Calls for a Breakup Grow Ever Louder in Belgium

Source: New York Times

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: September 21, 2007

BRUSSELS, Sept. 16 — Belgium has given the world Audrey Hepburn, René Magritte, the saxophone and deep-fried potato slices that somehow are called French.

But the back story of this flat, Maryland-size country of 10.4 million is of a bad marriage writ large — two nationalities living together that cannot stand each other. Now, more than three months after a general election, Belgium has failed to create a government, producing a crisis so profound that it has led to a flood of warnings, predictions, even promises that the country is about to disappear.

“We are two different nations, an artificial state created as a buffer between big powers, and we have nothing in common except a king, chocolate and beer,” said Filip Dewinter, the leader of Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Bloc, the extreme-right, xenophobic Flemish party, in an interview. “It’s ‘bye-bye, Belgium’ time.”

Radical Flemish separatists like Mr. Dewinter want to slice the country horizontally along ethnic and economic lines: to the north, their beloved Flanders — where Dutch (known locally as Flemish) is spoken and money is increasingly made — and to the south, French-speaking Wallonia, where a kind of provincial snobbery was once polished to a fine sheen and where today old factories dominate the gray landscape.

...

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/world/europe/21belgium.html?ref=world

Parasites searching for an open wound...

I think my ancestors were from there in the 16th C.

They were on the verge in 1965 -- the first time we went there.

and the Wallonia as a bunch of snobs living in dirt.

How interesting.

But there is also deep resentment in Flanders that its much healthier economy must subsidize the French-speaking south, where unemployment is double that of the north.

expecting a break-up some time in the future. That reminds me of a quote - I believe from Henry Adams - that no American ever dies in the country in which he was born, simply meaning that change is rapid.

Other candidates: Scotland will leave the United Kingdom; Catalonia will leave Spain; Quebec will leave Canada; and just maybe the United States is not as solid as we think.

out at a Welsh Nationalist pub, and one of them used to say "They'll always be an England, but I wouldn't bet on the UK." A lot of them saw a kind of a two-tier structure developing across Europe whereby people voted for local,regional,special interest parties in national elections and went international for EU. For my money, I think we are pretty much at the end of the nation state ( the damn thing was only invented about 500 years ago). Now it is a case of what we replace it with. Multi-nationals figured out that the nation state is pretty much a joke at this point in history. It's time the rest of us figured it out and figured out what to do.

Washington, Oregon and California as one country. The rest of the US can go its own way.

From 1820 to 1865, easily within a person's lifetime, Texas went from

Spanish to
Mexican to
Independant to
American to
Confederate to
American again.


Spanish- Mexican happened because of battles fought far from Texas.

Mexican - Independant happened because of a revolution in Texas.

Independant - American was by popular vote.

American - Confederate was by popular vote.

Confederate - American was because of battles far from Texas.

Changing governments was no big surprise to a Texan living in mid-1800's.

Instead of a Europe of the Nations.

It may yet happen.

It was very, very close last time.

...will stir the pot among Basques, Catalans, Scots, Welsh, Corsicans, and Quebecois.

Remember Monty Python and "What's a derogatory name for the Belgians?" Now it looks like it will really be the "Phlems".

might be making their plans as well.

DemEx

has gone through. I wonder if France would let Alsace-Lorraine go its own way. Probably not.

Vlaamse Bloc and the Front national both are considered extreme right and extreme nationalists... sort of like the authoritarian republicans here. they've been around for more than a decade. -- they are like the Vichy french -- and no one that I know in Belgium supports them. -not to say they don't have support, but it's not among any of the college-educated professionals I know nor people working small-owner bizzes.

The Walloons are not considered "stuck up" French speakers. They live in the former heavy industrial area of southern Belgium, where cities like Liège still have soot-stained walls on buildings. Wallonia was where the Battle of the Bulge was fought, and where Ypres became a graveyard in WW I. The northern predominantly Flemish speaking area consider the Walloons a economic burden because heavy industry doesn't have the same power as before. France makes fun of the Walloons because they have a district dialect...and because they're not France.

but they are not two nationalities. Belgium was occupied by everyone.. spain, austria, germany, france... the big tension for the north is that flemish was called "the language of peasants and farmers," while French was (and still is) used by Flemish-speakers, mainly in the capital, Brussels, as an "affectation"... the language of diplomacy ...in the way that Catherine the Great spoke French, and in the way that many other nations now learn to speak English because America is the great power. --or was... that dollar thing worries me... the northern Belgians wants their propers.

The Flammands want respect for their culture (Brueghel (I would bet his peasants at that wedding were speaking Flemish), Rubens, Tapestries, Art Nouveau, --one of the first and most prolific printing presses (Plantin) that was also one of the most long-lasting--the first stock market (bourse)... but because the world is often ignorant. a lot of people think Belgium is only a French-speaking country (ergo "French fries) -- supposedly created by Napoleon's Belgian cook. Flemish people that I know also claim Walloons like the gypsy Django Reinhardt, tho he maybe did not claim them -- I think this article gives too much credence to the ultra right in Flanders. There is a sort of wounded pride in some Flemish people, but again, Vlaamse bloc are akin to segregationists.

