as the standard for all that’s good in humanity: neutrality, waffles, chocolate, fries, beer and rubber-related mass murder and mutilation. The place definitely has it all.

Belgium split from the Netherlands because the north was mostly Protestant and the south mostly Catholic, but also because apparently religion, language, politics, education and who gets to boss whom around are enough to make sharing a country rather difficult. Then, after a performance of La Muette de Portici, boom: revolution. The Dutch were perfectly willing to send an army south to deal with that pesky revolution, the French were perfectly willing to intervene, and somehow the idea of an independent, neutral Belgium acting like the armrest you lower in the back seat of your car to keep two belligerent siblings from clawing each other’s eyes out and make them enjoy the drive in silence for five damn minutes just... stuck.

One by one, the great powers recognized Belgium’s independence and guaranteed its neutrality, and then peace and harmony ruled over the European mainland forever and ever. Napoleon was dead, Hitler wasn’t born yet, and nobody would ever dream of violating Belgium’s neutrality... for about 75 years.

In the meantime, about 55 years into nationhood—which every amateur historian recognizes as the teenage years of a country—Belgium got angry, got some face piercings and a tattoo, and its king acquired the Congo as his personal playground. This guy really, really liked his rubber, and the regime he built became extraordinarily fond of forced labor, murder and violent mutilation; having an overseas African realm allowed all of that to be pursued to nearly genocidal levels. Eventually even the colonial powers looked at the whole thing and went, "Jesus Christ, Leopold," and Belgium took the Congo away from him. A year later, the situation improved drastically when Leopold himself relocated.

Permanently.

To hell.

Then, obviously, Austria-Hungary went to war against Serbia, Russia mobilized in defense of the Serbs, Germany declared war on Russia and then on France because, hey, if we’re gonna punch someone it may as well be a French national—and guess who got the German invasion force? Obviously Belgium. Obviously. Children, I tell you. I can hear Belgium yelling, "But I’m not even playing!" as she gets punched right in the face. But hey, Leopold’s nephew Albert got the crown, went to the front to fight like a king of old, and when things became desperate the Belgians opened the sluices, flooded the Yser plain and stopped the German advance. Belgium kept a sliver of her territory, kept her king with the army, kept fighting, and eventually kept her independence. And in 1936 Belgium even went back to being neutral, all the mistakes of the Great War understood and metabolized, just in time for a little man with a ridiculous moustache to force them to do it all over again.

Germany wanted half of Poland, the Soviets wanted the other half, and in one of history’s less charming real-estate agreements they had already decided roughly how to divide it. Germany invaded, Britain and France declared war, the Soviets came in from the other side, and soon enough there was another gigantic war going on.

For months, though, the Western Front sat in the strange limbo of the Phoney War. Eventually Germany had to actually get to France, and the Maginot Line made the obvious route profoundly unattractive. So who got the beating?

Belgium.

Again.

The armrest of Europe, and Germany reached across it, slapped France and said, "I’m touching you," while sticking his tongue out.

Back and forth. More hammering, more history, more feats of bravery and more acts of savagery. The Ardennes became a battlefield again, Bastogne produced the glorious resistance of the Battered Bastards, and then, after a while, moustache guy became the absolute hero of the war by killing the monster who had started it all. And hell was well fed for a long, long while.

Finally, peace. And Belgium decided that, after being fooled twice, there wouldn’t be a third time. Neutrality as a security policy had failed; now Belgium started collecting mutual-defense alliances with warlike focus. She became an original member of the United Nations, probably just to avoid the other members adding "to invade Belgium... again" to the name of the organization, signed the Brussels Treaty in 1948 and became a founding member of NATO a year later.

Then West Germany joined the great alliance in 1955, leaving everyone a little disappointed and murmuring, "Who are we collecting all these bombs for, then?" Fortunately, they took a collective look east, saw Khrushchev’s ugly, weird, definitely Soviet face staring back at them, and experienced that swooning moment tantamount to love at first sight, when you just know who’s getting nuked if the occasion ever arises.

And the Soviets made their own club, the Warsaw Pact, and evil finally had a face, a logo and a mailing address where you could aim all the nukes. But the nukes never flew, and it’s in part due to Belgium’s relentless diplomacy and the tireless work of another weird, tiny guy named Paul-Henri Spaak that Belgium stopped being the failed armrest of Europe and became a nuclear-defended armrest, and the old, problematic and bloodthirsty powers of Western Europe have not gone to war with one another since. Spaak had spent two years as a German prisoner during the First World War, watched Germany invade Belgium again during the second, and somehow came out of all that not asking for revenge, but helping build Benelux, NATO and the European institutions that would force the old enemies to sit at the same table. He eventually became NATO Secretary General, which is a rather magnificent career choice for a man whose country had spent much of his lifetime being used as Europe’s preferred shortcut to France. It’s been a long while since a Brit or a Frenchman fired at a German, and I call that progress. The whoever-had-the-biggest-stick idea was right.

And it’s even more commendable how, instead of pointing his hate-boner at Germany for the rest of his life, this man, this great man, this peacemaker, pointed his reconciliation boner at the Huns and made them family.

All twenty inches of it, if we go by character.

Enjoy heaven, Paul. You deserve it. You’re a modern-day saint, or close enough.

The thing about Belgium is that it’s a place, but also an idea, the butt of a lot of my jokes because I love the idea of Germany reaching across to annoy France. Belgium was a place worth so much to both attackers and defenders that they went to war over it, twice; something worth sacrificing for because whatever happened to Belgium would affect everyone else in the end. And Belgium is not perfect, is not ideal. Hell, Belgium must have some ugly streets and bad neighbourhoods. But Belgium is also the seat of some of our best hopes about the future, because maybe, if we cover ourselves in enough layers of mutual-defense treaties, we’ll have world peace. Thanks to Belgium and Long Dong Diplomat up there, France, the UK and Germany have been playing together politely for 71 years, and now all of them would go to war for imperfect but always interesting Belgium.

Why?

Because perfection was never a requirement, and the best way to destroy an enemy is to turn him into a friend - whomever said it, Lincoln, Sugismund, was right - and then sit together under a nuclear umbrella.

Belgium appears again and again in my mind and my conversations because, beyond the country, the mutilations, the waffles, the beer and the living proof that government is apparently completely unnecessary, seeing how they lived without one for something like 541 days, I like the strength, the story, the legacy and the meaning Belgium holds for humanity as a whole. And drunk me loves it because... reasons... and something about boobs.

So there it is. My love letter to Belgium: living proof that some things are worth defending not because they are perfect, or because they belong to you, but because the world would be worse if they were allowed to be destroyed.

And it’s easy to love Belgium because, in my mind, she has beautiful brown hair, Disney-princess eyes and a way of melting when I give her a hug that I just love. So yes: like Britain, Germany and France before me, I would go to war for Belgium, and I hope to keep deep, loving diplomatic bonds with her for as long as possible, because the world just seems more beautiful, more interesting, more exciting and maybe just a little pinker with Belgium in it. And maybe, with enough time, far in the future there will be something as old and as wonderful as the Colosseum that is a living, eternal memory of my love for Belgium:

I love you, Belgium.

Fiat Belgica, et pereat mundus.