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Flemish Interest (Dutch: Vlaams Belang) is a Belgian political party. It presents itself as right-wing, but its opponents see it as far-right.

The same opposition in the United States press. The New York Times labels Flemish Interest far-right, but The Washington Times writes a column in response to disprove the argumentation. Geert Buelens of Berkeley University and Antwerp University sees more global parallels . At both sides of the pond, there is a rift in society. Both groups turn inwards upon themselves, convinced of their own perfect right. There is no dialogue or understanding for each other. But to make a fool of President Bush or Flemish Interest is particularly beside the point. As long as their (social)-democratic opponents don’t have an inspiring, positive and attracting alternative story, they are finished. The liberals don’t get farther as pleading the status-quo and that in a changing world. The neocons on the other hand do have such a story of drastic plans and proposals for structural change.

Flemish Interest was formed in 2004 by members of the now defunct Flemish Block (Dutch: Vlaams Blok), which was condemned by a court for permanent incitation to discrimination and racism in November 2004. Members of the Flemish Interest party and some other conservatives such as law professor Matthias Storme see it as a political trial inspired by the Belgian establishment, and according to them, but this is not challenged, this condemnation would not have been possible without several amendments to the law such as carried through by the political majority in the preceding years.

Flemish Interest advocates independence for Flanders and strict limitations on immigration. It is consistent on the law-and-order theme. It is a leading force in the militant wing of the Flemish movement. It is a Euronationalist party.

Platform

A few points in the platform:

• Return of all non-European immigrants and a federation with the Netherlands are no longer found in the platform. Only those immigrants who do not "assimilate" must go back and with the Netherlands they aspire a cooperation that is as close as possible.
• The motto Eigen volk eerst ("our own people first") has been left, at least officially.
• Independence for Flanders. This aims at stopping the "financial transfers" from Flanders to Wallonia, which free-marked oriented Vlaams Belang sees as unjustified. In 1999 in Wallonia, 55% of the active population was earning an income, composed as follows: 16% in the private domain (industry and commerce) and 39% in the public domain (public administrations and benefits).
• An educator salary and increased child benefits for toddlers must allow the working couple, if so desired, to leave one parent at home for the education of the children, with the intention to support the waning Flemish birth rate.
• The retirement pay system must be revamped according to Dutch standards with an investment fund as an intermediate buffer between income and expense, the so-called Flemish “Gold Fund”, so that pensions remain payable in future.
• The traditional Flemish school discipline, which actually helps to situate the Flemish education system at the world top (Pisa-report 2003), must be preserved.
• Turkey should not be allowed to become an EU member because Turks are foreign to European culture.
• The party presents itself as very committed to freedom of speech, and considers the existing so-called Belgian "anti-racism" and "anti-discrimination" laws in contradiction to it.

Macroeconomic policies

How will the new Flemish economic policy look like after the independence?

Flemish interest’s economic thinking is strongly influenced by the Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitveness and specifically by the writings of Michael Porter, its head, about the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions. Flemish Interest sees Porter’s clusters as the engine of economic development.

Since World War II, Flanders has become an economic growth pole, traditionally and still to a large extent around the automobile branch. Since then some governmental attempts tried to copy foreign growht pole successes. For instance California’s Silicon Valley translated into Flanders’ Language Valley. But this clearly ended in a fiasco. Flemish Interest is convinced that regions can better concentrate on activities in which they traditionally perform well and which are fit for the local social climate. Innovation must start there and not be imposed from above.

Flemish Interest, in agreement with neo-liberal economist Friedrich Hayek, believes that the government must limit its actions to creating the right conditions for spontaneous economic growth and remove bottlenecks in infrastructure. Some Flemish examples: a longer runway for Antwerp Airport, to complete the existing highway traffic rings around Antwerp and Brussels, to deepen the river Scheldt, reopening of the Iron Rhine railway to Duisburg in Germany, improved opening up of Zeebrugge seeport to its hinterland, the creation of industrial estates close to universities, to oil the wheels of government…

A second radical macroeconomic mesure should be the introduction of the flat tax. Flemish Interest purports that in Hong Kong, the Baltic States, Slovakia (Flander’s principal competitor in the automobile industry) and Russia it is already a big success. Flemish Interest claims that a flat tax is uncomplicated, economically efficient and fair.

