NUTS! (English) | |||||
| Capital (and largest city) |
Arlon | ||||
| Other cities | Luxembourg City, Bastogne, Bouillon, Trier | ||||
| Language official |
French | ||||
| others | Dutch, German, Luxembourgish | ||||
| Government | Political, economic, and military union of:
| ||||
| Legislature | Interparliamentary Council | ||||
| Head of the Union | Henri of Luxembourg | ||||
| Secretary-General | Arnaud Robinet | ||||
| Established | 1944, renewed 1985 | ||||
| Currency | Benelux franc (⨎) | ||||
| Organizations |  Atlantic Defense Community
| ||||
Since 1983, Luxembourg and what remained of the Belgian state have cooperated ever more closely, using the Benelux Union as their framework for doing so. Members of the union are considered independent states, but Benelux itself more often acts as a single entity in world affairs. It has a common military command, currency, customs and border enforcement, and head of state - Henri of the House of Luxembourg-Nassau, who holds the titles of Grand Duke of Luxembourg, King of the Belgians, and Head of the Union. The parliament of Benelux consists of members drawn from the respective parliaments of its members.
Note that despite its impressive-sounding name, the modern Benelux has a presence in less than half of the former territory of Belgium and no portion of the Netherlands. Its claim to the name comes from continuity with the prewar institution, not control of the entire Benelux region. In 2018 the Trier city-state joined the union, so that it once again has three effective members.
History[]
Benelux has existed since World War II, when it was first planned by the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, then in exile in London. The economic and political integration of Benelux was an important precursor to the European Economic Community.
1983[]
Luxembourg has the distinction of being the only NATO country not to be directly targeted by Soviet nuclear weapons on 26 September 1983. However, the country certainly felt the war's impact. The nearest targets were the West German air bases at Bitburg and Sprangdahlem, the city of Saarbrücken, and the French city and air base of Metz. In Belgium, all the strikes were in the center of the country. The eastern part, located in the Ardennes and facing Luxembourg, did not experience any nuclear explosions.
The Belgian national government was crippled by a nuclear attack to Brussels, while the Luxembourgish government declared a state of emergency immediately. Local authorities did what they could to tell their people to keep calm. With most modern communications disabled, they had to resort to printing posters and sending police to shout messages in the main streets. Such means could do little to prevent a panic. Police and gendarmes tried in vain to stop looting, but before that morning was over, order was breaking down, as it was in cities across Europe.
By the end of the day, the panic was compounded as people fleeing the blasts began to arrive, together with wind-borne radioactive fallout. Warsaw Pact planes dropping conventional bombs did additional damage: they obliterated Luxembourg's large civil airport and Jehonville Airfield in eastern Belgium, a reserve NATO facility, and took out government facilities in Luxembourg City, both of Luxembourg and the EEC. A few days later, still more people arrived fleeing the Soviet armies that had made a faltering yet incredibly destructive push into West Germany. This wave of refugees was not wholly civilian. Groups of soldiers also fled in disarray. Now the true horror of this period set in: the desperate, visceral urge to run for safety, combined with the knowledge that any possible destination would be just as bad or worse.
Reference map of prewar Benelux. The Benelux Union still claims some responsibility over this entire area.
Knowing this, authorities tried to issue more directives to stay in place. But many people were disinclined to listen. They joined the human flood. Prospects were not good in any direction. Many initially sought to go northeastward, away from the Soviet army. But the coastal regions were beset by flooding caused by broken dams, and with no outside help, few who fled there survived. Before too long the refugees became a directionless tide drifting in all directions, vainly seeking a place that could provide shelter. People began to clump together in impromptu bands as they moved, sharing what little they could find and providing mutual defense. A few safe havens emerged in southern Flanders, the eastern Campines, and especially in the hills of the Ardennes. Camps formed in these areas, but even here, resources were scarce or nonexistent.
The ordinary institutions of society could not cope with all this. Public administration ceased to function at almost every level. When they could not maintain order, police and gendarmes frequently joined the throng.
Castle Berg
The leaders of the Luxembourgish national government - the Grand Duke, Prime Minister, and cabinet - were well-informed enough to know that leaving could not do any good for themselves or the country, yet they also could not hope to confront the crisis with any effectiveness. All they could do was wait and hope to survive. They had one asset here not available to most citizens: a castle, namely the grand ducal residence of Schlass Berg. Berg was north of the capital, well protected in the rugged terrain of the Ardennes. Grand Duke Jean had been there on the morning when the missiles came down. He had summoned other members of the grand ducal family there immediately, and within a few days, most of the cabinet and the remaining commanders of the gendarmerie were there too.