The Catholic party is center-right, not far right like Vlaamse Bloc. I didn't get, in the article, why exactly they have not been able to form a govt. It sounds like a filibuster here in congress to wear down the opposition. I wonder who helps Vlaamse bloc with party funding, etc. Seems to me that someone wants to undo their social safety net in the same way that Sarkozy was brought in to make France "more capitalist."

it's funny how we've heard, for decades (at least I have) how weak and unstable the European economies are, how they will fall under the weight of their own utopian social democratic beliefs, and yet it appears that the euro, and europe in general, inspires more confidence than the reaganomic, bush junta u.s. hmmmm.

the writer who did this article for the NYTimes is a very interesting reporter. She's spent quite a bit of time in Iran in the past, and wrote about it without falling into stereotypes while educating Americans a bit about the culture. I'm not trying to say she's doing a hit job, just that Vlaamse bloc is the squeaky wheel.

......The turning point is widely believed to have been last December when RTBF, a French-language public television channel, broadcast a hoax on the breakup of Belgium.

The two-hour live television report showed images of cheering, flag-waving Flemish nationalists and crowds of French-speaking Walloons preparing to leave, while also reporting that the king had fled the country.

Panicked viewers called the station, and the prime minister’s office condemned the program as irresponsible and tasteless. But for the first time, in the public imagination, the possibility of a breakup seemed real.

Contributing to the difficulty in forming a new government now is the fact that all 11 parties in the national Parliament are local, not national, parties. The country has eight regional or language-based parliaments.

Oddly, there is no panic just now, just exasperation and a hint of embarrassment. “We must not worry too much,” said Baudouin Bruggeman, a 55-year-old schoolteacher, as he sipped Champagne at the festival in Namur. “Belgium has survived on compromise since 1830. Everyone puffs himself up in this banana republic. You have to remember that this is Magritte country, the country of surrealism. Anything can happen.”

bc they certainly are not ready to boil over like Lebanon,Gaza strip or northern Spain imo

...all that's needed is a nice invasion to get everybody holding hands and singing Kumbahya.

Too bad there's no oil there.

Or were those two separate Flemish radical parties whose names both translate to Flemish Bloc?

but again, they've been around for ever and most people I know/have known for twenty years roll their eyes when they talk about them as a political party. I haven't been there for a few years, so maybe it's diff, but when I talked to ppl from Belgium who were visiting here last year, I asked about Vlaams bloc, etc. and heard they were stronger than before b/c of the whole backlash after 9-11 but were like "football hooligans" in England. but maybe that's just from their perspective.

Belgium has a lot of "guest worker" families from Turkey who came to the country in the 1960s -- Vlaams bloc also appeals to people who don't like muslims with females wearing head scarves, etc...

I think the comment above about nationalism being over is really interesting, because as much as Vlaams bloc hates Wallonia, the left and the right hate each other here. so are we looking at the U.S. as four different "nations?" -- Cascadia in the northwest/west, with San Fran as a capital, Midlandia with Chicago, New Yorkistan for the northeast and Jesusland for the south? -- or "Atlantis" with Atlanta as the capital? --pardon the dig at the south. since I'm from there, I seem to feel I can so those sorts of things...

I wonder about regionalism because of the issue of fuel costs for food transport and populations of areas with majorities that really do not want to have the same laws, and because of the thirty year-long hate campaign by the right wing against liberals. Imagine that fake partition program here... southerners cheering, waving the confederate flag, as non-Christians left the south...

I wonder how a country as small as an independent Flanders or Wallonia would survive, but I wonder more about how a country as large as the USA has managed to hold itself together this long. I imagine there's probably a sweet spot of size, geographic size and population size, in which governance is efficient and the economy is reasonably self-sustaining with a decent balance of trade.

I'd always kind of imagined the Vlammsblok as being like you described, football hooligans with a platform, a ballot, and delusions of grandeur. The times are strange all over, though. To me, it looks like things are primed all over the Western world for the center to fall apart and the two old extremes to face off again. The way things seem to be going, though, the strong Left needs to finish putting on its makeup and get its butt onstage already. The other actors are already in their brown shirts, ready to steal the scene. :-/

In 2002, three non-profit organisations that in effect constituted the core of the Vlaams Blok party were sued by the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism and the Liga voor Mensenrechten (League for Human Rights) for "incitement to hate and discrimination." The organisations were condemned by the Appeals Court of Ghent in April 2004 for "repeated incitement to discrimination." The party's appeal of the verdict was rejected by the High Court in November 2004.

Following this conviction, the Vlaams Blok party disbanded itself in 2004. The former Vlaams Blok party leadership and members subsequently established the Vlaams Belang. According to the Belgian state security service, this was merely a cosmetic act.<9> To some observers, comments made by the leaderships of the old and new parties read along the same lines.<10> The Belgian State Security Service noted that the party was forced to change its name and to rid its platform of racist elements.<11> The "launch of the new name Vlaams Belang was paired with a publicity campaign that had the intention of creating an image of respectability".<12>

Changes to the party platform have been made to allow it to comply with the law, and the motto of Vlaams Blok, Eigen volk eerst ("Our own people first"), has been dropped, though it is still used by party leaders and members in meetings.

dear lord, priorities people! what on god's green earth, except maybe to add some good ganja in the mix, is more important to have as a foundation for a country!? what, he don't like beer, fries, and chocolate? oh hell no, kick that bastard out! no one needs a killjoy!

me thinks this jerkwad doth protest too much... pfft, like petty bullshit such as language and history mean anything compared to the glorious ecstacy of such delicious things. the dude's harshin' my buzz, he needs to shoo away!

those fries come with mayo.

Whole different story.

*real mayo* is like the jis... um, nectar, yeah, nectar! of the gods. you haven't lived until you had real fresh mayo. mmmm..... mayo.
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