COLUMN ONE : A Dark Side of Europe’s Cultural Hub : While one face of Antwerp is a wide-open, cosmopolitan stew of nationalities, the other is a center of ethnic and linguistic intolerance.

ANTWERP, Belgium — On one side of town, local officials have turned out en masse to celebrate this city’s designation as this year’s European “cultural capital.” They are opening an exhibit of Jacob Jordaens, a Baroque painter at the time 400 years ago when a bustling port put Antwerp squarely at the commercial and cultural crossroads of Europe.

Simultaneously, in another corner of this Flemish-speaking town, a more sinister variety of Antwerp’s culture is on display in a tavern called the Lion of Flanders. Supporters of the far-right Vlaams Blok, Antwerp’s most popular political party, are explaining why they want to close their city to outsiders--especially Moroccan and Turkish immigrants and French-speaking Belgians.

“We’re in favor of letting people have their own culture in their own country,” Gunter Cauwenberghs, 32, a furniture repairman, says with a not entirely pleasant smile. “We treat immigrants with hospitality: They can come and they can go.”

This is a tale of two cities, Antwerp past and Antwerp present--one a wide-open, cosmopolitan stew of nationalities; the other a defensive, intolerant center of ethnic and linguistic animosities.

Europe is home to bloodier rivalries, from civil war in the Balkans to seemingly perpetual terrorism in Northern Ireland. Belgium is no Yugoslavia, and Antwerp is no Sarajevo. Nobody has died here. Yet Antwerp’s designation by the European Community as Europe’s cultural capital has served to underscore that even Europe’s traditional centers of commerce and learning are being washed by currents of bitterness and antipathy.

Antwerp must have been a spectacular place four centuries ago, a city where: Portuguese merchants traded East Indian spices for German silver; Italians set up some of the world’s first foreign bank branches; the stock market became a model for London’s. It was in Antwerp that the incipient art of printing blossomed and where such masters of Baroque painting as Anthony Van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens lived and worked.

What a contrast with Antwerp today.

The Vlaams Blok, heavy with Nazi coloration, stunned Belgium’s political leadership in the most recent national elections in 1991 by capturing 25% of the vote in Antwerp. In all of Flanders, the northern half of Belgium where Flemish, a Dutch dialect, is spoken, the Vlaams Blok took 10% of the vote and sent 18 of its leaders to the Belgian Parliament.

That Antwerp alarms Eric Antonis, who is directing the celebration of Antwerp as Europe’s 1993 cultural capital. It is the Antwerp of 400 years ago that he is trying to recapture.

“Antwerp was really an open metropolis in the 16th Century, a marvelous city where foreign traders and artists flocked,” Antonis says. “We would like to try to open the city again.”

One part of Antwerp 93, as Antonis’ program is known, directly resurrects Antwerp’s past: the Jordaens exhibit, a re-creation of Rubens’ workshop, an exhibit of intricately carved wooden altar frames that were made in Antwerp.

Beyond that, Antonis, himself a Fleming who grew up 25 miles from Antwerp, hopes to re-create the spirit of Antwerp’s former glory with what amounts to practically a yearlong festival of contemporary arts. Against the opposition of many Flemish political leaders, who urged him to put mostly local talent in the spotlight, he has assembled an international cast.

The performing arts program, for example, has drawn choreographers, composers, playwrights and theater groups from all over the world. Avant-garde performers from 14 cities, only one Belgian, will appear on a barge that has been converted into a stage. A Los Angeles group offering a mix of modern dance, rap music, gospel music and street theater will go first, from May 20-23.

It is symbolic that the Ark, as the converted barge is called, will be moored on the Schelde River. The Schelde provides Antwerp with its port, which is its economic heart.

Antwerp’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed with the port. The city languished throughout the 1700s, when the port was closed during a long period of religious wars. It rebounded when the port reopened in the 1800s. The port remains open today, Europe’s second-biggest (after Rotterdam’s). But the recession that is gripping the rest of Europe has not bypassed Antwerp.

So robust was Antwerp’s economy in the 1960s that there were more jobs available than there were workers to fill them. During that period, the region actively sought foreign workers, especially from Turkey and Morocco.

Then came the 1973 Arab oil embargo and a decade of economic stagnation. The immigrants stayed but the jobs disappeared. Antwerp’s official unemployment rate is now about 11% and rising, and that figure misses those who have given up looking for jobs or who can find only part-time work. The Flemish Employers Assn. estimates real unemployment at more like 20%.

This climate nurtures resentment of outsiders. The Vlaams Blok became Antwerp’s leading political party in the 1991 elections, outpolling both the Christian People’s Party and the Socialist Party, the top vote-getters elsewhere in Flanders.

Why is Antwerp, among all Flemish cities, the Vlaams Blok’s stronghold? Marc Swyngedouw, a sociologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven, looks to the aftermath of World War II, when several hundred Flemish Nazi collaborators, mostly from rural Flanders, converged on Flanders’ biggest city in search of anonymity. They began the political movement that gave birth to the Vlaams Blok in 1979.

