It would be hard to think of a country with less national feeling than Belgium. Internally divided, deadlocked politically, sewn together out of historical scraps, it is the rare case of an imagined non-community: a neutral vessel through which other chauvinisms (notably Flemish) flow. In place of pride, Belgians have Belgitude. Instead of anthems or heroes, they have waffles, frittes, beer, incompetent governance, recurring strikes, eurocrats, some painters, and chocolate. Everyone followed the games, of course, but my Belgian friends did so bywith proxy or assumed allegiances: a favorite player, Pan-African solidarity, dislike of the French.
All this changed in 2014. Belgitude took on a sunnier, more sincere complexion thanks not to any shift in ideology or economics, but to football. After over a decade of failure, The Red Devils––Les Diables Rouges to French-speakers or De Rode Duivels to the Flemish––qualified for the World Cup in Brazil. They had a new head coach, Marc Wilmots, a former attacking midfielder and Walloon senator. More importantly, they had players who were actually good. Essentially every athlete in the team had come of age in the superior leagues of adjacent countries.
There was the tween-idol-lookin boyish wunderkind, Kevin De Bruyne, then still at Wolfsburg, and his lanky, stone-faced rival, the goalie Thibaut Courtois, who caused a scandal) when he apparently “stole” De Bruyne’s then-girlfriend in 2013. On the wing, the Devils boasted the wily dribbling genius of Eden Hazard, the “Belgian Magician,” and in attack, they had the imposing threat of Romelu Lukaku, one of the team’s many postcolonial fairytales.
And then, of course, there was Vincent Kompany. The previous year, Kompany had lifted the Premier League trophy wearing the armband of Manchester City. As captain of the Belgian team, Kompany possessed a media-trained charm, an Obama-like class, that turned him into a dignitary on spikes: the national reconciler-in-chief. He was a winner––but he was also more than that. Well-spoken in both French and Flemish (not to mention English), Kompany was emblematic of the new Belgium: the mixed-race parentage, a child of divorce, Anderlect’s own Horatio Alger, a genuinely good guy. We are all mysteriously affected by our names, which in turn have the power to affect others. Who doesn’t want to be kept company? Or to be part of one? As both balm and adhesive, Kompany’s aura soothed long-running intra-national grievance. He was like Mr. Rogers for the Flemish and Walloons.
If football can be seen as a repository for martial emotions, then in Belgium it was something like the reverse: not the channeling of proto-Fascist energies into the bloodless domain of sport, but the fabrication of a national story—a sense of togetherness—out of affective thin air.
In 2014, with so many talented athletes and photogenic faces, the marketing went into hyperdrive. Brand partnerships proliferated. Lifesize cutouts began appearing in supermarkets. The beer company Jupiler launched its “Red Inside” campaign, plastering its logo over Belgian flags. #TousEnsemble was the Francophone hashtag. It was nationalism as team spirit in the form of a Coke commercial or H&M ad. A much-viewed docuseries following the 2014 team, funded by the French-speaking Wallonia-Brussels federation, began with a Flemish ultra in a wheelchair eulogizing Kompany as all that was best in the Kingdom.
Most chauvinisms have their roots in pre-capitalist, blood-and-soil passions. They reach back to an age that was displaced, at least according to A.O. Hirschman, by the market’s promotion of rational self-interest over chivalric glory. So if one endpoint of soccer nationalism has been the postmodern carnivalesque, what Ian Buruma calls “a giant costume party, a jokey, theatrical form of chauvinism,” then Belgium got there first. The Red Devils phenomenon represents an almost entirely commercial, market-driven project of symbolic nation building: the stirring-up of profitable if ephemeral passions meant not for the battlefield but the gift shop. In Belgium, the national top soil is thin.
