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The text below is taken from the East_Cantons article on Wikipedia, and is used under the terms of their licence.

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Not to be confused with the East Canton in Ohio
Not to the confused with the Cantons de l'Est in Quebec, see Eastern Townships

Eupen-Malmedy, or the East Cantons (in German, die Ostkantone; in French, les Cantons de l'Est; in Dutch, de Oostkantons), are composed of the former Prussian districts (Kreise in German) of Malmedy and Eupen, together with the neutral Moresnet. French-speaking Belgians also once called them the Redeemed Cantons. These territories were annexed to Belgium in 1925 by the Versailles Treaty, after a plebiscite. Secret negotiations between the Belgian and German governments for their return to Germany failed because France did not want any clause of the Versailles Treaty to be reviewed, but wanted more pre-War German lands to be alienated.

At the beginning of the 1920s, the municipalities composing these territories were regrouped into three districts: Eupen, Malmedy and Sankt Vith.

After the municipalities’ mergers of 1976-1977, the 11 municipalities sharing the territory of the East Cantons were regrouped to their current status as follows:

District of Eupen:

District of Sankt Vith:

District of Malmedy :

Contents

Languages spoken in the area

The linguistic situation of the whole area is complex since it lies on the border between the Romance and Germanic languages and on an isogloss dividing several German dialects.

For instance, in Aubel, Baelen, Plombières, Welkenraedt (neighbouring Belgian municipalities), Eupen, Kelmis and Lontzen, the local languages can be classed as Limburgish, or better as Low Dietsch, while the inhabitants of Raeren speak Ripuarian and those of the district of Sankt Vith use the Moselle Franconian (Luxembourgish). On the other hand, most of the people living in Malmedy and Waimes speak French, although there is a minority of German speakers. Moreover, Walloon is still widely spoken in the Malmedy-Waimes area.

The East Cantons as a whole should therefore not be confused with the German language region created in 1963 or with the German-speaking Community of Belgium.

History before 1795

Historically, those territories have little in common. The Northern part around Eupen was originally part of the Duchy of Limburg, a dependancy of the Duchy of Brabant, and was latterly owned by the Austrian Habsburgs, as part of the Austrian Netherlands. But the Southern part (i.e. more or less what is now the district of Sankt Vith) belonged to the Duchy of Luxembourg. However, the small village of Manderfeld-Schönberg belonged to the Archbishopric of Trier. Malmedy and Waimes, except the village of Faymonville, were part of the abbatial principality of Stavelot-Malmedy which was — like Luxembourg and Trier — an Imperial Estate of the Holy Roman Empire.

1795-1815 French annexation

In 1795, as the French Revolutionary Army entered the Austrian Netherlands, the area was also taken over and eventually incorporated in its entirety into the French department of the Ourthe.

1815-1919 Prussian administration

Map of Belgium in 1843: Eupen and the East Cantons are then germans.

At the Congress of Vienna, the whole area was awarded to Rhenish Prussia. In the North West of the area, Moresnet, coveted by both the Netherlands and Prussia for its calamine, was declared a neutral territory. After 1830, the 50% guardianship of the Netherlands was taken over by newly independent Belgium, and this remained so even after 1839, when Belgium relinquished its claims to neighbouring Dutch Limburg.

This change did not significantly affect the inhabitants of this region. Even in the French and Walloon speaking Malmedy, changes went smoothly since the municipality was allowed to continue to use French for its admnistration.

For instance, during a visit to the city in 1856, the King Frederick William IV would say "I am proud to have in my kingdom a little country where people speak French". For the people of Malmedy, this would eventually change when Bismarck came to power in Prussia and, within the framework of the Kulturkampf, imposed German as the only official administrative language. If this was not a problem in Eupen and St.Vith, it obviously became one in Malmedy-Waimes. There was some resistance to the change: for instance, Roman Catholic priests who were forbidden to preach in French started to preach in Walloon in order to avoid having to preach in German.

However, after several decades, the inhabitants became used to speaking German (which was also the only language tolerated in the schools) with the government, although Walloon was still widely spoken. At the beginning of World War I, most of the inhabitants considered themselves German and fought for that side during the war.

