What about Belgium?

In 2005, 65 members of the Flemish business and academic establishment issued a “Manifesto for an Independent Flanders Within Europe”, crystallizing the terms of the debate over demands for Flemish independence. And this was not the product of the xenophobic extreme right-wing Flemish nationalist party, they were serious people.

Last year Belgium’s public RTBF-TV broadcasted an extremely convincing news bulletin portraying the live break-up of Belgium, a bad joke, as some said. It was not just a bad joke. Not only because the very next day Philippe Dutilleul, the director of the fake newscast, presented the book “Bye-Bye Belgium”, so it was a not very original marketing method (see Orson Welles’ “War of the worlds”), but also because the news flash that Flanders had declared independence and that the Belgian state was breaking apart was credible enough for many Belgian citizens.

Nowadays, for about three months Belgium still has no government, since elections on June 10, in which voters split on ethno-linguistic lines between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings. And there are more and more talks about splitting Belgium.

And this happens in European Union, where the ‘integration’ and ‘multilingualism’ are promoted. One of the debate issues is the very heart of EU – Brussels, since the Flemings are asking for more autonomy and to “cut” a bilingual electoral district from Brussels.

But in the same time, the EU capital is also one of the few things that may hold the country together: although Brussels is located within Flanders, it is unlikely that a majority of this overwhelming Francophone city would choose to become part of a new Flemish state.