Notes from a Tiny Country (that might become smaller yet)

Exactly a month ago, I left Australia to wither in its heat and went in search of long-lost cold and snowy winters. I'm glad to say I have been successful: it's been a long time since Belgium has seen the cold and snow we've had a few weeks ago. Having my head sufficiently protected from overheating, I even managed to continue writing my thesis - though there is of course no atmosphere to get work done like the one at work itself.

Besides the cold and the happy rediscovering of various family members and dogs, there was a fair amount of reacquainting with the homeland. From a distance of well over 10,000 km one does get some inkling about potential problems affecting the tiny suburban area wedged in between France, Germany and the Netherlands - but somehow I never expect the worst to happen; not to Belgium. After all, it's been a good 175 years now that we may have had our misunderstandings and believe we're all very different and so on, but surely in the end we'll have a beer and some fries and forget about those "troubles" until some later day. Besides, we've got Europe to worry about - and Brussels: what on Earth would we do about Brussels?

Maybe my lack of interest and confidence in the status quo were misplaced this time. Because looking at the political landscape - and talking to some of the people who cultivate that landscape - I'm starting to get the impression Flanders (i.e. the North) is simply put a mess. No one seems to trust anyone else anymore. Of the three political alliances that existed when I left four years ago, none have survived. Instead of one (I'll keep this clean) useless populist party, we now have two. Furthermore, recent polls indicate no less than five political parties would get between 10 and 20 percent of the vote in Flanders. To the best of my knowledge Flemish politics has never been as divided. (For all you statisticians: most likely this isn't just a fluke - there have been a few very similar polls.) So maybe the Flemish are -and will be- the main cause of the current Belgian ungovernability? (We haven't had a decent government since the elections in June 2007.) And maybe I'm not the only one who thinks so. Some (semi-?)official Walloon (i.e. from the South) bodies are already investigating the relative merits of becoming independent or joining France.

In all of this Machiavellian politics, it's nice to see a light rise in the West. As you all know, Obama was inaugurated yesterday. Apparently that doesn't mean the Belgian pubs suddenly change their tradition and turn on the television (a concept that has been tried and tested in the Anglo-Saxon world, but that hasn't quite taken off on Belgian soil just yet), but the continent did take notice. After years of chauvinistic Eurocentric anti-Americanism, we seem to once again place hope in our younger brother across the Atlantic.