On the Belgian side of the border, even this level of coordination was impossible. Eventually, the remains of the local government of Luxembourg Province would attempt to re-create Belgium with the support of retreating soldiers. But for now, it was panic and chaos without any direction.
1984[]
Death followed disorder, beginning in the winter of 1983-4 and into the following year. All over Europe, people faced hunger, epidemics, untreated radiation burns. Hospitals became refugee camps, then tombs. A large portion of livestock in the region's farms was slaughtered that winter because so little else could be found. More generally, people began spreading out from the towns and main roads into the countryside. Even in the deepest Ardennes, bands of survivors roamed in search of sources of food.
Even accidental injuries became a deadly threat, since reliable care was difficult to find. Luxembourg's Prime Minister Pierre Werner was killed from complications arising from such an accident. Members of the government, still holed up inside Berg Castle, had access to physicians but supplies were still hard to find. Werner's death damaged the cohesion of the government, and some officials began to drift northward, joining other displaced persons surviving in the Ardennes.
Groups of itinerant soldiers came to the fore during 1984, filling the gap left by the collapse of state power and civil society. The soldiers differed in their cohesiveness as units and in their overall commitment to the rule of law. Some certainly came in undisciplined bands and survived by forcibly taking things from the suffering populace. This was especially true of soldiers forced to wander in countries that were not their own.
Bucking this trend, eastern Wallonia came to host several groups of Belgian troops straggling back from Germany. The staff of the 10th Armored Brigade assumed a leadership role. This reserve brigade had been stationed in Limbourg not far from the Belgium-Netherlands-Germany tripoint. Much of its strength had tried to push east to meet the Soviets, but when the front collapsed, the commander judged that the Ardennes was the best place to rally. They were joined by other Belgians retreating from the front alongside groups of West German and British troops. The pattern of fallout prevented most from returning to their home regions, so they remained in the east. This relatively high concentration of soldiers in their home country encouraged cooperation: with each other, with foreign troops, and with local people, both natives and migrants. Over the course of 1984, a rudimentary military regime took shape in the region, centered in the southern part of Belgium's Luxembourg province.
Still, disorder reigned in most parts of western Europe. In Luxembourg city, a ragtag band of German soldiers, apparently a mix of East and West, served as the leading power for a good part of the year before moving on toward the south. In their wake, a company of the Gendarmerie still loyal to the government temporarily restored order in the hollowed-out capital. Grand Duke Jean even came to the city, visited some camps and hospitals, and tried to project the image that the country was still functioning. But the population was still too mobile, and social conditions too volatile, to govern effectively. That second winter, the government again could do little to support the masses of hungry people sprawled along the roads and towns in the southern part of the country. Its rule was only nominal, vulnerable to the next armed band that would come along.
The emerging Belgian military government made attempts to coordinate its activities with the grand ducal government in Berg and what was left of surviving localities in Germany; the three considered themselves to still be wartime allies. In early 1984 they still were making plans to resist a Soviet invasion. When this did not happen, they shifted to sharing supplies, above all what little they could find to purify water and care for the sick. Radiation continued to take its toll, and most of the survivors were suffering from health complications.
A bit further out, some coherent NATO army units survived in the region west of Kaiserslauten in the southern Rhineland. This group was still on a war footing for most of 1984, sending detachments across the Rhine to pursue what was left of the Soviet invaders. Led by Americans and West Germans, this group was distrustful and dismissive of the civilian government in Luxembourg and proved far less willing than the Belgians to cooperate during this period.
In every other direction, fallout and destruction impeded travel. Survivors in western Flanders, near the coast, were cut off from the Belgians in Luxembourg Province by the radioactive wastes of central Belgium. And anyway, many of them were ready to turn their backs to Belgian nationhood, embracing instead Flemish identity. Contacts between these two surviving communities remained tense and infrequent. Another pocket of survivors in the Campines was less hostile, but so distant that they and the emergency government had no way to meaningfully support one another.
The main source of information from the outside came from groups of survivors still crisscrossing the continent in search of safety. They brought rumors - like the story that Holland and Zeeland were entirely underwater, or that the Swiss had closed all their borders and were treating the survivors like an enemy army. The confusion, fear and isolation of this period compounded the other privations.
1985-1986[]
By now, Grand Duke Jean and the Berg government were adjusting to the new reality. As the only civil government left in perhaps all of northwestern Europe, they enjoyed some measure of respect, but the renegade soldiers who held sway in the capital could still largely do what they wanted with impunity. And as foreigners now outnumbered native Luxembourgers within the country's borders, the government could not even rely on the people's automatic loyalty.