For citizens the unique flat tax percentage would replace the present Belgian progressive tax system on salaries and pensions. The latter works with progressive percentages running from 25% to 50% according to income bracket. To compare, the University of Leiden estimates that introducing this flat tax system in the Netherlands could be done in a budgetary neutral way with a percentage of 28%. But independent Flanders could do better. In the new system there are no longer tax deductible items or exemptions. For social purposes the flat tax should be combined with a significant zero taxation threshold. So low incomes are exempt from taxation.

The flat tax is equally adopted for companies, where it is particularly advantageous to boost investments. In the new system the flat tax is implemented on corporate profit defined as the turnover, reduced with purchases, salaries and investments without write-downs. The latter implicates that all investments can, for tax accounting purposes, be brought in cost in the very first year of the purchase, which reduces the taxable profit seriously. Another supposed advantage, thanks to the flat tax dividends are no longer taxed twice such as is in fact the case is currently in Belgium.

The law to cut state party-funding

In Flanders this law is also called the “dry up” law.

On January 20, 2005 Claude Eerdekens saw his bill to cut state-funding to Flemish Interest pass through the Senate and onto the statute book.

In point of fact, the new law only regulates the practical implementation of a more fundamental law that dates from 1999. That one keeps things specific to parties convicted for “racism” and all evils attributed thereto. So in itself Eerdekens’ law is no surprise. Some conservative flemish people, however, are scandalized by the collaboration of Flanders' conservative VLD party to vote this law. They contend that such a collaboration is anti-natural and can, in the eye of Flemish electors, only work to Flemish Interest's advantage, at the expense of the VLD's.

Bart Brinckman, who leads the Wetstraat (Downing Street) redaction of the Flemish quality newspaper De Standaard, calls the Flemish parties “opportunistic chickens”. Only one party comes out of it looking better, he writes, and that’s Flemish Interest.

Senator Marc van Peel of the oppositional Christian Democrats goes further. He sees a conspiracy by French-speakers to weaken the other Flemish parties. In “Villa Politica” - the politics programme broadcast on Friday - he asked, “How can the Flemish mainstream parties be so stupid?”

Because of much bribery and scandal in the past Belgium has a strict party-funding system that makes private funding marginal. It is illegal for politicians and parties to accept donations from companies or accept donations from private individuals of over €125 (around $160 as of 2005). All political parties are, therefore, state-dependent.

Eerdekens reasoned that, given that all parties are effectively dependent upon the state, and given the fact that November 2004’s banning of the Vlaams Blok had been circumvented simply by founding a new party, why not give the 1999 law some real teeth? Why not starve Flemish Interest by cutting its funding?

But who precisely is this character, Claude Eerdekens? Well, in February 2001 the same Claude Eerdekens, the parliamentary leader of the Parti Socialiste, declared in Parliament that 99% of the immigrants in Brussels—historically a Dutch-speaking city — filed their naturalisation papers in French.

“We do more”, he boasted, “to turn Brussels into a Francophone city than the Flemings can ever do to prevent it.”

In such an atmosphere, then, the establishment is admitting inviting foreign immigrants - mainly French-speaking Moroccans - to come to Belgium and apply for citizenship. The policy-aim is unambiguous: to change the ethnic balance and the spoken tongue away from Dutch.

But Eerdekens made a basic mistake in this assertion. People are not stupid. They notice that kind of thing. In particular, the residents of Brussels and the hundreds of thousands of Flemish who commute there each day notice a fundamental change in their quality of life. To quote Eurostat (urbanaudit): in London the yearly probability of getting murdered is 3/100.000, but in Brussels it is 10/100.000. It is quite certain that the picture is the same with the other crimes of the person. Certainly, Brussels’ known problem with Islamic terror would make such a proposition likely. So yes, we notice … and yes, we fully understand the racial politics of the Walloon power elite and, therefore, the evil consistency with which they label all Flemish resistance “racism”.

In this hothouse atmosphere Flemish regional politics has produced a strange paradox. In the Flemish Parliament Flemish Interest saved its regional party funding by arguing that they are the legal successors of Vlaams Blok yet were a different party. The Flemish Parliamentary office which decides such cases, and where Flemish Interest’s political opponents have a majority, could easily have said that this was clearly nonsense. Indeed, they did decide that Vlaams Blok and Flemish Interest were same party and thus “guilty of racism”. But they did not cut the funding. No doubt they recoiled at the thought of the first attempt to destroy Vlaams Blok/Belang through the courts and the groundswell of sympathy for the underdog that created throughout Flanders.

