Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reads, a Jacquin podcast where we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name is Daniel Finn, and the features editor here at Jacquin, and I'll be presenting the show.

Belgium may be one of the smallest countries in Western Europe, but its capital plays host to the EU, as well as NATO.

In 1955, the US-led Military Alliance produced a series of short movies that profiled its member states.

In the 20th century and within the Atlantic community, the frontiers of Belgium are clearly defined.

South of the Netherlands and north of France, neighboring on Luxembourg and Germany, and across the channel from Britain.

A strategic crossroads frequently violated through the centuries by rival armies.

In self-protection, the people sought refuge and security in tightly unified city-states.

The Baroque and Gilt Gothic magnificence of the Brussels Grand Place reflects the prosperity these independent cities achieved.

Rudy Scheng, a Reichstrat, Rudy Raielle, or Kuning Clickestrat, according to whether your native Belgian language is Flemish or French.

Officially, it's four and a half million of one and three and a half million of the other, but in fact the majority of the people speak the two languages.

Within a 200-mile radius of the Belgian capital, live 72 million Europeans, British, French, Dutch, Luxemburgers, and Germans, as well as the Belgians themselves.

If the Atlantic Alliance can succeed in breaking down national barriers to encourage a wider flow of goods and ideas, the Belgians see their capital and their country as certain to gain increasing importance,

as an international center within the Atlantic community.

Almost 70 years later, Brussels is still the headquarters of the Atlantic Alliance, and the main hub of European integration.

But the harmonious picture of inter-communal relations conjured up by NATO's infomercial has given way to talk of outright separation.

Our guest today for a conversation about class, region, and empire in modern Belgium is Anton Jager.

Anton is a Belgian historian of political thought who's written for a number of publications, including Jacobin and New Left Review.

How did Belgium come to be one of the first industrial states in Western Europe, and what was the political significance of that transformation?

Yes, a very big historiographical question, which are several answers, and I'm going to try to give the most plausible one, I think.

So what makes the industrialization or the early industrialization of Belgium particularly puzzling is that it militates quite aggressively against this barbarian idea that capitalism only develops in Protestant countries or that you need cultural base of Protestantism for capitalism to actually take off,

while what you see in the case of Belgium, which was still predominantly Catholic country in the early 19th century, it actually became the most powerful industrial state on the continent after Britain, of course.

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