Shortly after we moved to Belgium I again met an old friend, a retired French teacher who had been brought up in the south of France between the Wars. Conversation over dinner turned inevitably to politics and the great European project.
"What you forget too easily," she told me, rounding on a casually dropped piece of Euroscepticism, "is the experience of my generation. At home, in my childhood, every day, we lived with the recent memory of the first War, and the certainty - not possibility - that there would be a second. Then we lived with occupation. You have no idea . . ."
I recalled the rebuke 10 days ago when 15,000 people marched through Brussels against the new Austrian coalition; 200 organisations and most of the country's leading democratic politicians took part. They were led by a group of frail old men and women from the organisation representing Belgians deported under the Nazis. They spoke with tears welling in their eyes of "never again" and of how moved they were by the turnout of young people.
The strength of Belgium's reaction to the events in Austria has been unparalleled in the rest of Europe. Without doubt it has its roots in part in that living memory of Nazism, in part also in a profound sense that what happens in Europe is the business of all Europeans. In part, too, in a determination to maintain the cordon sanitaire that has so far made coalition deals impossible with the country's home-grown fascists of Vlaams Blok.
And there has been a genuine enthusiasm for the internationalist idealism of the new government and its popular Foreign Minister, Mr Louis Michel, himself the son of a former deportee.
It is as if Belgium is rebranding itself. The land of Dutroux, paedophilia, political corruption, bureaucratic inertia and sectarian linguistic division is showing its real face to the world. A tolerant, decent society which believes silence is collusion.
School holidays to Austria have been cancelled, tourism stalls blocked, a major taxi firm now even refuses to service the embassy. . .
Mr Michel has led the charge against Jorg Haider. He marched with the 15,000, he demanded the extradition of Gen Pinochet, and even opened up a parliamentary inquiry into the alleged involvement of Belgium in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratic leader of the Belgian Congo.
A seamless photomontage on the cover of the latest issue of Tel e Moustique, Belgium's cross between the RTE Guide and Magill, aptly depicts the genial Mr Michel as Zorro. "Austria is my business", he says of the Haider controversy. "France is my business, Great Britain is my business. I am a European. As Europeans we have subscribed to common democratic values," he says, pulling no punches. "A man who exults in Nazi theses", he contends, "is a Nazi."
And he is deeply undiplomatic about the Austrian Chancellor. "Schussel chose very egotistically, for his own power and for his own prestige and for his own career. That is the choice he made. He did not make the choice for Austria."
The former language teacher and leader of the Francophone Liberal party is an impassioned conviction politician who has a considerable influence in the inner cabinet of the Prime Minister, Mr Guy Verhofstadt.
He sees the eviction last June of the Christian Democrats from government after 40 years as an important opportunity for a new type of politics.
"The parties which were at the hub of our politics for the last 40 years, who permeated the institutions, and were implicated in all the deals, the denials, the concessions that that implied, they are now in opposition. And there is undeniably a need for fresh air," he told Tele Moustique.
"The nature of the Liberal-Socialist-Green coalition opens up new possibilities. Words like democracy, humanism, equality, have a real meaning . . . Previous governments' practice left a gulf of credibility between such concepts and reality."
Mr Michel is among those who believe Vlaams Blok, the Flemish virulently anti-immigrant and ultra-nationalist party, should be banned. "No freedom for the enemies of freedom," he says.
The party, which has about 15 per cent of the vote in Flanders and as much as 28 per cent in the country's second city, Antwerp, could make gains in the local elections in June, but he is adamant that no local power-sharing deal should be done with them. To suggest as much inside his party would lead to expulsion.
"And in other countries, France, Germany, Italy, wherever," he insists of the anti-Haider protests, "it will be more difficult for a party to do what Haider has done."
But is it gesture politics? Can a small country really make a difference? "I am ambitious for my country and for Europe," he says. "And I insist that, as a small country, one can conduct high politics. A small country makes no difference if it contents itself to shut up. Because few are ever going to ask our advice, it is better that we should offer our opinions as our right . . . And at the same time, being small gives us a freedom of speech precisely because there are less raisons d'etat."
The country's Socialist VicePresident, Ms Laurette Onkelinx, agrees: "For too long Belgium has said, `We are too small, we must be silent, above all, no waves'. Now a new pride is returning. We are prepared to advertise our convictions."