However in the Belgian Senate the Flemish majority parties did the opposite, voting in favour of the fund-cutting law. The decision was not without its detractors. Even commission president and majority Flemish socialist Ludwig Vandenhove (SP.A) called it “a tactical mistake”. But why, for heaven’s sake, go right ahead and make it?

The unspoken supposition is that, tactically, there was little immediate harm to pleasing the French-speakers at this time. That kind of thing poses more of a “long run” problem for the majority Flemish parties. Besides, they calculate that a new prosecution and conviction of Flemish Interest would be necessary before the funding lifeline could be cut. So, they can relax … there’s no electoral need to give the French-speakers the “brush-off” just yet.

Of course, in that “long-run” the French-speakers are on a collision course with Flemish Interest. Independence for Flanders means the death of Belgium and the end 11,3 billion Eurodollar ($14,8 or £7,9) financial transfers the French-speakers get ever year. Victory for the French-speakers in the war on Flanders means the death of Flemish nationalism. It has to be one or other: Belgium or a free Flanders. Both can’t survive. In that regard, Flemish Interest senator Wim Verreycken did not pull any punches when he said that Flemish Interest will have its place in history together with Eamon de Valera and Václav Havel, “who were honoured later as heroes”.

But is a new conviction really necessary before party-funding can be cut? In legalistic Belgium the controversy had begun before the new law was even passed. For sure, Vlaams Blok’s ban in 2004 dates from AFTER the principle-establishing law of 1999. We must await to see whether the appropriate court, the State Council, will really view Flemish Interest as a new party.

The French-speaking minority holds half of the seats in the State Council. So, not much Flemish collaboration is necessary to win a majority. At the Belgian federal level, no mercy cannot be expected for Flemish Interest.

So what a pity, then, that the Flemish mainstream in the Senate didn’t take the chance, when Eerdekens’ proposal was debated, to vote for an amendment banning retroactivity. The main “obstacle” to this crucial amendment was that the whole of the bill would first have had to go back to the Chamber of Deputies (Belgium has a bi-cameral system). And that would take too much time and, of course, bestowed too much attention – once again - upon Flemish Interest and its travails. Better a bad law than that the underdog steals away public sympathy and support from the politicians of the mainstream. But we shall see what price will have to be paid for such short-sightedness … whether Flemish Interest is finally put to the sword through their treachery or whether it will triumph and deliver Flanders from their cowardice.

Eerdekens, for sure, is no lemming and isn’t going to go over the cliff with the Flemish mainstream. He is on record as saying, “The Flemish here obviously think that they are in the Flemish Parliament, but if they continue on this way Wallonia is not ashamed to live next to such a great country as France and, one day, they will find out that France will be bordering at the gates of Brussels!”

So there it is. French-speakers will run things how they want, he is saying, and the Flemish will submit to everything and pay or he, Eerdekens, will disappear into France - eventually with Brussels and all of its international institutions, too. The plan to connect Brussels via a corridor to Wallonia and thence the French-speakers’ homeland is not some vague blackmail. Walloon minister-president Van Cau calls it a “continuité territoriale”. Perhaps he never heard of the commission which was named after former French premier Edouard Balladur and which imposed respect for stable borders on the warring peoples of the Balkans. Perhaps he doesn’t care and, anyway, considers that the theft of Flanders’ capital city is all the Flemish lemmings deserve.

The epilogue took place on March 25, 2005. On that day the Belgian Council of Ministers agreed the final implementation arrangements (or Royal Decrees) by which the so-called “Dry-Up” Law could finally be published in the Belgian law gazette. All political parties in fact exclusively being state-dependent, parties convicted of racism can now be denied state funding for up to twelve months.

Pressure to do so has been unremitting. Answering questions in parliament the day before, Minister of the Interior Patrick Dewael (VLD) was pressed no less than five times about it. His questioners sought to remind him of the on-going alleged racism of Flemish Interest. To this end a remark (registration required) made on Sunday 20th March 2005 in a TV interview by Flemish Interest Member of Parliament Filip De Man served very well. He said, “Muslims are by definition no democrats”. It clearly was a set-up.

