Belgium is a country that seems to be incapable of functioning. It has had no government for 6 months and on Dec.1 the leader of the largest party after the last election, Yves Leterme, gave up in his attempt to form a minority centre-right coalition government. This attempt did not break down on political or idealistic grounds, but on linguistic ones, as the Dutch-speaking (Flemish) Christian Democrats could not convince their French-speaking (Walloon) party colleagues to work with them. Recent polls show that there is a great deal of support among the Flemish-speakers of the north for the proposal that they should join their linguistic brethren in The Netherlands where they would surely immediately become a significant force in a larger Greater Netherlands. The Walloons, on the other hand, have no great desire to destroy Belgium, which has existed for 177 years, suspecting that they would become nothing more than a provincial backwater in a slightly larger France. And neither side probably wants to split up into tiny two independent countries, both of which would disappear onto the fringes of an increasingly fragmented Europe. Anyone who doubts that with regard to the supposedly ever-more united Europe of the European Union merely has to look at the unmanageable list of countries who send out national squads for European and World Cup soccer tournaments. In a further ironic twist, Brussels, the Belgian capital and its only truly bilingual place, is also the headquarters of the European Union and Nato, and its dismissal as the capital of an independent country would certainly make a mess of that status.
But there is an increasing suspicion that such subtleties may not actually matter any more and that the decades-long feuding between two linguistic groups that simply cannot get along in a national sense has already become more than a national government can tolerate. In fact there are very few western nations that successfully maintain bilingual societies and two national languages. In Europe, it’s hard to think of any other than quirky Switzerland, which does not govern itself like any other country, and Finland, with an ever-decreasing but still well-served Swedish population, and possibly Italy with its surprisingly successful solution to the once serious problem of the German minority in South Tyrol. Certainly France doesn’t rate, as it has suppressed the rights of any native language other than French. Ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish about the UK, the Catalans and the Basques about Spain, the Spanish-speakers about the US. And then there’s Canada, the world’s second largest country but with only slightly more than three times the population of Belgium. Like Belgium, Canada also has a bilingual national capital, Ottawa, and large sections of the country that are mainly French-speaking. In many ways its national linguistic demographic is much like Belgium’s, but with English taking the place of Dutch. So far, Canada has managed to survive the surge of pressure for the independence of a French-speaking Quebec, and for the moment it seems like the independistes of Quebec are in retreat, or perhaps hiding. But nobody should count them out and the fate of Belgium could have a serious impact in a country whose global and economic importance dwarfs that of the little country that apparently couldn’t.