Early in 1985, the Belgian military government and the Luxembourg grand duchy deepened their cooperation by confirming the terms of the Benelux Union. For now this was largely symbolic, since the governments lacked the ability to help each other very much. But it ensured that they would form a united bloc in their dealings with outsiders. From 1985 til today, Benelux has functioned as a unit on the international stage, though the Netherlands, the -ne- of Benelux, has never been able to participate.
In the more rugged parts of the Ardennes, a semblance of peace returned, though of course nothing like normalcy. The people who had settled there were staying for longer and by and large accepted the authority of the respective governments, Belgian and Luxembourgish. Farming was at a subsistence level, the supply of food was insecure, and all the soil had a level of contamination; but new rhythms and routines brought some predictability to life. The population of livestock was growing again. City people were learning farming and husbandry.
Belgian troops began a gradual demobilization in 1986. The conscripts who wanted to return home had deserted a long time ago, seeking their families among the destruction or resettling in western Flanders or elsewhere. But many who remained were likewise tired of military service, and anyway the community needed more people working to produce food. The army also began to work with locals to start reconstructing pieces of the local civil administration. The Luxembourg provincial government, and several municipal colleges, were functioning again by the end of 1986, though they still reported to the army, which was acting in the name of the Belgian state. In Luxembourg too, civil administration was returning at the commune level, enabled by a more stable population. However, the grand ducal government was not able fully to coordinate the different villages, and many were operating basically on their own.
1987-1992[]
Luxembourg passed a milestone in 1987 when it held elections for a new Chamber of Deputies, the first since Doomsday and certainly the region's first restored national parliament to meet since the war. In order to work with the new parliament, the administration finally left its castle and moved to the town of Diekirch, capital of Luxembourg's northern district. However, the Grand Duke did not yet dissolve the emergency wartime government, instead merely naming new members to it from among the Deputies. Jean had taken on a great deal of personal power during the emergency and was unwilling to give up responsibility just yet. The former British army colonel still believed that his firm leadership was necessary for his country's survival.
However, fate intervened in the Grand Duke's plans. Radiation and exhaustion finally overpowered him, and he died in September of 1987. Henri, his son, inherited the throne.
In 1988, the Belgians followed Luxembourg's lead and set up the rudiments of a civil administration. The state again attempted to join forces with the Flemish survivors at the other end of the country, and again were rebuffed. From this point Belgium and Flanders went their separate ways, though the Belgian government never gave up its goal of reuniting the country.
The administration also decided, with the military's agreement, to recognize Grand Duke Henri as Belgium's head of state in 1989. He was the nephew of the late King Baudouin: the king's older sister Josephine had married Grand Duke Jean. It was likely but not certain that the king had no other living relatives. The sensible course was to acknowledge Henri as King of the Belgians for now, with the proviso that he would step aside if a closer relative would ever be found. Henri did not have the power to influence policy on the Belgian side of the border, as he did in his home country. The army officers were still definitely in charge. But a head of state gave more credibility to the state, and the personal union strengthened the ties already established via Benelux.
In 1992, Belgium finally held its own elections for a new Parliament. The legislatures of both Belgium and Luxembourg accordingly chose members to meet in a new Benelux Parliament. Its permanent home would be in Arlon, the provisional Belgian capital, but it held its ceremonial reopening in the Bastogne, a symbol of perseverance since World War II. Among its resolutions was a call for the two states to combine their militaries and gendarmeries into a single Union Command answerable to the civil governments. Neither side was ready yet to take this step immediately: citing the ongoing emergency, the ruling clique of the monarch, the Belgian officers, and other unelected leaders continued to set policy themselves. But Benelux was clearly on the path toward democratic civilian rule.
These same years were marked by growing tension with the Rhineland militaries. A shifting set of units and factions held sway over a string of settlements to the east of Belgium and Luxembourg. By and large they still claimed to represent what was left of the NATO alliance; while not many original personnel were left in arms, their commanders were mostly World War III veterans. The rivalry with Benelux grew steadily, and by the early 90s each side had denounced the other as illegitimate. The city of Trier, the most prominent surviving community in the region, became a flashpoint, with different factions aligning themselves with Benelux or with the Rhineland juntas. The two sides did not go to war, but the idea that they might resume their alliance faded forever.
1992-1999[]
By the mid-90s, the area of the Benelux Union was showing signs of recovery. A money economy was re-emerging, and the joint government found itself regulating the value of old Luxembourgish and Belgian francs. Civil rule and elections had returned, if imperfectly. Most importantly, the restored administrations were slowly regaining the confidence of local inhabitants. They could now claim with some credibility to be the legitimate continuation of the Benelux states.
