Theodore Dalrympyle doesn’t hold out much hope:
Belgium’s inability to form a central government would not matter so much if the country did not need to reduce its public spending. Though Belgium is the largest per-capita exporter of goods and services in the world and has healthy private savings, it also has a large and growing public debt—nearly 100 percent of GDP—and an annual budget deficit of more than 5 percent. With growth negligible and government bond yields rising in a currency (the euro) that the Belgians cannot inflate, retrenchment is essential, but the Walloons and the Flemish cannot agree on how to do it. The Walloons want higher taxes to maintain the current arrangements; the Flemish want lower taxes and reduced spending to promote long-term growth. The result is a stalemate. Wallonia and Flanders are like a married couple who no longer can live together but find divorce impossible because of difficulties over the settlement.
There’s a lot of that going around.
Wallonias have lived off the Flanders for decades now. The Flanders want liberty. Let the Wallonias appeal to France for their subsidies.
Egads! Does this mean a huge cut in Belgium’s military? Is Europe doomed? Are we next?
with any luck, you are…
and good riddance, imho.
Naaaah, Europe isn’t doomed, because the Belgians have ridden on the German, French and British coattails for so long, their contribution is insignificant. Problem is, if we are next, whose coattails do WE ride on?
Belgium – blending the fecklessness of the French with the obstinance of the Germans. Not a great combination.
Belgium stages a children’s play, where the Walloons are the corrupted “crickets” of southern Europe, while Flanders plays the “ants” role of Germany and the productive countries of the north.
I can remember as a child in the early 50s watching newsreels at the movies picturing the Flemish & Walloons fighting (literally) pitched battles w. pitchforks at barricades over which language was to be taught in the public schools. Today we here in America are ACTIVELY throwing away the unifying nature and huge advantage of having a single language and culture for the Tower of Babel balkanization approach advocated by the multi-culti crowd–an approach that, has history has so amply demonstrated, worked SO well for the Balkans. There is A REASON that cautionary tales like that of The Tower of Babel come into being..
VX — we are in Brugge last year, which is in Flanders. My wife, the mussel-aholic francophone, orders “moules”. The waiter huffily points out to her that they don’t speak French.
OKEEEEH. Got it. Little sensitive to that issue, huh?
We are headed in the same direction. I doubt the country will remain as one body politic very much longer. The same regional divisions that existed in 1860 are still with us, along with much of the Transmississippi West included with teh south as well. NE, Kalifornia, Oregon, and Washington are a different country.
This is why White Nationalism, if you’re into that kind of thing, probably won’t work either. White guys from Northern Europe, even back when we were on top of geopolitics and had all of the other folks beaten down, were always picking fights with each other, and quite earnest about it. We are the guys who invented industrial-scale killin’.