The exhibition The Welfare State also contains visual and textual material from the four cultural archives in Flanders: Amsab and the Liberal Archive in Ghent, KADOC in Leuven and ADVN in Antwerp.

These four so-called cultural archives in Flanders were created by and for different political movements, the so-called ‘pillars’ of industrialised Belgian society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the Catholics (Christian Democrats), the Liberals and the Socialists, to which the Flemish National Movement was added somewhat later. These archives were all founded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when cultural policy was being devolved from the central government to the linguistic communities. Before that, from the late 1960s until the late 1970s, the Belgian political parties and trade unions had split along the linguistic divide, so that there are no longer any major socio-political organisations uniting the Flemish-speakers and the French-speakers.

KADOC–Documentation and Research Centre for Religion, Culture and Society is an institution under the Catholic University of Leuven. It was founded as the Katholiek Documentatiecentrum (Catholic Documentation Centre) in 1976. Amsab–Institute for Social History in Ghent was founded in 1980, as the Archief en Museum voor de Socialistische Arbeiderbeweging (Archive and Museum for the Socialist Workers’ Movement), but also traces its lineage back to a National Institute for Social History that existed in Brussels in 1937–40. In recent years Amsab has broadened its political scope to include, among other things, archives of the green and LGBT movements. The Liberal Archive in Ghent was founded in 1982. ADVN–Archive and Research Centre for the Flemish National Movement in Antwerp is the newest, and smallest, of these archives. It was founded in 1984 as the Archief en Documentatiecentrum van het Vlaams-Nationalisme (Archive and Documentation Centre on Flemish Nationalism).

We contacted all four archives, and after exploratory visits they set up a joint working group, consisting of Chris De Beule (Researcher at the Liberal Archive), Koen De Scheemaeker (Director of ADVN), Hendrik Ollivier (Head of the Collection at Amsab), Paule Verbruggen (Head of Mediation at Amsab) and Luc Vints (Head of Mediation and Communication at KADOC). These colleagues then presented us with a joint selection of visual and audio-visual material (political posters, photographs, informational films) from all four archives. We are very happy with this working method, since this exhibition wants to be dialogical rather than dialectic. It does not try to convince the entrenched, nor does it preach to the already converted.