Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0035/00350.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 29KB | 440 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00350}
$Pretitle{370}
$Title{Belgium
Chapter 2C.   Social Organization and Values}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Jenny Masur}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{percent
belgians
social
workers
employees
catholic
children
class
family
marriage}
$Date{1984}
$Log{}
Country:     Belgium
Book:        Belgium, A Country Study
Author:      Jenny Masur
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1984

Chapter 2C.   Social Organization and Values

     Belgians are joiners, being members of organizations encompassing life
from birth to death; it was reported in 1984 that about four out of six
Belgians belonged to an organization. Orchestras, sports groups, theater
groups, and radio and television may be divided by language, but cooperatives,
housing for the poor, youth and children's groups, mutual aid societies,
unions, savings banks, farmer's associations, hospitals, and leisure clubs
are divided on the basis of the three traditional political family
affiliations-Liberal, Socialist, and Catholic. The political parties form just
one facet of these complexes of organizations, which provide health care,
administer health insurance, orient the school systems and, most importantly,
bind networks of family, friends, and acquaintances. Belgians rarely know
individuals from other groups except by stereotypes. A change in political
allegiance means a drastic change in friends, services, and perhaps jobs.
Thus social control is exerted through conformity to the norms of others
in the same particularistic groups.

     In the nineteenth century both the Socialists and the Catholics sought
mobilization through a variety of organizations. The Catholics were the first
in the mid-nineteenth century to create a world in which people shared social
networks and a worldview, but they were soon imitated by the Liberals and by
organizations of the proliferating Socialists. Belgians call each set of
organizations a "spiritual family" (French, famille spirituelle-see Glossary)
or "pillar" (Dutch, zuil-see Glossary), more colloquially, "world" or
"ideological grouping." These pillars linked members to a negotiating
political elite through an intermediary or patron who might be a leader of a
cooperative or an association of farmers. Such contacts might be used to
find a job or retirement home, following the principle of political
proportionality, which meant that each pillar's elite was responsible for the
allocation of its share of the resources. It has been a matter of discussion
whether the trend has been toward "depillarization" because of the effects of
television, social and geographic mobility, declining religiosity, the
opening of rural areas, and the emergence of nontraditional parties (see
Political Parties, ch. 4).

     The  extensive Catholic and Socialist networks of organizations are
testimony to the importance given by Belgians to the humanistic Christian
ideals of mutual aid, solidarity, the common good, and love of one's fellow
man. The Catholic pillar is most extensive, having a broad network of private,
nonprofit social service and health care agencies and a dense array of
organizations in Flanders alone. Despite the declining number of practicing
Catholics, the pillar is maintained because it offers not only charitable
services respected by the public at large but also a job market.
Practicing Catholics form the core of employees and clients, but the services
attract many others, too. Those who are not practicing Catholics are
Catholics in a sociocultural sense; they still adhere to an ideology that
respects evangelical values, the example of Jesus and the selfless lives of
those in religious orders- in contradistinction to the anonymity and
bureaucracy of modern life-and emphasizes harmony among interest groups and
classes and between the individual and the collectivity. This Christian
ideology is transmitted by Catholic schools and by Catholic youth and adult
movements.

     The national Catholic network of social service agencies in 1984 included
about 100 hospitals (having 30,000 employees and 50,000 beds), 240 homes for
the aged, and 190 day-care centers; it offered marital counseling, help for
the handicapped and diverse medical services, as well as mutual aid societies
that claimed 4.5 million members and were concentrated in Flanders. Such
agencies grew out of the charitable activities of religious orders performed
for the poor, sick, and outcast during the Middle Ages. State subsidies and
the decline in members of both practicing Catholics and vocations for the
religious orders have led to doubts, especially in Wallonia, as to why such
agencies continue to be directly administered by the church. Karel
Dobbelaere, a leading Belgian sociologist, has documented the secularization
of schools and hospitals (through the differentiation of functions and
professionalization), coupled with decreasing numbers of religious personnel.
Because of declining numbers of priests, the growing school populations, and
state teaching requirements, priests have been restricted to teaching religion
instead of the breadth of subjects they taught in the past. Medical care has
been differentiated from pastoral care or personalized caring provided by the
religious nurses. Moreover, in 1984 church norms did not necessarily
predominate in schools, where the law prohibited the regulation of the private
lives of teachers (for example, firing teachers who married divorced persons);
nor did they prevail in hospitals, where doctors might justify, for reasons
of health, procedures not approved by the church (abortions, sterilizations).
Nevertheless, of all the Catholic pillar organizations, Catholic schooling is
considered the most important, a "must," according to 71 percent of the Le
Soir poll's Catholic respondents.

     In active contradistinction to the Catholic church's role in education
and politics, Belgium has sheltered the movements of Freemasonry, Free Thought
(Libre Pensee), and socialism. The heyday of the first two was the
nineteenth century, although as recently as 1969 the Center for Secular Action
and the Union for Secular Associations was founded to regulate and represent
associated secular organizations. Conflict between these three movements
and the Catholic church laid the basis for the religious cleavage apparent in
Belgium from the nineteenth century through the 1950s.

     Freemasonry dates to 1721 in Wallonia, but only in 1833 did most of the
lodges unite in the Grand Orient of Belgium. Initially, the Freemasons were
not anticlerical. In the 1830s, however, first the pope and then the Belgian
Catholic church condemned them, refusing them sacraments and threatening
excommunication. As a result, most Catholics left the Freemason organizations,
and many anticlericals joined. Catholic beliefs gave way to deism,
agnosticism, and atheism. The military lodges disappeared, and a majority of
the aristocratic members left as well. Thereafter, the Freemasons were
involved in the founding of the VUB/ULB, the formation of the Liberal Party,
and the popularization of various Liberal projects, such as obligatory
education and secular education for girls. Many Freemasons, as propertied
electors, had an influence on the vote until the turn of the century. Later
members of the movement included anarchists, radicals, and Socialists. The
two world wars had a divisive and debilitating effect on the worldwide
Freemason movement. Because the Freemasons do not divulge membership
statistics, it was unclear how many Belgians belonged to a lodge in 1984.
It has been reported, however, that a majority of middle-class intellectuals
participated in the movement and that its influence was considerable.

     Intertwined with Freemasonry and the Liberal Party were the
contemporaneous intellectual and political movements of socialism and Free
Thought, which were tied to positivism, rationalism, and secularization.
Membership often overlapped. In 1863 Free Thought, drawing on bourgeois and
intellectual circles, was f