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Over the past two millennia, the area that is now known as Belgium has seen significant demographic, political and cultural upheavals. The first well-documented population move was the conquest of the region by the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC, followed in the 5th century by the Germanic Franks. The Franks established the Merovingian kingdom, which became the Carolingian Empire in the 8th century. During the Middle Ages, the Low Countries were split into many small feudal states. Most of them were united in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries by the house of Burgundy as the Burgundian Netherlands. These states gained a degree of autonomy in the 15th century and were thereafter named the Seventeen Provinces. The history of Belgium can be distinguished from that of the Low Countries from the 16th century. A civil war, the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), divided the Seventeen Provinces into the United Provinces in the north and the Southern Netherlands in the south. The southern provinces were ruled successively by the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs. Until independence, the Southern Netherlands were sought after by numerous French conquerors and were the theatre of most Franco-Spanish and Franco-Austrian wars during the 17th and 18th centuries. Following the Campaigns of 1794 in the French Revolutionary Wars, the Low Countries—including territories that were never under Habsburg rule, such the Bishopric of Liège—were overrun by France, ending Spanish-Austrian rule in the region. The reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the end of the French Empire in 1815. The 1830 Belgian Revolution led to the establishment of an independent, Catholic and neutral Belgium under a provisional government. Since the installation of Leopold I as king in 1831, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. Between independence and World War II, the democratic system evolved from an oligarchy characterized by two main parties, the Catholics and the Liberals, to a universal suffrage system that has included a third party, the Belgian Labor Party, and a strong role for the trade unions. Originally, French, which was the adopted language of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, was the official language. The country has since developed a bilingual Dutch-French system. European exploration and administration of the Congo took place from the 1870s until the 1920s. First by Stanley who undertook his explorations mainly under the sponsorship of King Leopold II of Belgium, who desired what was to become the Congo as a colony. In a succession of negotiations Leopold, professing humanitarian objectives in his capacity as chairman of the Association International Africaine, played one European rival against the other. The Congo territory was acquired formally by Leopold at the Conference of Berlin in 1885. He made the land his private, personal property and named it the Congo Free State. Leopold's regime began undertaking various development projects, such as the railway that ran from the coast to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) which took years to complete. Nearly all of these projects were aimed at increasing the capital Leopold and his cohorts could extract from the colony, leading to atrocious exploitation of Africans. In the Free State, the local population was brutalized in exchange for rubber, a growing market with the development of rubber tires. The selling of the rubber made a fortune for Leopold, who built several buildings in Brussels and Ostend to honor himself and his country. During the period between 1885 and 1908, between five and fifteen (the commonly accepted figure is about ten) million Congolese died as a consequence of exploitation and diseases. To enforce the rubber quotas, the Force Publique (FP) was called in. The FP was an army, but its aim was not to defend the country, but to terrorize the local population The Force Publique made the practice of cutting off the limbs of the natives as a means of enforcing rubber quotas a matter of policy; this practice was disturbingly widespread. However, there were international protests spearheaded mainly by Edmund Dene Morel and British diplomat/Irish patriot Roger Casement, whose 1904 report on the Congo condemned the practice, as well as famous writers such as Mark Twain (who wrote King Leopold's Soliloquy) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness also takes place in Congo Free State. In 1908, the Belgian parliament bowed to international pressure in order to save their last bit of prestige in Europe, forcibly adopting the Free State as a Belgian colony from the king. From then on, it became the Belgian Congo. During World War I Belgium's neutrality was violated in 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan. For much of World War I, the west end of "The Western Front" trench warfare stalemate was roughly the border of Belgium and France at the North Sea. The former German colonies Ruanda-Urundi—now called Rwanda and Burundi—were occupied by the Belgian Congo in 1916. They were mandated in 1924 to Belgium by the League of Nations. Belgium was again invaded by Germany in 1940 as part of the invasion of France. Belgium was occupied until the winter of 1944-45 when liberated by Allied troops of several nations, including a small contingent of Belgian nationals. The port of Antwerp was a hotly contested locality, being the focus of the Battle of the Scheldt in October 1944, and the main objective of German forces in the Battle of the Bulge in December.. After World War II, Belgium joined NATO and, together with the Netherlands and Luxembourg, formed the Benelux group of nations. Belgium is also one of the six founding members of the 1951 established European Coal and Steel Community, and the 1957 established European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community. Belgium hosts the headquarters of NATO and a major part of the European Union's institutions and administrations, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament, as well as parts of its administration. The Belgian Congo gained its independence on 30 July 1960 during the Congo Crisis, and Ruanda-Urundi became independent in 1962. During the 20th century, and in particular since World War II, the history of Belgium has been increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main communities. This period saw a rise in inter communal tensions, and the unity of the Belgian state has come under scrutiny. Through constitutional reforms in the 1970s and 1980s, regionalization of the unitary state had led to the establishment of a three-tiered system of federalism, linguistic-community and regional governments, a compromise designed to minimize linguistic tensions. Nowadays, these federal entities uphold more legislative power than the national bicameral parliament |
Belgium Information: Inside
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