Belgium is a country that has little to live for. Jeremy Clarkson - in one of his rare existentialist moments - called Belgium "a country invented so that Britain and Germany would have somewhere to sort out their differences." And it is true that without the interference of the Great Powers in 1830, Belgium would not have existed, but would have been split between the Netherlands and France. Now the Belgiums are coming to realize that they could have saved themselves the trouble of 180 years of national bi-linguistic co-existence. After 207 days (Dutch language alert) of coalition negotiations (Britons, take note: coalitions can take this long to form. Your five day wait was easy) everybody is ready to throw in the towel. The issues dividing the Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloons are too much to overcome.
The Dutch Volkskrant newspaper concludes (Dutch language alert) that Belgium now has but two options left: the first is an emergency government and the second is another general election. Neither will provide a real, lasting solution. An emergency government will eventually have to be replaced by a government with a democratic mandate and elections are unlikely to shift the political landscape so dramatically as to open up new avenues of negotiation opportunities. So what is Belgium to do? Nobody seems to know anymore.
There is, however, a third option that few appear willing to countenance: a break-up of the country into two independent states: Flanders and Wallonia. Now as most of my British friends will know, I'm not the biggest fan of Belgium. Still, I would be sorry to see it dissappear from the map. And to be honest it is unlikely to go anytime soon. The stakes are too high for everybody involved: the Walloons know that without the financial backing of Flanders, Wallonia is a dirt-poor country, with no high-tech industry to speak of. The Flemish are aware that they are to small a country to go it alone and cognizant that their only hope is to rejoin the Netherlands, which would be a national humiliation.
Finally there is the European Union. Belgium, as a bi-lingual country, is in fact a wee version of the state of EU wants to be. So letting Belgium fall apart would be to admit that linguistic differences are impossible to reconcile and, ergo, that the EU is doomed to failure. Yugoslavia, a similarly divided country was allowed to dissolve itself in the early 1990s because it was on the fringes of Europe. But for Belgium, right in Europe's heartland, to break up would be of a different magnitude, even if it will be a peaceful separation. The EU will therefore do everything in its power to prop up Belgium. Whatever it takes Belgium must be maintained.
And long may it live, for it will give the rest of us something to make fun of, this oversized border between the Netherlands and France.
On a side note, that Belgium has been without a government gives us another thing to ponder. Does a country need a government to function? Apparantly not. It can exist perfectly well with just a Parliament and some bureaucratically-minded civil servants. Who would have thunk it?
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