It all began a week earlier. After a political television show, The Seventh Day, aired on Sunday morning March 13, 2005, there was a supposedly “off the record” discussion between a newspaper reporter and Flemish Interest party ideologue, Gerolf Annemans. The reporter asked if it would be possible to adopt Muslims as party candidates. Annemans diplomatically answered that this “could not be excluded as a principle”. He had no choice in the matter. Saying something “different” about some group in society could be all too easily used by the Centre for Equal Opportunities (called by Flemish Interest the Thought Police) in a new hate speech trial.

But the journalist came to an all too hasty conclusion and the newspaper ran the story that Moslem candidates would be listed by Flemish Interest and that the party was actively pondering who they should be. This was big news, even finding its way to The China Post ! Flemish Interest immediately issued a denial. But now the liberal media didn’t abandon. In the next Seventh Day programme, and under the pretext that party president Vanhecke was abroad in Austria, they invited De Man, the Vlaams Belang MP serving the constituency of Brussels and the surrounding Flemish countryside. De Man is well acquainted with the issue because in Brussels we find the Muslim Molenbeek district, sometimes compared with The Bronx .

Now, it is true that De Man takes a less subtle line on Islam than, for example, his party leader, Frank Vanhecke. The latter is on record as saying this:

“The characteristics of Islam are incompatible with a number of values and principles in our society: separation of church and state, equality between man and women. If these are hallmarks of Islam, then there is a problem with democracy.”

But that isn’t quite the line De Man took. What he said was arguably the wrong side of law. As soon as De Man realised he tried to correct it. In the daily De Standaard he explained that real Moslems take the Koran seriously and, therefore, don’t recognise the separation of church and state, don’t consider men and women to be equals and don’t favour freedom of speech. Even Turkey is allegedly not a full democracy because, he argued, the army has the last word.

On the democracy issue De Man also quoted the case of the election for the Belgian Muslim Council, held on the very day of his TV interview.

Here should be explained that the Council was – with the broader Representative Council of the Belgian Muslim Communities behind it – set up in 1998 to give Belgium’s far from homogenous Islamic communities a broad degree of representation. Belgium’s Muslims are of different national origin, with Moroccans and Turks accounting for almost 85% and the remainder including Albanians, Iranians and Senegalese.

On 13 December 1998 Belgium’s Muslims experienced an event unprecedented in Europe when they participated for the first time in a purely Muslim election. As luck would have it, afterwards the Sûreté felt compelled to veto the appointment! of twenty-nine of the sixty-eight Council members because they were known to belong to fundamentalist groups. Can’t blame them for trying, De Man would say.

The Muslim Council election of 20th March 2005 had a different but alledgedly no less charming outcome, as De Man explained to De Standaard. Only fifteen percent - about 70,000 - of those entitled to vote had registered their intention to do so, he said.

Actually Flemish Interest contends that on the day it was worse than that - only 45,000 made the effort to go to the polls. Worse still, altogether too many of them were Turks. The substantial Moroccan majority of Belgium’s 500,000 Muslims won only twenty seats out of the 68, compared to the Turks’ forty – a consequence, it allegedly seems, of the Moroccans’ poor integration with the democratic traditions of the West. Nothing, however, could stop Lucien Francis, president of the election commission, from announcing that things had gone “much better than predicted by some people” . The least one can say is that the “official version” was at odd’s with De Man’s.

But Groen! Party president Vera Dua got down to the very root of the issue. She said, “with this pronouncement Flemish Interest once again stigmatises a complete population as undemocratic, only - and only - because of a conviction of faith. This pronouncement proves that fundamentally nothing has changed since the condemnation of the Flemish Block. This extreme-right party consciously continues to stigmatise all Muslims and, by this, continues blatantly to break the anti-discrimination law.”

Not every Member of Parliament was quite so harsh. Stijn Bex, the junior coalition partner of the Flemish Socialists and whose name means Spirit, warned “On the basis of one stupid pronouncement we won’t do that (ie, seek a new prosecution). That would benefit you too much. But we will watch you. If this is the party line, then you may expect more condemnations for racism.”

When De Man then asked to have the floor, Speaker and prominent VLD member Herman De Croo interrupted him immediately, “Freedom of speech still exists here”. He couldn’t have meant for the Flemish Interest MPs and the “dry up” law. De Man was silenced.

