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azzuri · 'Our Scotland' Fossil Joined: 12 Sep 2005 Posts: 3787

Belgium 'an accident of history with football and beer'

By David Rennie in Brussels

(Filed: 19/08/2006)

The political leader of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking half of Belgium, has caused outrage by saying that the 175-year-old Belgian nation was an "accident of history" with "no intrinsic value".

Years of devolution had eroded the kingdom to the point where it now amounted to nothing more than the "king, the national football team and certain brands of beer", said Yves Leterme, the Flemish region's premier.

Adding personal insult to political injury, he accused French speakers living in Flanders of "lacking the mental capacity to learn Dutch". He scorned the official notion that Belgium was a bilingual nation, saying: "Look at the difficulties Francophone leaders, and even the king of this country, have in speaking fluent Dutch."

Belgian reactions to Mr Leterme's interview, given to the French newspaper Libération, appeared only to reinforce his vision of a nation falling apart.

The French-language press was united in its anger yesterday, saying that Mr Leterme had insulted Belgium's four million French speakers and King Albert II. A front page cartoon depicted the monarch in crown and court regalia administering a stern dressing down to Mr Leterme.

The Flemish-speaking press dismissed the row as a misunderstanding, saying that Mr Leterme had been speaking ironically. The premier told De Standaard that he had been misquoted, insisting that he was criticising the Flemish language skills of the royal court, not the king.

But there is no doubt that Mr Leterme touched on some very raw truths about a nation increasingly divided between the Dutch-speaking north and the French-speaking south, with Brussels as a bilingual international city in the middle.

His own family symbolises the rapid changes in Belgium. Mr Leterme is the son of a francophone father and a Flemish mother. Such bilingual unions are rare: in 2002, only 0.2 per cent of marriages in Flanders involved Flemish women marrying French-speaking men.

The two halves of the nation read different newspapers, watch different television programmes, listen to different pop music and follow different celebrities. Outside Brussels, road signs and notices are strictly monolingual, to the point of farce.

Tourists driving from Brussels to nearby Mons or Lille frequently panic when they leave the capital and those two city names suddenly vanish from road signs. They do not realise that the road runs through Flanders, so motorway signs must say they are heading for "Bergen" and "Rijsel" - the Flemish names for Mons and Lille, respectively.

Mr Leterme's hard-line stance reflects the growing sense among voters in Flanders, the richer and larger half of Belgium, that they subsidise ungrateful French compatriots in the south and the time to sever the last remaining ties may be near.

see - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/m...?xml=/news/2006/08/19/wbelg19.xml

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True Scotsman · Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject:

Belgium is facing the same problem as Britain is, breaking up. That's what happans when you put two different nationalities that speak two different langauges.
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Neil · Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2006 2:40 pm Post subject:

That would be Gaeldom & the rest of the UK you are wanting to separate would it?
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