EARLY BELGIAN COLONIAL EFFORTS - The University of Texas at ...

a nation of cultural, linguistic, religious, and political uniformity that identified one as
British, French, and closer in terms of experience to Belgium, German or Italian.
Belgium as a nation was only created forty years before Italy and Germany. Its
national experience and myth had to be invented. The national myth, which made a
Belgian a Belgian, had to be created and disseminated to all Belgians. But there was a
sense of “Germany” and “Italy” hundreds of years before they became nations.
Pirenne’s previously mentioned hypothesis notwithstanding, 401 Belgium had been part
of successive empires and nations for hundreds of years. More than any other European
country in the nineteenth century, Belgium had need of an identity.
The question as to what would provide this identity divided Leopold from the
cabinet and the chambers. The two houses of the chambers would successively
cooperate for the first twenty years of the country’s existence under the banner of the
Union Party with just such a goal in mind. Leopold, however, was not entirely devoid of
a sense of what a nation should be. The problem was that to Leopold the model for both
constitutional monarchy and nationalism was Britain, and Britain was an empire.
Stockmar’s comments on Leopold’s dedication to all things British both during
and after his marriage to Charlotte surely attest to this. It can be argued that Leopold’s
dedication to his niece Victoria in the almost ten thousand letters that passed between
them was a way to keep both himself and Belgium informed with Belgium’s main
protector and to maintain the close family relationship with Victoria, and later Albert.
But it can also be argued that this was Leopold’s way of keeping in touch with the
401 See Stengers and Gubin, 20-6.
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