:smack:
If this in any way affects my supply of Rochefort 10 or La Chouffe, I’ll be the first American to sign up for the Belgian Reunification Army. I hope beer and chocolate are in the rations…
[Homer]
Stupid Flanders…
[/Homer]
Are you kidding me? Mayonnaise and Chips? You think that would be bad? Just think about how awesome Mayonnaise is. If you don’t like mayo, then I’ll let it slide, but I’m firmly in the camp of mayo and fries. I prefer it to ketchup every time now. So much better. I go by the cardinal rule. If you want the best-tasting food, you have to combine fat and carbs. Well, fries are already fat and carbs. But what is Ketchup? That’s just carbs! Gotta add some fat to that! Mayo is Fat + Carbs + Fat!
It’s really amazing, for those who haven’t tried it. I know it sounds gross, but it’s really really good. Try it! What do you have to lose? Think of the other tasty stuff the belgians make? Waffles, check, Chocolate? check, Beer? check. Do you think they’d actually screw up something like this?
Despite the seeming homogeneity of the EU, this isn’t quite true. There’s no common level of taxation (income, sales, or corporation), healthcare, defense, social services, etc. etc. They are different per country, and can make a big difference.
Semantic note: I know treis meant “full independence” for Scotland and Wales, but Scotland actually is officially a “country” in its own right. The UK is a strange beast. It’s a country that contains two countries, a prinicipality, and a province, each of which has its own political assembly (apart from England), with varying degrees of autonomy. Scotland has a different legal system and system of distribution of tax revenues (though it gets a lot of funding from the UK pot). Wales, while not officially a country, also has an assembly, though it has rather few teeth than the Scottish Assembly.
As for Belgium: I’ve been hearing rumblings for a long time about this, but it does seem to be coming to crisis point. I doubt the two sub-nations would do too well on their own; I also hope that a spit, were it to come, wouldn’t lead to Yugoslavia-type animosity. Anyone know what happened to ethnic Czechs in Slovakia, and vice versa, during the Velvet Divorce?
I’m going to Brussels in November and will report back when I return. 
ETA: frites and mayo - big thumbs up. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, but make sure it’s good continental mayonnaise, not Miracle Whip.
You know for a while there, it almost seemed like Belgium would go away- by being absorbed into “BeNeLux”. It’s sad the the Phlegms 
want to go the wrong/opposite way.
I can handle the mayo…
But I can’t get my head around a country which is PROUD that its capital city’s main tourist attraction is a statue of a boy pissing.
so, yeah, they do need some sorting out…
Anyone can have a king, but if great beer and chocolate aren’t enough for them to come together over, what’s wrong with those people?
I can only conclude that their right-wingers are even more deluded than ours. 
If you aren’t gonna put ketchup on fries, for chrissake use vinegar to season them with!
Damn heathens.
Have you ever tried mayo on chips?..it’s damn tasty I tell you.
Oh and it’s Czechoslovakia
And home rule for Manchester
The northern part of Belgium, Flanders, was Dutch from 1795 untill 1830.
In 1795 Napoleon occupied Holland and soon his brother Louis was introduced as the first king of Holland… …decreed that Holland and Belgium would become the Netherlands. Instead of returning to a republic, new candidates popped up to occupy the throne. One of them was a so called William ´of Orange´. People were made believe that he was a descendant of William of Nassau-Dillenburg, also known as William the Silent, a noblemen who revolted against the Spanish rule in Holland… The ´reborn Orange´ actually was descendant of a totally different family. The Treaty of Paris (1814) provided that the Netherlands and Belgium be united into a single kingdom and William was proclaimed its first king of The Netherlands. By 1830 the Belgians’ patience had run out with their Orange-king. Mainly because he bled Flanders dry for money to get the northern parts of Holland out of the economic funk they had been in for hald a century. So an almost identical situation as today, as Flanders is currently bled dry to support the southern part of Belgium, Wallons, that has been in an economic funk for over half a century as well. Remarkable similar situation, actually. However, it’s also a hundred years ago that Southern Belgium, Wallons was the economic industrial succes and Flanders was the backward agricultural part leeching of Wallons. Politics are nothing if not short of memory. … William made a brief effort to regain control in the south of his kingdom, (affectionally know as the 10 day’s war, no kidding!) but within a few months he withdrew. On 20 January, 1831 Belgium was recognized as an independent nation. They stipulated by law that never ever an Orange could inherit the Belgian crown… and then they put together a king out of some timid nobleman from a noble family they had conveniently lying around. The new King was a timid guy perfecly happy to have ceremonial powers only. But at least now the Belgians, now a pritine monarchy again, could blow a raspberry at Holland and say: “We’ve got our own king, thankyouverymuch”
So yeah, Holland might welcome Flanders back in the fold. We’ve wanted it in the past. But really, we’ve been married once already and that marriage didn’t work out.
Before that, though, the southern part of the Netherlands had for a time belonged to Austria. Hence known as the Austrian Netherlands.
So they had been apart before.
The countries where both occupied by revolutionary France and made into the Batavian Republic.
A revolutionary craze that had the new nation states looking for new identities that bound them, in opposition to a monarch, had them delve into history and the Dutch renamed themselves Batavians. But in the southern territories there had lived, not the Batavians but the Belgae.
This also helped to form a separtist feeling amomong the Belgians.
To nuance a bit. Like later in the US but then upside down, Belgium was quickly industrialising, while the Northern economy remained firmly (almost obstinately)based on trade.
The economic measures by the government in the the North, like tax policies, all favoured trade.
Although there are voices in Belgium in favour for reintegration with the Netherlands, the Flemish are also still very proud to be Belgian. Also we are stuck with some institutions and Instutions are very hard to get rid of once installed.
Do you think an entire government and civil service would just disband itself?
And what to do with the Belgian king? He would just abdicate?
Also where do we leave Wallonia? , the French certainly don’t want it!!
But their beer is *so * damn good … doesn’t make sense, does it?
Anyway, what’s the diff? Does nationhood still mean all that much more than province-hood in the EU? If it’s mostly just about having your own name on your postal address, why should that really matter anymore?
If there is a war I’ll be out there campaigning for a stop and re-unification. Any country that produces Audrey Hepburn is allowed to also invent chips with mayo :eek:
It would seem in Europe nowadays, the only thing being in one country or another means is the color of the postman’s uniform.
Seriously, please stop perpetuating this untruth.
I’m going to hijack the thread slightly.
If a “country” like Belgium, that is, an arbitrary geographic grouping put together for (mostly) expernal political purposes, can’t survive in the long run (less than 200 years), then what in the world makes us continue to believe that we can arbitrarily throw together other geographic groupings for external political reasons and have them survive?
Most of Africa, certainly the sub-Saharan part falls in this category. So, unfortunately, does Iraq. So I’m not certain if I’m rooting for Belgium to stay together as an example for others to follow, or for it to fall apart so that perhaps we can stop perpetuating the myth that a country can be formed by anything other than the will of the people involved to be grouped together politically.
If chocolate and beer aren’t enough to hold a nation together, then humanity is doomed.
And waffles. Endive, too.
I think the existence of the European Union makes the national borders of its member states less important. Nationalism can safely be indulged because it is less of an all-or-nothing proposition than in times past. Why not an independent Catalonia? It’s never going to fight wars with any of its neighbors, the way the Yugoslavian states did when their federation split up. And it will still be part of the larger political and customs union.