Summary
YOU wonder how Belgium can be bothered having a national question. Does a country this small really need a velvet divorce? You can drive across it in a couple of hours and hardly notice you've been there. And, despite two years of constitutional upheaval, Belgium certainly doesn't look like a failed state. Travelling between picturesque cities such as Bruges and Ghent, with their chocolates and dentilles, you pass through endless neat suburbs and orderly villages of restored cottages. Bosnia, it isn't. Belgium is twee in a way rural England is supposed to be, but is not. I'm even told that garden gnomes came originally from Belgium, brought back home by British soldiers fighting in Flanders in the First World War. Now the gnomes of Flanders want their own country.
Belgium has had one of the most intractable ethnic disputes in western Europe. The enmity between the Dutch-speaking Flemish in the north and the French-speaking Walloons in the south of the country is deep, and intense, though fortunately not bloody. There are no pogroms or street fights, just the occasional flagburning. But these two peoples really don't seem to want to share the same space. Last year, a failure to agree a new division of powers between Flanders and Wallonia left Belgium without a government for six months. The king had to step in to force the warring political parties to come to their senses and form an administration. In the capital, Brussels, a kind of linguistic ethnic cleansing has been taking place, with shopkeepers in Dutch-speaking localities being ordered to take down signs written in French. Last year, it was reported that a couple in one suburb of Brussels were forced to prove that they spoke Dutch at home before getting access to childcare.See the full content of this document
Extract
Lessons to Be Learned From a Potentially Messy Divorce
Following last month's elections, in which the Flemish separatists made further substantial gains, there is an expectation, almost a presumption, that Belgium, after 180 years as a functioning nation state, is on the road to partition, if n...
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