ABSTRACT
In this chapter we address the manner by which the Belgian state reacted towards the presence of German immigrants and their descendants on its territory in the half-century between 1870 and 1920.1 We refer to Germans who migrated to Belgium before the First World War and their descendants as a Belgian ethnic minority and, depending on their citizenship, we call them German Belgians or Belgian Germans. We want to verify whether, due to the war, a biologicalessentialist understanding of the German population was developed. Our hypothesis is that while before the war their presence in Belgian society was no issue, the war made them eternally foreign to the Belgian authorities (or ethnic Germans to the German authorities). We look into the attitudes of the Belgian and German states towards this population before and during the occupation of Belgium in the First World War. Central to the paper is whether the policy towards this population changed at the beginning of the twentieth century due to the Great War. The hypothesis to verify is that state policy changed from a civic management of this population to an ethnic treatment. The ways in which the Belgian and German policies towards this group interacted is analyzed.
