Flanders ( FLAHN-dərz or FLAN-dərz; Dutch: Vlaanderen [ˈvlaːndərə(n)] ) is the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium. However, there are several overlapping definitions, including ones related to culture, language, politics, and history, and sometimes involving neighbouring countries. The demonym associated with Flanders is Fleming, while the corresponding adjective is Flemish, which can also refer to the collective of Dutch dialects spoken in that area, or more generally the Belgian variant of Standard Dutch.
Most Flemings live within the Flemish Region (also often referred to as simply Flanders), one of the regions of Belgium, which is a federal state within Belgium with its own elected government. However, like Belgium itself, the official capital of Flanders is the City of Brussels, which lies within the Brussels-Capital Region, not the Flemish Region, and the majority of residents there are French speaking. The powers of the Flemish Government in Brussels are limited mainly to Flemish culture and education.
Geographically, Flanders is mainly flat, and incorporates the whole coast of Belgium on the North Sea. It borders the French department of Nord to the south-west near the coast, the Dutch provinces of Zeeland, North Brabant and Limburg to the north and east, and the Walloon provinces of Hainaut, Walloon Brabant and Liège to the south. Despite accounting for only 45% of Belgium's territory, more than half the population lives there – 6,821,770 (or 58%) out of 11,763,650 Belgian inhabitants, as of January 2024. Much of Flanders is agriculturally fertile and densely populated at 501/km2 (1,300/sq mi). The Brussels Region is an officially bilingual enclave within the Flemish Region. Flanders also has exclaves of its own: Voeren in the east is between Wallonia and the Netherlands and Baarle-Hertog in the north consists of 22 exclaves surrounded by the Netherlands. Not including Brussels, there are five present-day Flemish provinces: Antwerp, East Flanders, Flemish Brabant, Limburg and West Flanders. The official language is Dutch.
The area of today's Flanders has figured prominently in European history since the Middle Ages. The original County of Flanders stretched around AD 900 from the Strait of Dover to the Scheldt estuary and expanded from there. This county also still corresponds roughly with the modern-day Belgian provinces of West Flanders and East Flanders, along with neighbouring parts of France and the Netherlands. In this period, cities such as Ghent and Bruges of the historic County of Flanders, and later Antwerp of the Duchy of Brabant made it one of the richest and most urbanised parts of Europe, trading, and weaving the wool of neighbouring lands into cloth for both domestic use and export. As a consequence, a very sophisticated culture developed, with impressive achievements in the arts and architecture, rivaling those of northern Italy.
Belgium was one of the centres of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, but this occurred mainly in French-speaking Wallonia. In the second half of the 20th century, and due to massive national investments in port infrastructure, Flanders' economy modernised rapidly, and today Flanders and Brussels are much wealthier than Wallonia, being among the wealthiest regions in Europe and the world. In accordance with late 20th century Belgian state reforms, Flanders was made into two political entities: the Flemish Region (Dutch: Vlaams Gewest) and the Flemish Community (Dutch: Vlaamse Gemeenschap). These entities were merged, although geographically the Flemish Community, which has a broader cultural mandate, covers Brussels, whereas the Flemish Region does not.
The term "Flanders" has several main modern meanings:
The "Flemish community", i.e. the social, cultural and linguistic, scientific and educational, economical and political community of the Flemings. For most purposes this is considered to include the 6.5 million Belgians (approximately 60%) who consider Dutch to be their mother tongue, including many people living in the Brussels-Capital Region.
In the context of the political subdivisions of Belgium there are the Flemish Region (competent in mainly economic matters) and the Flemish Community (competent in mainly cultural matters). The first does not comprise Brussels (which forms a Region by itself), whereas the latter does comprise the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Brussels.
The political institutions that govern both subdivisions: the operative body or "Flemish Government", and the legislative organ or "Flemish Parliament".
Within Belgian discussions, the two westernmost provinces of the Flemish Region, West Flanders and East Flanders, forming the central portion of the historic County of Flanders are also still collectively referred to as Flanders.
The name originally applied to the ancien régime territory called the County of Flanders, that existed from the 8th century (Latin Flandria) until its absorption by the French First Republic. Until the 1600s, this county also extended over parts of what are now France and the Netherlands.
In France, one of the historically Flemish regions is now in the Nord department. This is referred to as French Flanders, and can be divided into three smaller regions: Walloon Flanders, Maritime Flanders, and Artesian Flanders. The first region was predominantly French-speaking already in the 1600s, the latter became so in the 20th century. The city of Lille identifies itself as "Flemish", and this is reflected, for instance, in the name of its local railway station TGV Lille Flandres.
The historically Flemish region which became part of the Dutch Republic, now part of the Dutch province of Zeeland, called Zeelandic Flanders.
However, the term came to be used for a bigger territory, and this is critical to the evolution of modern terminology. Once the Counts of Flanders (who were also Dukes of Burgundy) expanded their regional power to create the bigger entity, now referred to by historians as the Burgundian Netherlands, "Flanders", along with Latin "Belgium", were the first two common names to describe this regional block. With the breakaway of the northern Netherlands in the early modern period, the term Flanders continued to be associated with the whole southern part of the Low Countries—the Southern, Spanish or Austrian Netherlands, which were the successors of the Burgundian state, and also predecessors of modern Belgium. The restriction of the term Flanders to the Germanic speaking part of the population occurred later.
In the history of art and other fields, the adjectives Flemish and Netherlandish are commonly used to designate all the artistic production in this area before about 1580, after which it refers specifically to the southern Netherlands. For example, the term "Flemish Primitives", now outdated in English but used in French, Dutch and other languages, is a synonym for "Early Netherlandish painting", and it is not uncommon to see Mosan art categorized as Flemish art. In music the Franco-Flemish School is also known as the Dutch School.
Dutch-speaking part of Belgium
The term "Flemish" came to be a term for the language Dutch, and during the 19th and 20th centuries, it became increasingly common to refer exclusively to the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium as "Flanders". Belgium divided itself into official French- and Dutch-speaking parts starting in the early 1960s. Today Flanders extends over the northern part of Belgium, including not only the Dutch-speaking Belgian parts of the medieval Duchy of Brabant, which was united with Flanders since the Middle Ages, but also Belgian Limburg, which corresponds closely to the medieval County of Loon, and was never under Burgundian control.
The ambiguity between this wider cultural area and that of the county or province still remains in discussions about the region. In most present-day contexts however, the term Flanders is taken to refer to either the political, social, cultural, and linguistic community (and the corresponding official institution, the Flemish Community), or the geographical area, one of the three institutional regions in Belgium, namely the Flemish Region.