In 1996, a largely Belgian armed force entered Luxembourg City, occupying the heights of the city center and demonstrating that the Union was now stronger than the independent armed bands that had dominated the remains of the city. Luxembourg finally regained its capital. Henri soon followed and raised the grand ducal standard triumphantly over the ruins of the old palace. A large part of the people, who by now were mostly French- or German-born, welcomed him. The following year the national government moved from Diekirch back to Luxembourg City.
Henri dissolved the wartime government in 1999, finally stepping aside to adopt a mostly ceremonial role. This act highlighted the successful recovery of the Benelux allies. They had restored a functioning state in the chaotic mess of western Europe.
2000-2009[]
In the 2000s, the rivalry with the Rhineland escalated. In 2001 Belgium and Luxembourg carried out the long-awaited plan to combine their military security forces under a single Union Command. In 2003 Luxembourg organized new cantons in the hills of northeastern Saarland, incorporating for the first time a significant piece of former German territory. Both acts were seen as provocations in the Rhine. In 2005 the scattered factions formed a new defensive pact, the Rhineland Alliance.
This was a culmination of the polarizing process that had been building for twenty years between the former allies. Trier, still caught between the two sides, became hotly contested territory. In late 2005 a pair of Belgian merchants were abducted, then released with their fingers broken. Benelux sent a company of Union troops into the city to secure it for peaceful commerce. But they were attacked openly, and a firefight broke out that left Benelux in control of the left bank of the Moselle, Rhinelander partisans on the right, and an almost total stoppage of traffic on the city's three bridges.
Benelux responded with a much larger force, including a pair of British Chieftain tanks. This was enough to drive opponents from the city with minimal combat, sparing the ancient center of Trier from damage. But the land was now truly at war. East of the city, both tanks were rendered inoperable by landmines and C-4 charges; most of the rest of the war would be fought by infantry. In a decisive battle at Nonnweiler, Union brigades fought an Oberstein army to a standstill. The Rhineland lacked the capacity to mount another offensive. Officially Trier was restored to neutrality, but Benelux was clearly the dominant force in the city-state. The setback sparked a political crisis in Oberstein that ended with the execution of its American leader and, eventually, the establishment of a joint civil-military government.
Meanwhile, improvements in communication and trade were improving connections to the world outside the tiny island that Benelux and the Rhineland uneasily shared. Overland routes saw increased traffic to North Germany, Burgundy, and Switzerland. Benelux created a new foreign service to manage relations with this more interconnected world of European survivors.
The Atlantic Defense Community was founded in 2007. It was above all an alliance for maritime security in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, but it also consciously positioned itself as a successor to the old NATO alliance. Benelux leaders took an immediate interest, especially leaders from the older generation. They had labored for decades to rebuild the structures of Luxembourg and Belgium; now they could begin to rebuild the institutions of Western Europe, as well. Furthermore, everyone hoped that Atlantic connections would deter another Rhinelander attack.
Foreign leaders were skeptical that this poor, landlocked union could contribute anything to the alliance. Some dismissed the bid as an attempt to get a free boost to its own defense. For some years Benelux diplomats tried to persuade the Atlantic nations that they had something to offer. Benelux, they argued, could serve as a link for radio communication, as a centrally-located airport, and as a toehold in Europe's turbulent interior. They also touted the Union's historic importance to the project of European integration and its past cooperation with the allied nations.
Since 2010[]
On March 10, 2010, after a final diplomatic push by the Benelux foreign minister Anne Grommerch, the ADC voted to accept Benelux as a "partner nation". The newly-invented status allowed the Union to participate more fully than a mere observer, but not on the same level as the full members. The restored runway of Jehonville Airfield served as a stopover base for ADC aircraft heading southward during the Second Sicily War. This demonstrated its usefulness to the alliance. In 2012, Benelux became a full member when the ADC carried out its plans to make it the headquarters of its Mainland Brigade, a new center of operations in central Europe.
In 2014, with ADC encouragement, Benelux dropped its policy of treating Trier as a neutral city-state. It was now to be part of Benelux's defensive perimeter along its eastern flank. With the approval of the local government, Benelux stationed a military detachment, now much better equipped with guns and supplies from the Nordic Union, on roads south and east of the city. This provoked a burst of small yet violent attacks along the borders, but the Rhineland states themselves refrained from doing anything beyond lodging protests.
In 2018, twelve years after the war, Trier's senate voted to accede to membership in the Benelux Union. The union had consisted of only two nations since World War III (despite a nominal Dutch presence in its institutions), and this was its first time admitting a new member.
