Quote:
Originally Posted by Mynydd
The question is which kind of guarantees would be seen as guarantee enough --excuse the redundancy here.
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It's hard to immediately come up with hard guarantees. But I can give some large lines along which I'm thinking. These are my opinions, not those of all Flemish of course.
But first of all,
linguistic. I would say that Flemish be tolerated as an official language together with Dutch. Or at least as an official variant of Dutch. But that shouldn't be a problem. Most Dutch dictionaries already contain many Flemish words, labeling it as
South-Dutch. Works for me.
I remember my elementary school teacher explaining us how in the time Flanders was with the Netherlands (1815-1830) Flemish were discriminated when going for public offices since according to the Dutch our knowledge of the language was too little. I never found out if it's true, or if it was typical Belgian propaganda. But a situation like this should be avoided completely.
I don't know how the situation currently goes in
Friesland. I believe their own West Frisian language has a special status as well. Perhaps that could be used as a model for the status of Flemish.
Secondly,
economically. The harbours of Rotterdam and Antwerpen would suddenly both fall under the same government. Given the competition there, we'd need guarantees the Dutch don't try to end the Antverpian harbour, which would effectively kill off a huge part of the entire Flemish economy. If they allowed us to finally finish the
Iron Rhine, that would be much obliged as well.
The economic part for me is quite important, given my background in economics and logistics.
Thirdly, there's still this slightly
religious disagreement between catholics and protestants. It's one of the reasons why we separated in the first place. I personally don't care for this, as I'm not christian, but many Flemish nationalists are. So if the Dutch government would decide to take certain rights away from the Catholic church, that could lead to a pretty big schism.
I am unsure if the current generation cares much for this third part. But people of my grandparents' and maybe parents' generation wouldn't like being subject to a protestant king unless they can be certain their religion won't be touched.
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Many other flemish focus too much on the small differences and stereotypes. Such as they Dutchmen are more like cheapskates (I'm not saying they are, but it's the stereotype here) and that they live in these tiny rented homes, while many Flemish live in relatively large, self-owned houses.
But in my opinion those differences are not important enough to disallow our reunion as a people.