Posted on 06/13/2010 4:09:43 PM PDT by americanophile
BRUSSELS — The move to break up Belgium gathered momentum Sunday as separatists won an emphatic election victory in Flanders, the prosperous Dutch-speaking half of the fiercely divided nation.
A stunning electoral success for Bart de Wever’s Flemish nationalist party marks a significant new challenge to the fragile unity of a country where tensions between French and Dutch speakers run deep.
Scheduled to take over the rotating presidency of the European Union in less than three weeks, Belgium will now do so with a caretaker administration and facing months of tortuous negotiations to put together a coalition government.
“We are close to the abyss,” said Lieven De Winter, professor of politics at the Université Catholique de Louvain, who described Mr. De Wever’s win as a landslide. “Whether we are five meters or five centimeters away is difficult to say. But Belgians are at a crossroads where they are making a choice on whether they want to live together or not.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I admit having not kept up that closely with this. Will it be good, bad or make no difference in the larger scheme of things?
Some US politicians certainly remind me of phlegm.
This has boiled down to a choice of whether or not the Flemish wish the continue to support a large population of French-speaking people who really would prefer not to work real hard.
I suspect it won’t be long before some of us in Texas start to feel the same way about people on the East and West Coasts of the US who don’t want to work real hard either...
Probably not make any difference. Flanders would go to Holland and Wallonia to France and perhaps part to Germany and Luxembourg as well. The EU headquarters would suddenly be in Holland however.
I like Belgium and always enjoyed visiting there (the Ardennes) but man, that country is really screwed up.
Didn’t Biden just say recently that the capital of the world is Belgium? Does this mean there will be 2 capitals now? (sarc)
What it really goes to show is that mulitculturalism is generally a failure. A nation of different langages and values can exist for a while, and the groups can tolerate eachother, but it does not make for a cohesive society. I suspect that in the end this will happen to Canada as well.
There’s no such thing as a Belgian anyway - the Belgicae were a barbarian tribe in Caesar’s day. Now there are Flemings and Waloons, and apparently they hate each other.
IIRC, that almost came to pass in the late 70's.
The only thing that kept Belgum or its antecedents, Spanish then Austrian Netherlands, was the Catholic faith. Belgium was incorporated into the Netherlands at the Congress of Vienna but the Dutch were a bit too intolerant of Catholicism so Belgium broke away. With Europe post-Christian there is nothing to serve as a glue to keep Belgium together.
The people who work in Silicon Valley start-ups make Texans look like laggards. 80-hour work weeks here have been common for decades.
Possibly, maybe related to this topic.
John Perry Barlow: Internet has broken political system
“The political system is broken partly because of Internet,” Barlow said. “It’s made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We’re going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich.”
Translation: “We’d have world Communism by now if it wasn’t for you meddling freedom-lovers!”
Or give it all to Germany.
The Flemish separatists have been around for a long, long time, well before the Internet. Countries are stitched together out of factions and then break up on their own. No computers needed.
Darn so Obammy was right about a two-state solution. He just got the location and parties involved very wrong.
If I remember correctly, the Dutch speaking side pays the taxes and the French side gets all the money.
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