In many respects, that’s what makes it so easy to liken basically every other European capital (yes––including Berlin), the city doesn’t belong to any one people. The street signs are always double––Arts-Loi or Kunst-Wet––and what you hear most in several neighborhoods is Arabic. Despite being the seat of European bureaucracy, there’s a benign anarchy to Brussels, an ungovernability, as if it were the neglected latch-key child of distracted, dysfunctional parents. If France is for the French, then Belgium is for no one in particular. And while the supposed “Africanness” of Les Bleus has made the French national team a political lightning rod as much it is as a gathering force,by contrast, essentially no one in the Belgian media––or, in my experience, in pubs or cafes or everyday discussion––ever mentioned the racial makeup of The Red Devils. They were simply red. Skin color or phenotype didn’t matter. There was a simplicity born of historical inexperience with collective identity that allowed the national group portrait to be as happy as it was, in 2014, and as innocent. When Belgium lost to Argentina in the quarter-finals of the Brazil tournament, many of my friends cried their eyes out.
The so-called Golden Generation of Belgian talent that dawned in 2014 was supposed to crest four years later in Russia. What happened instead could’ve been written by Mark Fisher and soundtracked by Boards of Canada: nostalgia for a future that never came to be. The hauntology of football.
After crashing out to Wales in the 2012 Euros, the team got a new coach, Roberto Martinez, fresh from Everton, a Spaniard, and thus neither Flemish nor Walloon, a neutral third-party. Martinez’s style was all-out attack, which unleashed creative, offensive wonders. The link-up play was beautiful to behold.
As Martinez supercharged expectations, Belgium’s athletic and political realities continued to diverge. Soccer had once promised to be an aspirational mirror, or metaphor, for the harmony of Belgian society. The shared understanding of the athletes on the pitch, however, so unlike that of their politicians, had turned it into something else: an alternate universe.
The 2018 marketing phenomenon put the 2014 campaign to shame. Branded flags hung from every establishment. Metro stops were officially renamed––in both French and Flemish. Demey became “Demey-final” (for semi-final), while Merode became “MeRode Duivels.” Perhaps the sweetness of the fantasy––as sweet as a Belgian ale or the thought of your depressed parents remarrying––made the sour feeling of the loss to France in the “Demey-final” all the more palpable. Anybody but the French! And the nature of the loss––a header from a corner, Umtiti outjumping Fellaini by barely an inch––gave Belgians a taste of the spite and hatred and xenophobia to which all self-regarding nations are prone: the wounded obverse of collective pride.
In retrospect, the highlight of the Golden Generation came the week before the loss to France, in the quarter-final victory against Brazil, which followed, only four days after a last-minute knockout-stage qualifying win over Japan. I watched that game with my friends at a bar in Uccle, a verdant, upscale neighborhood. Belgian flags and televisions covered the walls. Everyone was dressed in black, yellow, and red. The game was tied nil-nil at the half but when the teams retook the field, the Samurai Blue scored twice in quick succession. A stunned silence fell over the bar and indeed the city and the nation. How could this happen? How could the fairy tale end so soon?
In the 65th minute, Martinez rolled the dice, sending on Marouane Fellaini and Nacer Chadli. The change elicited a chorus of groans in the chairs around me; Fellaini and Chadli were known as competent footballers, a bit workmanlike, at times awkward, possessing none of the finely-tuned virtuosity of a De Bruyne or Hazard. When you google Fellaini you see a much-circulated photograph of him taking a ball straight to the face. Which is exactly what he did to equalize after Jan Vertonghen had clawed one back minutes before. Then, at the end of stoppage time, the game square at 2-2, Courtois released De Bruyne in a lightning breakaway; De Bruyne fed Thomas Meunier on the right who crossed into the box, Lukaku stepping over the ball so the unguarded Chadli could stroke it home––the last touch of the game. How to describe the emotion of that moment without condescending to it? Belgitude was supposed to be about drowning your marginalism in strong beer and morbid irony––not cheers and hugs and jumping up and down. But when the ball hit the net, we cheered and hugged and jumped up and down. We didn’t know it then but that goal, Chadli’s second against Brazil, was the Golden Generation’s high water mark.
When the Red Devils returned home to celebrate their accomplishment––a third-place finish, the country’s best-ever World Cup performance––over 40,000 fans gathered in Brussels along the parade route, which ended in the historic Grande Place. That afternoon yellow smoke hung in the air above a sea of red bodies dancing to techno. People waved flags. DJ’s dropped the beat. For the first time Belgians had their heroes: Hazard in his sunglasses grinning from behind the decks, Kompany shaking hands and kissing babies. And what is said of war must also be true for football: soccer is a force which gives us meaning.