Institutions[]
The following institutions comprise the Benelux Union:
- Interparliamentary Council ("Parliament")
- Committee of Ministers ("Cabinet")
- Economic Committee
- Unified Command
- Joint Police Commission
- Olympic and Sport Committee
- Crown
Membership[]
The postwar Benelux began as a cooperative effort between Belgian soldiers and the Luxembourgish grand ducal house; but as the civil governments and Union institutions developed, they always kept a place for the Netherlands, both to maintain continuity with the original Benelux and as an expression of hope for a future recovery and reunification. Originally, this role was served by Dutch soldiers and citizens who had fled into Belgian or Luxembourgish territory. As time went on, this direct connection to the Netherlands grew ever more tenuous. A Dutch infantry battalion still serves under the Belgian army. It includes but is by no means limited to soldiers whose parents had been Dutch or who have some other Dutch connection. A few token seats in Parliament and some of the other institutions are also designated for the Netherlands; these also are filled by qualified people who can claim some connection to the country.
The city of Trier's accession in 2018 represented the first-ever expansion of the Union beyond the original members. It required some adjustments to the design of the Union institutions, which had not been designed with an open-ended membership in mind. It also raised the question of other members in the future from the surviving city-states of Germany and France, but no other community has a close relationship to Benelux comparable to Trier.
Symbols[]
The Union's emblem and the main device on its flag is a ring depicting the flags of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Benelux has never totally given up on the idea of reincorporating the Netherlands, and the flag represents that aspiration.
the Red Lion of Luxembourg
The Red Lion of the House of Luxembourg became an unofficial unifying symbol in the early days of the revived union in the 80s. It is used as a symbol both in independent Luxembourg and Luxembourg Province of Belgium, where almost all of the secure Belgian territory is located. The lion represents not just the region, but also the local culture, the ruling dynasty, and continuity with prewar nations. It can also be identified with the Leo Belgicus, a symbol of the entire Benelux region since the days of the Renaissance.
The cryptic English word NUTS! serves as the union's war cry and not-quite-official motto. It comes from the 1944 Siege of Bastogne, part of the Battle of the Bulge. Messengers from Nazi German army came to ask the American troops to surrender, to which the American commander gave the famous, defiant, one-word typewritten reply. The siege became an important part of the mythology of the new Benelux. It represents defiance in the face of adversity and carries a pan-Allied or pan-Western appeal that can bring together citizens of different nationalities. Bastogne itself is of symbolic importance to the Union; its major treaties were signed there, and it is where the parliament first met, even though the permanent capital has never been elsewhere than Arlon. The Nuts cry is the quintessential expression of Benelux patriotism, heard everywhere from military drills to sporting events.
International relations[]
Since Benelux has a high level of political, economic, and military integration and has a single head of state, it functions in most ways as a single entity on the world stage. It is Benelux, not Luxembourg or the Belgian remnant government, that sits as a member of the League of Nations and the Atlantic Defense Community.
The Rhineland settlements east of Benelux remain unfriendly, but the defensive boost provided by the ADC has deterred them from making any further large-scale attacks. Links to the ADC have brought benefits beyond defense. The Atlantic allies have helped develop infrastructure and been a source of industrial goods. A small number of foreign military personnel are stationed here, mostly in Luxembourg City, and locals generally welcome them.
The Union's continuing claim to represent all of the original three Benelux countries is contested and unenforceable. The only two states of any significance, Flanders and Friesland, have developed distinct national identities and ruled out any possibility of reunificaiton. People in small, isolated settlements like the Campines might still think of Benelux as "the government" but see it as useless and remote. The most direct successor to the Kingdom of the Netherlands is in fact the faraway Netherlands Antilles, which has no real relations with the Union; neither government has ever had to take a position on the status of the other.
Culture[]
The region experienced an extraordinary level of population turnover during the 80s and 90s, greatly changing the local culture. A majority of the people in the Benelux countries today have roots from outside, especially France and Germany, with some from the Netherlands. A modest but not insignificant number of stranded American military personnel also settled here following the war, as did an even smaller number from Britain.
French became the common language between the Belgian and Luxembourgish governments very early on. Most of its institutions remain largely Francophone, but officially the Union is trilingual (French, Dutch, German). The Luxembourgish language proper is in decline, but it's continuous with the nearby German dialects which are spoken widely on both sides of the border.
With the growth of international sport in the 2010s, Benelux began to field national teams. Separate Belgian and Luxembourgish teams compete in association football. For numerous less popular sports, combined Benelux teams compete. Benelux has a single Olympic committee and sends one team to the Games.
Sources[]
- McAuliffe, Kenneth J. (2013). The story of the NUTS! reply. U.S. Army. [1]