Finding a New Balance: the Belgian Security Syste in the aftermath of WWI

This paper will highlight the reorganization of Belgian police system at the end of World War I. My aim will be to understand how the war transformed the dynamics of security and forced the creation of a new balance of protection and repression in order to answer the necessities of the Interwar, the will to modernize (democratize) society and the re-appropriation of past debates about policing and police organization. The particular interest of the Belgian situation derives from a number of reasons. The traditional historical account, is that the country – in spite of its initial neutrality - was nearly totally occupied by German troops for four years. However, a small band of territory beyond the Yser River remained free; it concentrated the national institutions and somehow incarnated the legal and moral continuity of the realm. In geopolitical terms, the situation of the country was equally specific—submitted to several occupation regimes, surrounded by a neutral country (the Netherlands), an annexed country (Luxemburg) and belligerent countries (France, Germany but also – across the sea – Great-Britain). In a socio-political perspective, the characteristics of the Belgian State also render particularly relevant a study of the impact of the conflict on its apprehension of security. Its structure was historically distinguished by a very high degree of municipal autonomy, including in the field of law enforcement. It is therefore interesting to examine how this autonomy came to be reshaped in the aftermath of the conflict, just as a stronger Belgium - unitary and centralized – was being promoted in reaction to the wartime centrifugal tendencies (fostered by the German Flamenpolitik) and to combat the inward-looking phenomenon of preference for local interests manifested as early as 1914. In the field of security institutions, Belgian society was also specific in its remarkable lack of change throughout the 19th century; in spite of real controversies among the judiciary, the higher echelons of police forces and politicians, no consensus had ever emerged to change the equilibrium of the repressive apparatus established at the time of independence. As security issues acquired a new significance in Belgium after November 11, 1918 - with the repression of collaboration with enemy, the on-going hardships of a shortage economy, the return of refugees, the presence of Allied armies, etc. -, the joint effects of past specificities and past security experiences led to a necessary review of law and order institutions. This situation resulted in a new division of security assignments in the context of a society where public life was itself undergoing the changes of democratization. The First World War and its aftermath thus represented times of crisis for police forces in Belgium but also a determining moment for a new perception of the rationales of order in the realm.