Dr. David Hensely, a professor of History at Georgia Highlands College in Rome, GA, will present a lecture on Friday, Sept. 30th at 1:30 pm in MLC room 348 entitled: "The Bureaucrat Exists for the Public, and Not the Other Way Around: “Freedom of Language” in Twentieth-Century Flanders, “Freedom of Conscience” in the Contemporary United States, and the Right to Regulate Those who Serve the Public" His main research focus is on the relationship between language and identity in Modern Europe. He also maintains an interest in the far right in both Europe and the United States. His talk examines the attempts of the French-speaking elite in Flanders (Belgium) to maintain a place for their language in the Flemish public sphere, and the ways in which these efforts affected their self-representation and political engagements. Those who follow the political scene in the US today will surely recognize calls on the part of those who serve the public in some way – whether in the public sphere, as bureaucrats, or in the private sphere, as licensed pharmacists or business owners – to choose whom they will serve in part based on “freedom of conscience.” This argument typically states that such individuals should have the right to withhold certain services – issuing wedding licenses or other government documents, providing catering services, or filling prescriptions for contraceptives – based on their personal, religious opposition to, say, homosexuality or abortion. Efforts by the state to force such individuals have been reviled as government overreach. These arguments find an unexpected yet striking parallel in the history of the small European country of Belgium in the last century. Throughout the 1900s, a series of laws mandated that bureaucrats in Flanders use Dutch in their dealings with the public, angering some French-speaking Belgians who worried that their “right” to hold a bureaucratic job was being infringed. In the 1960s and 1970s, these mandates were extended to private schools and workplaces. Was this an example of state tyranny? Or did the state have the right to protect the Dutch-speaking majority’s access to vital government and business services? This talk will examine the ways in which different groups of stakeholders in Flanders confronted these questions throughout the twentieth century, and what light they might shed on similar debates in our own society.
