Language and the Belgian Armed Forces

In the Armed Forces, the language divide has resulted in an institutionalized 60-40 manning split based upon the larger Flemish population, and, in the area of defense procurement, it has had a major impact in the awarding of contracts based upon the proportional economic advantages to each region.

The Great War dramatically illustrated the Flemish condition, especially in the army. During the Great War as much as eighty per cent of the soldiers in the army were Flemish, but were commanded in the French tongue. Neither the officers who gave the orders nor the doctors who treated the wounded spoke Dutch. Two languages in the army was opposed by every military authority who has observed the havoc wrought by this system in old Austria-Hungary. After 1830 the Flemish language was ostracized, but in the fifty years before the Great War it had gained a position of equality with French as the official language of Belgium. The Walloons, however, protested vehemently against the waste of time and uselessness of learning a language never used or heard in Wallonia.

The Front Movement and Activism were more expressions of Flemish frustration than a desire to aid the Germans. But after the war there was a violent reaction against the Flemish "treason," and the Flemish cause suffered a severe setback. Amnesty for those "unjustly" punished after World War I became a major mobilizing issue among Flemings in the interwar period.

Detailed laws regulating the use of language in the Belgian armed forces have been designed to balance the principles of linguistic equality with the requirements for efficient operation of the military chain of command. The basic law of 1938 (amended in 1955, 1961, 1963, and 1970) stresses the right of individuals to use their native tongue while satisfying their national military obligation.

The language preference of each soldier is presumed to be that of the region of residence at the time of entry into the military, unless a specific request is made for assignment to another language group. Residents of Brussels declare their preference at the moment of induction. Basic military training is then given to the recruit in the native tongue, after which the soldier joins a monolingual unit. All orders, communications, commands, and general administrative work are conducted exclusively in the language of the unit concerned. Any official communication between the administration of the armed forces and the individual soldier is in the language of the region in which the individual resides.

Commissioned and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) are required to have at least a working knowledge of both national languages. Language competency is established through testing. A thorough knowledge of one of the national languages and a working knowledge of the other is required for entrance to the Royal Military Academy and War College and for promotion. Fluency in both languages is a prerequisite for promotion to all of the senior ranks above captain. Personnel policies of the armed forces have been formulated to ensure parity between the language groups among the senior officers; 60 percent of the junior officers, NCOs, and civilian personnel are supposed to be Dutch speaking. Forty percent are French speaking.

In 1982 some 59 percent of all Belgian officers were Dutch speaking, and 41 percent were French speaking. This reflected a significant effort by the Belgian military to achieve the linguistic balance, regulated by the 1938 law and its subsequent revisions. It was a distinct change from the French- speaking bias among officers that prevailed until the early 1970s.