Belgium to disappear?

[Guillem2]

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10110979
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/danielhannan/nov07/wallonie-libre.htm

Is Belgium going to disappear? The country was build on consociation - a corner stone of the Good Friday Agreement. The funny thing is that most of the Norths politicians don't know that! Ask them what consociation is and they don't know.

Arend Lijphart was one of the main artichects of this system. It was designed for a problem in the Low Countries and it's been used where significant minorities cannot agree with the majority. Lebanon, Northen Ireland and Belgium are examples

How long will it last in the North? It's only a temporary soloution.

[AFS]

Interesting. de Gaulle used to say that Belgium was a country invented by the British to annoy the French...

[Sky Blue]

Very interesting indeed. Consociation didn't help Lebanon in the long run because one of the parties to the deal believed it was cast in stone and couldn't be changed.

Any break up of Belgium will be a boost for others seeking independence from large European countries - Scotland? Corsica? Basques? to name just 3. For that reason I think the EU will do all they can to keep Flanders & Walloonia together in a sham marriage.

[deiseach]

Have to laugh at that Telegraph blog entry where he claims that "the countries which do best, these days, are small, agile ones". Alex Salmond has been saying that for years, to hoots of derision from the likes of the Telegraph.

Bring it on, I say. The break up of Belgium, that is. People often complain that modern politics is dull. This is interesting. And if it leads to more discomfort for smug majoritarian politicians in London, Paris and Madrid who view the status quo as being akin to holy scripture, so much the better.

[Owenmoresider]

Denied us two World Cup qualifications in the past, serves them right methinks! Still hard to imagine in modern times that a Western European country could break up, aside from the one obvious possibility.

Might be a silly point, but if the administrative capital of the the European Union can't keep its own country together, how does it expect to integrate 27 of them further within the EU?

[deiseach]

Might be a silly point, but if the administrative capital of the the European Union can't keep its own country together, how does it expect to integrate 27 of them further within the EU?

I'd say the Eurocrats are slavering at the idea of having a city to call their own, much like Washington, DC.

[scalder]

There is an arguement that with all the immigration into Westerm Europe, Ireland included, that the charater of many states will be underminded, could we see an independent Muslin state in Holland or England?

[TacadoirArdMhacha]

There was an article I read recently about consociationalism which argued that the system can never really truely work which the 2 blocks argue about the basic future of the state.

In Belgium I'd always thought that the 2 blocs were both agreed that a Belgian state was the most preferable option which therefore meant that they used the system to ensure the effective hsaring of a single state.

Its an issue which is eventually going to have to be tackled by Nationalists in our assembly. They are charged with the job of making a statlet work which they argue (correctly in my view) is a failed political identity which should not exist. A contradiction in terms surely.