Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel had a brief moment in the limelight today when his country joined fellow NATO members France and Germany in blocking proposals to increase Turkey's defences in case of a war with Iraq. Observers are describing the situation as "unprecedented" and many are calling it the worst crisis in the security alliance's history.

Surely one of the most fascinating things about observing this escalating trans-Atlantic crisis from the vantage point of Central Europe (your blogger is based in Munich) is the extent to which it is bringing dusty history out of the attic and exposing it to the light. I mean, who would ever have thought that Belgium might end up involved in a bust up between Europe and the USA? After all, it's a tiny place that earns a substantial part of its living by hosting the enormous EU bureaucracy so it's not the kind of country that stands to benefit from antagonising anybody.

Time to hit the books, then, and brush up on Belgium. I'm starting with W.G. Sebald's mesmeric Austerlitz, published in 2001. In short, this superb novel tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, who is sent on a Kindertransport to England in 1939 and placed with foster parents. The childless couple erased from the five-year-old all knowledge about his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as a successful architectural historian, the past begins to haunt Jacques and he is forced to go looking for the drowned history of Europe.

Early in the book, we find him in Antwerp, in the city's magnificent railway station, which was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. Let's listen now to the novel's narrator:

"Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Austelitz began, in reply my question about the history of the building of Antwerp station, when Belgium, a little patch of yellowish grey barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with its colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power — at that time, now so long ago although it determines our lives to this day, it was the personal wish of King Leopold, under whose auspices such apparently inexorable progress was being made, that the money suddenly and abundantly available should be used to erect public buildings which would bring international renown to his aspiring state."

In many ways still an "aspring state" although it remains "divided and disunited in itself", Belgium enjoyed another fifteen minutes of international renown today when Louis Michel, its Foreign Minister, called NATO's credibility into question.