1919-1925 Provisional Belgian administration

In 1918, as World War I was drawing to a close, the French government was determined to increase the size of Belgian territory at the expense of Germany. The French attempted to annex the Saarland and to persuade the neutral Netherlands to exchange territory claimed by Belgium in 1830 but relinquished in 1839 (Dutch Limburg and Zeeuws Vlaanderen) with German territory that had once been Dutch (Bentheim, Emden and the Land of Cleve).

Frustrated in these attempts, the French sided with Belgium's claim to the "lost" cantons of Eupen, Malmedy and Sankt Vith. In 1920, the Treaty of Versailles awarded all the communities on a provisional basis to Belgium. A five-year transition period under the command of the Royal High Commissioner, General Herman Baltia, ensued. Under pressure from the United States, whose war aims had included popular sovereignty, a plebiscite was planned, and between 26 January and 23 July 1920, it was held on Baltia's orders under Article 34 of the Treaty. However it was not a secret ballot - inhabitants of the cantons who objected to the annexation had to register (by name) at the village hall. This procedure led to mass intimidation - people were led to believe that anyone objecting to annexation by Belgium would not receive Belgian nationality, but be deported to Germany or at least have their food ration cards taken away.

1925-1940 Integration into Belgium

In the event, only 271 people out of 33,726 voted for the communes to remain in Germany.

In 1925, the area around Eupen, Malmedy, and Sankt Vith, together with the former Neutral Moresnet (Kelmis) was finally included in the Belgian state. However, in 1926] Belgium and the Weimar Republic conducted secret negotiations which would have led to the return of the East Cantons to Germany in return for 200 million gold marks - but the fury of the French Government on hearing about the plan led to the break-up of the talks.

After the inhabitants of the East Cantons finally received full Belgian nationality and the vote, parties who favoured a return of the East Cantons to the German Reich got between 44% and 57% of the vote in the East Cantons, achieving high scores even in French-speaking Malmedy. After the accession to power of Adolf Hitler, the socialist party of the East Cantons stopped agitating for a return to Germany. This caused a drop in the irredentist vote but also meant that the pro-Germany vote was now dominated by the openly Nazi "Heimattreue Front".

1940-1945 Annexed to Germany again

During World War II the East Cantons (and some other small villages that had been Belgian but German speaking in 1914) were annexed by Nazi Germany, with the clear consent of most of the inhabitants. Support for the German takeover eroded sharply after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent conscription of most of the male population into the German army (out of 8,700 drafted new Germans, 3,200 perished in the East). In December 1944 bomber raids first destroyed Malmedy, then Sankt Vith almost completely. Many communities were similarly affected by the Ardennes Offensive of 1944-45. Indeed, the southern part of the East Cantons was the theatre of hard battles including St. Vith, Rocherath-Krinkelt, Bütgenbach and many others.

1945 Back to Belgium

After the war, the Belgian state reasserted sovereignty over the area, which caused the male inhabitants of the area who had served in the German army to lose their civil rights as "traitors to the Belgian state". After the war, the Belgian authorities opened more than 15 000 inquiries procedures against citizens of Eupen-Malmedy, which represents 25% of the population. In comparison, for the whole of Belgium, these inquiries concerned less than 5% of the population. Even though the ratio of the effective trials and convictions in comparison to the number of files opened was lower than the Belgian national average, it is clear that this repression left scars that needed time to disappear.[1]

The bad blood caused by the reluctance of the Belgian government to remedy the legal situation concerning the annexation (only remedied by an amnesty law in 1989), would lead to the emergence of a German Belgian national party, the PDB, or Party of German-speaking Belgians. The PDB (which at the European level co-operates with both the Scottish National Party and the Greens) has never agitated for a return to Germany, but advocated increased rights for the German minority in Belgium, including full equality with the Flemish and Walloon ethnic groups. This has caused many commentators on recent developments in Belgian politics to muse that the German speakers are now the last Belgians!

The nine German-speaking communities of the East Cantons now comprise the German-speaking Community of Belgium, while Malmedy and Waimes are part of the French Community of Belgium. There are special privileges for the minority language in both areas.

Chronology

Sources

References

  1. ^ Alfred Minke, La Communauté germanophone: l'évolution d'une terre d'entre-deux, 1995 - [1]

See also

External links

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