So, the consensus was singularly against De Man and Flemish Interest. But it has become clear in the days since that Council of Ministers’ meeting on 25th March that this was a consensus of “my enemy’s enemy”. It was underpinned not by some shared, principled rejection of racist sentiments but such as Flemish Interest alleges, by plain, old-fashioned political horse-trading - and, beneath that, much Conservative fear and Socialist loathing.

In that view, the francophone Socialists and the Dutch-speaking VLD Conservatives are, in their differing ways, equally threatened by Flemish Interest. One would lose its grip on the Flemish cash cow and the consolations of power in a Belgian state. The other would lose its natural constituency. So the deal was struck for the common benefit.The Socialists got VLD support for the Royal Decrees, so that they now can line up their sights on Flemish Interest for a second time. The VLD got some Socialist nose-holding for a law on banning marriages of convenience , so that the VLD now can parade its tough, new “anti-illegal immigration” credentials.

The March 25th meeting demonstrated in which way the Belgian political establishment seeks its own survival. They might secure that yet.

Notable members

• Gerolf Annemans
• Lode Claes
• Frank Vanhecke Template:Fn
• Filip Dewinter Template:Fn
• Karel Dillen
• Koen Dillen, son of Karel Dillen
• Roeland Raes, former vice president and party ideologue of the Flemish Block and, as of 2005, secretary of Lovendegem Flemish Belang local section. In 2002, he gave an interview on Dutch TV where he cast doubt over the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In the same interview he also questioned the scale of the Nazis use of gas chambers and the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary . Subsequently, Roeland Raes has never been expelled from the party (Source: Negationistisch, Het Laatste Nieuws, March 14, 2003, readers' letter by Karel Dillen), contrary to what Filip Dewinter has always pretended, and is still active within the Flemish Interest party. Roeland Raes was effectively charged with alleged historical revisionism in accordance with the Belgian 1995 Negationism Law by Belgium's Centre for Equal Opportunities, specifically for uttering the following controversial sentence: “whether it was planned (before the war, thus ahead of the Wannsee Conference) that they should all die during the war is another question” (in Dutch: “Of het gepland is dat ze allemaal zouden sterven tijdens de oorlog, is een andere kwestie"). During the interview, Raes had no doubts about the systematic persecution and deportation of the Jews by the Germans. Finally, from a juridicial point of view, Raes was knowingly never found guilty of negationism.
• Wim Verreycken, senator. A few years ago he requested to rename the Generaal Drubbelstraat in Berchem to Ward Hermansstraat. Ward Hermans founded SS Vlaanderen, the Flemish SS section, during the World War II, and was the editor in chief of SS Man newspaper. Nevertheless it should be mentioned that this well-known event is VLD MP Claude Marinower’s personal opinion about what he remembers to have understood during an oral discussion in the Antwerp city counsel. In his newspaper opinion piece, seven years after the incident, Claude Marinower implicitly admits that no official and approved protocol exists, so that some doubts stay about the exact range of the scope of this so-called request by Wim Verreycken. Most plausible hypothesis is that Verreyken “simply” wanted to make a comparison between SS-er Ward Hermans and Belgicist general Drubbel himself, who Verreycken holds co-responsible for the Belgian governmental policy during World War I to hand over unconvicted Flemish nationalists to foreign power France, with subsequent imprisonment in French labour-concentration camps under unfavourable conditions, making at the same time and in an emotional moment abstraction of the fact that the Jewish plight during World War II was infinitely bigger. MP Claude Marinower, having much Jews among his electorate, actually feels politically threatened by Flemish Interest’s courting of the Antwerp Jews, who have a security problem because their quarter is next door to Muslim Borgerhout (nicknamed Borgerocco).

