A Century Of Freedom...And Political Changes

Albert Devèze

"A [political] party does not have a reason for being unless it possesses its own ideal which it pursues with  the conscious and tenacious effort to progressively achieve it, an ideal which is susceptible to arouse within its adherents enthusiastic impulses and fervors of faith.
Does that mean the party must adhere to an immutable dogmatism, whose rigid rule will be the norm of its activity? Definitely not. It must, on the contrary, understand that when it comes to translating its idealism into positive laws, that these can only be the legislative raiment adapted to the measure of the social being who wears it; that this collective being, through internal and external transformations, suffers all the phenomena of growth and development, health and sickness, and that yesterday's impossibilities must consequently become today's possibilities and tomorrow's inevitable. If such is not that party's concept of politics, it would soon become a power of blind conservatism first, of reaction next. From then on, its decline would sanction its divorce from the people's material and moral necessities whose destinies it would have the pretension to hamper."

~Albert Devèze, Un siècle de libéralisme

(transl. by A. Ellefson)

After the Catholic Party, it is the Liberal Party that is the oldest political party in Belgium, having been officially formed in 1846, followed by the third of the three major parties, the Socialist Party, which was founded in 1857 (although, with time, these have split and reformed into many other parties).

When Holland Had Two Capitals

I know, this is a blog about Belgium (and Europe, by extension), so why devote a post to Holland? Well, it turns out that Belgium used to be part of the Netherlands, before Belgium became its own country.

The first king of the Netherlands, King Willem Frederick I, after the northern and southern parts of that country were united. The new king had wanted to have only one capital at the time, Brussels, as he had a predilection for the Southern part of his country (as evidenced by his serious investments in that area--see below). But the Powers that Be (previously mentioned in The Birth And Evolution Of An Artificial State) decided otherwise, and so the Netherlands had two heads of state for a while: Brussels and The Hague.

As a result, the Dutch Parliament had to travel "from one capital to the other, as did 600 families o functionaries and the diplomatic corp. Moving back and forth cost a lot of money, and much energy and time was lost transporting archives."