Yesterday I called a car rental agency in Hannover to book a car (part of my job). Since my German is completely shabby, I asked if the person on the other line spoke English - instead, she offered to speak French...

Now, there's nothing wrong with that. The good lady probably presumed he's calling from Belgium so he must talk French. Why yes, I do - but it's not my native language (and it turned out her English was excellent, probably better than mine). You see, historically, Belgium, when it became to be, was conceived by its ruling class as a unitary state with one official language - French. La Belgique sera latine ou elle ne sera pas. Now, that was the Zeitgeist - you really can't blame them. Everyone in charge pretty much thought like that back then.
Its proponents argued the local Flemish dialects were not similar enough to one another to be effectively used in administration - although they had been since the Middle Ages, and quite successfully. So for almost 150 years, Belgium was a state 'home' to two cultures - the Flemish one (Flemish dialects are closely related to Dutch) and the Walloon one (which originally did not speak French, but was gallicised thoroughly in the past two centuries).

During its unitary existence, the Belgian state retained its unilingually French upper class and consequently its stronly gallicising character, so to the unitiated (sadly, most people abroad) it looked like a homogenous, French speaking country. Official life was French only, and public schools were the instrument to impose it as the lingua franca for future generations. Brussels, a historically Flemish city but now inhabited by a majority of French speakers, is a living testimony of the doubtful 'success' of that approach. I call it colonisation, but some might prefer to look at it as the natural order of things - some people, even nowadays, believe some cultures can claim to be superior to others. And no, most of those don't live in Flanders.

Now you can't blame people for something they don't know. But one would think that with the recent political events in Belgium - events that got international press coverage, even though foreign press mostly follow French speaking Belgian news, and not the Flemish news - more people would realise Belgium is not just a happy bunch of French talking people.
Flemish have always been a majority in this country, and yet people still presume we only talk French. So yes, we have been gallicised. And yes, that has succeeded for a large part - the Walloon part of the country virtually knows no dialects anymore, they all got supplanted by French. Flanders more or less survived the assimilation process. I can understand people coming from Latin cultures tend to think that - Latin cultures are often rather self-absorbed, even more than Anglo-Saxon ones or other major European cultures - but I would think Germans, English, ... would know better. Yet they don't.

I am well aware French is far more important than Dutch - if only by amount of native speakers. However, what strikes me time and again is the fact, when foreign media want coverage of a problem in Belgium, they almost exclusively turn to the francophone media in Belgium. While that is a rather natural thing - most foreign journalists will know French rather than Dutch - it also gives a horribly wrong (and one-sided) image. In general this does not cause any significant problems.

However, if the topic in particular is polarised in a communautarian way - like tensions between Belgium's regions (Belgium is a federal state) - it can stigmatise one party very quickly and efficiently. And we all know stigmas are damn hard to get rid of. That is what has happened recently, during the communautarian tensions that gave way to a difficult government formation. Foreign media were all over it - like Oh my god Belgium still has no government! - but they only reported one side of the story. That is - the part of the French community, because their language is what most foreign journalists could understand. Nobody but some lone UK journalist really thought abour source reliability or colouredness; no - they just wanted a story. Nobody asked any questions about this obviously one-sided approach. But can you blame them, if they think Belgium is only speaking French?

I think we can. Even worse - I think we have to.

What happened to journalism, may I ask? A good story requires a thorough background check, preferably multiple sources, different points of view, in short: balance. Of course, it is impossible to exclude bias. Bias is only human. But there is a huge difference between doing the best you can to get a comprehensive article, and be lax and just throw whatever you can get at your public - a public that most of the time knows even less about the topic than you do, and probably can't be bothered. We all know how popular opinion making works. It doesn't need much facts. It mostly needs opinions. Strong ones, preferably. The more radical, the better. The more one-sided, the better.
It is quite okay to be biased - in an opinionated piece. A reporter, though, should try to be as objective as he can be - he reports. If not, he needs to look for another job. Or get a blog - you can be just like me ;-).

So there it is - my major gripe with foreign coverage of our dearest banana constitutional democracy. It may not be PC, but that does not change anything about the validity of my arguments.

Note: You might wanna know that I'm Flemish myself, so I am not claiming the historical part of this post is objective (history, by nature, has a certain bias). Nevertheless, facts are facts, there's never enough spin that can change those. And yes, I know the expression is 'banana republic', but that wouldn't be technically correct, would it ;-).