ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how the structure of Belgium as a consociational democracy has affected the construction of national and regional narratives of the Second World War, and how the development and evolution of these narratives in turn affected the consociational structure of the country. It looks at the emergence of a Flemish counternarrative of the Second World War and its aftermath between 1944 and 1970 as a symptom of the changing social, cultural, and political landscape in Belgium. Between the end of the second School War in 1958 and the general strike of 1961, the end date of Luc Huyse's investigation, the ethnolinguistic conflict gradually came to overshadow Belgium's ideological divisions, and the days of the classic consociational model were numbered. Immediately after the war, the struggle to gain or regain political legitimacy began across Europe, and with it, inevitably, began the creation and negotiation of the narratives and myths of the war.