Like other right-wing parties throughout Europe, the Vlaams Blok draws its political support mostly from the down-and-out, from those who feel most threatened. A voter survey after the 1991 elections found that 60% of Vlaams Blok supporters named immigration as the paramount political issue.

“These people have an acute sense of political powerlessness, a feeling that they can’t change things,” Swyngedouw says. “The Vlaams Blok offers a false utopia for them: If you kick out the immigrants who are coming here to take your jobs and get rich on your social security system, all your problems will be over.”

Steven Bosselaers, an unemployed 24-year-old freshly out of the Belgian army, finds nothing false in the Vlaams Blok’s message. “We respect other people’s identity,” he says. “We don’t say one people is better than another. We say that the only way to preserve people’s identity is to keep them apart.”

The Vlaams Blok’s immediate villains are the Moroccans and Turks, even though they make up only about 6% of Antwerp’s population of about 900,000. So far, the Vlaams Blok has not threatened Antwerp’s most celebrated minority group: the approximately 20,000 Orthodox Jews who hold down most of the jobs in the diamond district.

“But we are a little uneasy,” says Louis Davids, editor of the Belgian Jewish Weekly. “We never know what the future might bring.”

In mainstream Flemish politics, the Vlaams Blok’s kick-out-the-immigrants policy remains beyond the pale. But in another manifestation--fierce disdain for the French-speaking half of Belgium--the Vlaams Blok’s politics of exclusion is entirely acceptable.

The Vlaams Blok favors a Czechoslovak solution for Belgium’s regional rivalries. It would split Belgium into two nations, Flanders on the north and French-speaking Wallonia on the south.

Although the mainstream Flemish political parties stop short of demanding independence, they are engineering a highly decentralized Belgium.

Already regional governments in Flanders and Wallonia have assumed many responsibilities of the national government, starting with culture. Under a formula that has been accepted by Belgium’s French-speaking political leaders, as well, the national government will ultimately be responsible for little more than economic affairs, defense and international relations.

When Belgium was carved out of what had been the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830, the Roman Catholic religion united the new nation but language divided it. From the beginning, Flemish-speakers in the north outnumbered French-speakers in the south. But Wallonia, rich with coal, dominated the country economically, and French was the new nation’s official language.

“From the very first day, Flemish people were forced to fight for their rights,” says Vlaams Blok President Karel Dillen, whom Belgian voters elected to the European Parliament in 1989.

Flemish-speaking soldiers in World War I could not understand the orders of their French-speaking officers. In the courts, Flemish-speaking defendants were convicted in a language they could not speak. French was the language of the public schools; pupils who spoke Flemish even on the playgrounds were punished.

The tide began to turn 100 years after Belgium’s founding. The University of Ghent became the nation’s first Flemish-language university in the 1930s. The Belgian capital of Brussels, until two decades ago a French-speaking enclave just inside Flanders, is now officially bilingual.

Now Wallonia, whose smokestack industries of coal and steel are in decline, has lost its economic dominance to Flanders, home to most of Belgium’s high-tech industry. Flemish economic output was about $16,000 per capita in 1988, against $13,000 in Wallonia.

“We are the most intelligent part of the country,” boasts Dillen, a Vlaams Blok member of Parliament. “We work harder. We have the authors, the artists, the intellectuals.”

On top at last, Flanders intends to get even. Flemish politicians have raised alarms among Belgium’s French-speakers with a series of incendiary proposals:

* A member of the Belgian Parliament from the Christian People’s Party has proposed a law that would effectively prevent many French-speakers from moving to the Flemish suburbs around Brussels.

* Six of those suburbs already have French-speaking majorities, and the Flemish regional Parliament has prohibited the cable television companies serving two of them from carrying two French-language television channels.

* Another Parliament member has proposed giving bonuses to store owners on the Belgian shore, which is part of Flanders, who change their shops’ names from French to Flemish.

Tensions are highest along the language frontier, where it is not so much the ordinary people as the politicians who are exploiting the issue. Squarely on the front line is Myriam Delacroix, mayor of Rhode-St. Genese, one of the Brussels suburbs that is located on Flemish territory but has a majority of French-speaking residents.

Two years ago she set up an exhibition that displayed the works of both French-speaking and Flemish artists. “But in the second year,” she says, “lots of Flemish artists did not show up, saying they had received threats from some Flemish regional authorities.”

Antwerp itself is about 35 miles from the language frontier. But it is Antwerp, the biggest and most influential Flemish city, that sets the tone for Flanders’ relations with the rest of Belgium and the rest of the world.

Right now, with the Vlaams Blok the ascendant party, the message from Antwerp is one of intolerance and exclusion.

Jo Van Cauwenberghe, who teaches ethics in three Antwerp high schools, says pressure is still building as immigrants from Eastern Europe join Moroccans and Turks in Antwerp’s foreign ghettos. “A good civilization ought to be able to accept all this,” Van Cauwenberghe says. “Can Antwerp? I hope so, but I’m worried.”

Times researcher Isabelle Maelcamp contributed to this story from Antwerp.