Apartheid in Schaarbeek: Belgian Migrant Labor and Human Rights in Europe’s Carbon Transition, 1945-1973

Abstract

Scholars have regularly used histories of postwar migrant labor in Europe to narrate the fraught relationship between European nation-states and their former colonies, questions of citizenship and belonging, and ideas of multiculturalism and integration. The economic rise of the future European Economic Community and later the European Union went hand in hand with the rise of guest workers recruited from Europe’s impoverished, southern regions, North Africa, and Turkey, among others. In Belgium, these people constituted an important labor force in old and newly-emerging industries such as coal mining, car manufacturing plants, petrochemicals and domestic work. However, many of these “temporary workers” were also denied access to basic living conditions and political participation, thus giving rise to conventional idea of “permanent temporality” within the scholarly fields of refugee studies and postwar Europe. These debates, often built on research in state archives, mark how guest workers became a body politic without citizenship – a marker of political agency – situated outside the imagined borders of a nation – in this case Belgium.

This paper problematizes this approach by focusing on how migrant laborers in Belgium and its neighboring countries to an extent publicly claimed and contested an emergent discourse of human rights during the 1970s. They did so by setting up grassroots community initiatives, organizing along with traditional labor unions, and allying with new left and student movements. In their work, they were deeply cognisant of their colonial past and present, something which often fell on deaf ears among unfriendly state policies, violent police institutions, anti-immigrant people movements, and even left allies. Specifically, I examine how a language of universal human rights found its way among migrant activists and how they altered its meaning by bridging this discourse to histories of colonial oppression and the consequent necessity of reparations and inclusivity. To support this argument, I use personal testimonies and biographies, independent press from activist communities, and labor union archives in Belgium. I thus argue how migrant workers and refugees were far from passive subjects “stuck in permanent temporality,” and reverted to mobilization and political contestation very early onwards. Belgium offers a resourceful intellectual and empirical terrain to think through the afterlives of European empires for different reasons. It lived throughout its history as an amorphous borderland zone between Europe’s major powers before and after 1945. It became a major developer of infrastructure for the coal-to-oil transition on the continent – which also necessitated the mass recruitment of foreign workers. Finally, it offers a peculiar case study that can illuminate how (post)colonial and migrant identities were shaped in the context of mass migration from North Africa and the Middle East. This paper contributes to the on-going discussion of how migrant workers and refugees construct counter-pasts. These communities created a different past and a hopeful (even if yet unrealized) future where migrants and refugees were not simply victims and lost fugitives.