Velvet Divorce

16 July 2008



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Belgium’s Prime Minister Offers Resignation

It took 200 days of negotiation to establish the current coalition government in Belgium after an inconclusive election. After less than four months, Prime Minister Yves Leterme has handed King Albert II his resignation over a dispute involving regional autonomy. The King of the Belgians (Note: not the King of Belgium) has not formally accepted it, and he has started talks among leading politicians to find a better solution. Be that as it may, the country is on the edge of the abyss as Luc Delfosse, assistant editor of Le Soir newspaper so dramatically put it.

The trouble is simple enough. The French-speaking southern part of the country has triple the unemployment rate of the Flemish-speaking north. The Flemish part of the country is booming, and the Flemish wonder just why they have these Frenchmen as countrymen. There isn’t a national political party, a national TV station, or a national newspaper. Prime Minister Leterme says only the king, a love of beers (Chimay Rouge is pretty brilliant) and the national soccer team unite Belgians. He views his nation as “an accident of history.”

There was another accident of history in Europe called Czechoslovakia. Created out of the dead Austro-Hungarian empire, the Czechs and the Slovaks (each a Slavic nation with its own identity) wound up stuck together (along with 3 million Germans) in the same country. After a World War and 40 years of Communism, they all finally agreed to split up into the nations they really wanted to be all along. The Czech Republic and Slovakia came into being after the so-called “Velvet Divorce,” one of the most amicable breakups in history.

Belgium is faced with a similar situation. In a beauty pageant recently, a young contestant from the French-speaking south was booed because she didn’t speak Flemish; the poor kid was born in the Czech Republic and moved to a French-speaking town with her parents when she was a teen. When the animosity causes beauty pageants to be political events, things are out of hand.

The one complication here is Brussels, the “capital” of the European Union as well as of Belgium. It is hard to see either side agreeing to let go of the city and all the money and prestige that flows from it. An independent Brussels a la Singapore might work, but if neither French Wallonia or Flemish Flanders get Brussels, would politicians in successor states try to win it back? One sympathizes with Mr. Leterme, but it appears there are no good options.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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