The past 15 years have brought an upsurge of "autochthony." It has become an incendiary political slogan in many parts of the African continent as an unexpected corollary of democratization and the new style of development policies ("by-passing the state" and decentralization). The main agenda of the new autochthony movements is the exclusion of supposed "strangers" and the unmasking of "fake" autochthons, who are often citizens of the same nation-state. However, Africa is no exception in this respect. Intensified processes of globalization worldwide seem to go together with a true "conjuncture of belonging" (T.M. Li 2000) and increasingly violent attempts to exclude "allochthons." This article compares studies of the upsurge of autochthony in Africa with interpretations of the rallying power of a similar discourse in Western Europe. How can the same discourse appear "natural" in such disparate circumstances? Recent studies highlight the extreme malleability of the apparently selfevident claims of autochthony. These discourses promise the certainty of belonging, but in practice, they raise basic uncertainties because autochthony is subject to constant redefinition against new "others" and at ever-closer range.
This contribution traces three interconnected evolutions that characterise the transformation of Flemish nationalism into autochthony as Flemings obtained more cultural autonomy, the cultural influence of the Flemish Movement declined and Flemish nationalists started radicalising their political demands; as Flemings obtained more political autonomy, demands for greater economic autonomy started extending beyond the Flemish‐nationalist fringe; and as Flanders became more autonomous in relation to the federal state, Flemings started identifying increasingly with a new Flemish culture. In the process, both ‘allochtons’ and Francophone Belgians came to be construed as Flanders' ultimate ‘others’.
Abstract:This article analyzes the growth of autochthony in Belgium as an example of the increasing popularity of autochthony discourses in Western Europe. Autochthony discourses, which try to reserve the benefits of the welfare state to those who are said to really belong, tend to thrive in prosperous Western European welfare states with a strong Social-Democratic tradition that refuse to accept that they have become immigrant countries. In federalized Belgium, however, autochthony has a much stronger appeal in Flanders, which historically was dominated by Christian-Democratic parties, than in Wallonia, which remains a Social-Democratic bulwark. Analyzing Western European autochthony in terms of welfare chauvinism helps explain the ways in which prosperous Flemings, unlike impoverished Walloons, can afford to buy into the neoliberal rhetoric of choice and thus create themselves as autochthons.
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