• Yves Buysse

Notes

• Template:Fnb Frank Vanhecke and Filip Dewinter both participated in August 2004 to the Ijzerwake meeting, where a special tribute was made to Staf De Clercq, a former leader of the Vlaams National Verbond. On August 14, 1942, after the first internments of Jews in concentration camps, Staf de Clercq declared to the Volk en Staat newspaper: "Cleansing measures against Jews are performed more and more rapidly and their application is getting stricter and stricter. It seems that we breathe better and better in the vicinity of our editorial offices: weeks after weeks, homes and appartments are emptying so that we can walk quietly from our home to the office and from the office back home." Staf de Clercq died two months later, on October 22, 1942 precisely, after a lingering sickness which undermined his physical powers. What does history teach about him? The second mentioned sentence, the odious one thus, is clearly Nazi propaganda fall-out uttered by a weakened man. Always in the assumption, that the newspaper’s correspondent correctly reproduced de Clercq’s words, without any dirty additions, of course. Mind you, an eventual rectification certainly was impossible because of the Nazi censorship in occupied territory. But why can there be any doubt about the correctness of origin of the second sentence? Let’s go to the start. In the first World War, Staf de Clercq was stretcher-bearer and was also able to visit the Orne forest where he gave comfort to Flemish dissidents who worked there as forced labourers. Between the two World Wars he knowingly never made any anti-Semitic remark. On the contrary. In 1937, in tempore non suspectum, he wrote a larger publication called “Het VNV en het Duitsch nationaal-socialisme “ (“The VNV and the Nazis”). He was originally democratic, pacifistic and opposed to the Nazis. But during World War II he pursued an ungrateful policy, intended to be “of the lesser evil”. He collaborated with the German army (the Militärverwaltung) with the aim to keep the SS (the Zivilverwaltung) out of the government as long as possible. A policy in which he was “successful”. We will never know how many lives this has saved, Jewish included. Because of his early death, we also will never know for certain whether Staf de Clercq would have quitted the VNV in September 1943, together with other leaders, when it came to a breach with the Flemish SS lackeys: DeVlag and SS-Vlaanderen. But more important. What could Staf de Clercq in August 1942 possibly have known about the holocaust? There was one major, but forbidden (because considered as propaganda) external information source: the BBC. The first time the BBC broadcast about the holocaust, at least in English for sure, was on June 2, 1942 . It was about a report sent by a Bund underground activist in Warsaw, Leon Feiner, containing information on the murder of Jews in various parts of Poland. The report traced the path of the murder actions: town after town, district after district, month by month. It described the extermination centre at Chelmno, including the gas vans, and estimated the number of Jews whom the Germans had murdered in Poland by May at 700,000 (the real figure was much higher). But and that should be stressed, although the BBC reported the main contents of the report, including the estimate of the 700,000 murdered Jews, it did not stress the conclusion: that the program (the secret Wannsee conference program from January 20, 1942) to murder all the Jews was already being carried out. But by that time, even the Jews of Warsaw did not believe detailed descriptions of mass slaughter by the Jewish Underground newspapers! Common human sense could not understand that it was possible to exterminate tens and hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Warsaw Jews decided that the Jews were being transported for agricultural work in the parts of Russia occupied by the Germans. And the same in Flanders. Much Flemish even saw the Jewish deportations as the equivalent of the Flemish forced labour recruitment to Germany such as conceived by Fritz Sauckel who directed and controlled German labour during the war. (main sources: Encarta Encyclopedia and yadvashem, reworked).

External links

• Official web page
• Official Vlaams Belang party manifesto
• Vdare.com: Anti-Immigration Party Banned In Belgium November 09, 2004
• MajorityRights: The Blok is dead. Long live the Vlaams Belang? November 09, 2004
• BBC: Blow to Belgium's far right 9 November, 2004
• Telegraph: Flemish party banned as racist by Belgium's high court 10 November, 2004
• The Washington Times: Analysis: Makeover for Flemish far-right November 15, 2004
• The Mail on Sunday: A new war in the fields of Flanders 19 November, 2004
• The New York Times: Fear of Islamists Drives Growth of Far Right in Belgium February 12, 2005
• The Washington Times: The emerging ‘Eurabia’ February 18, 2005
• The New York Times: Europe's Jews Seek Solace on the Right February 20, 2005
• MajorityRights: Jews moving Rightwards February 25, 2005
• TIME: Life On The Front Lines: In Antwerp, the far right is facing off against muslims. Who's winning? Vol.165 No.9 | February 28, 2005
• The New York Sun: Slap at European Jewry Prompts Backlash March 3, 2005

In Dutch

• Vlaams Belang: America discovers us 23.02.2005
• De Standaard: My kingdom for an alternative. Schwarzenegger, Bush and Flemish Interest. by Geert Buelens (uni. Berkeley and Antwerp ) March 18, 2005

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