Little Belgium, host of the parliament of big Europe, has set a new world record that may be hard to equal in the foreseeable future. For 250 days it has continued to muddle through without a functioning government. For many decades the mystery has been why the country exists at all since, as Der Spiegel so delicately put it, only three things have held it together: the national football team, beer and the king. And now the football team is third-class, the beer is a globalized brew and the king, like all European kings and/or queens, is quaintly irrelevant. So why should the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flems be forced into a union that neither of them seems to want?
Nobody seems to know the answer to that, and the proof of dysfunctionality is that democracy has led to a parliament full of parties so antagonistic to each other, largely on linguistic grounds, that no coalition government can be formed or even imagined these days. Bilingual countries like Canada should be taking notes furiously in an attempt to avoid a similar fate. But wait, something extraordinary seems to be happening in Belgium. Without a government, things are running much more smoothly that it did with a government. It turns out that civil servants carry out the necessary work very well without bellowing politicians to bother them.