Will no-one shed a tear for Belgium?

A country that doesn’t exist anymore doesn’t need a government anymore either. Is the Belgian political crisis a portent of the shape of things to come in Europe? asks the FAZ.

Dirk Schümer

For over 200 days now Belgium’s politicians have been trying in vain to put together a new government. Can the country do without a central authority? Amid the ongoing euro crisis, can Europe easily ride out a power vacuum in Brussels of all places? Or will the monarchy valiantly leap into the breach? Actually, none of the above.

Even the wiliest negotiators around can’t seem to come up with a mutually acceptable compromise anymore to unravel the old Gordion’s knot of power-sharing between the central government and the Flemish and Wallonian parts of the country. The situation has reached a total impasse. Not only experts in constitutional law, but even hardened Belgian citizens are asking what elections are held for in the first place if those elected can’t even form a functional administration.

Embittered Belgians relish the prospect of two new nations

Given the choice, many would prefer the pugnacious voting system depicted in Asterix in Corsica. In the comic book take on the Mediterranean island, the ballots are thrown into boxes, which are promptly flung into the sea. Then there’s a punch-up and the toughest pugilist gets to be chief. Such a democratic free-for-all would probably be necessary if the Flemish employers association were to have their heart’s desire: a strong government with a mandate to reform the state so as to secure sound economic policies, a balanced budget and workable solutions for the future of the job market, unemployment benefits and pensions.

Most Belgians would probably only snigger sardonically at this wish list. The fact is the infighting political establishment is so far from addressing any of those issues that they have long since openly begun talks to split up the two parts of the country for good.

More and more embittered Belgians relish the prospect of two new nations at Europe’s administrative core, while the neighbours are rubbing their eyes in disbelief. Hasn’t a nation whose French speakers let its Dutch speakers bankroll them on a mammoth scale, even while brazenly ignoring Flemish culture and history, lost its raison d’être?

EU bears a striking resemblance to Belgium

How to run Europe’s capital – an historically Flemish and now mostly French-speaking city wedged in between Wallonia and Flanders – in nuts-and-bolts terms of transport, schools and urban planning: that is the subject of the most convoluted passages in the various draft compromises, all of which have foundered on the privileges of the French-speaking community.

Looking at this Kafkaesque muddle, it’s hard to believe suchlike trifles could end up tearing apart the lively capital of a multilingual, multicultural economic zone stretching from Lapland to the Canary Islands, from Ireland to the Danube Delta. How can Europe consider itself a bastion of linguistic pluralism and cultural openmindedness when militant Francophonie is banging away at its ideological drums on the EU capital’s borders? And how are Cypriots and Turks, Irish and Britons, Catalans and Castilians, Basques and Frenchman, South Tyroleans and Italians, Hungarians and Slovaks, Latvians and Russians ever to come to terms if the Belgians bury the great diversity project after nearly 200 years?

Without any real democratic mandate, Belgium handled its turn at the EU presidency [second half of 2010] like clockwork – what with a Belgian, Herman van Rompuy, in pole position as European Council president. And that’s no coincidence. With its inscrutable federal power-sharing and language accords, the country has bred a species of administrators who are savvy, infinitely patient, and quite at home in the ginormous engine rooms of the EU deal-making factory. In a way, the EU bears a striking resemblance to this Belgium.

Apparently the EU doesn’t keep strong nation-states together, but wobbly constructs, as can be observed in real time in fast-eroding countries like Greece or Ireland that are now run de facto by EU cost-cutting committees. Does that go to show that, in this age of automated administration, a weak state doesn’t need a government anymore, just some transfer payments? Are politicians nothing but limelight hogs for the show business of electioneering and press conferences?

The government deadlock actually jeopardises the economy, not the functioning of federal power-sharing systems that were put in place long ago. Ultimately, the disintegration of this model European state now only hinges on the medium-term costs of a breakup. In emotional terms, no-one sheds a tear for this Belgium anymore.

With the EU currently vetting new candidates for accession, namely Iceland and Croatia, and with its single currency crumbling before its very eyes, all this also goes to show that everything is in flux on this malleable continent. Nations are not eternal, though languages and traditions turn out to be extremely resilient. In a globally networked economy, every now and then one state or another can indeed become superfluous. Politics in present-day Belgium, at any rate, seems to be reduced to a mise-en-scène of symbolism and spectacle.

Translated from the German by Eric Rosencrantz
Source - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Frankfurt

Albert II

The most powerful monarch in Europe

The last three and a half years of institutional chaos in Belgium have turned Albert II into “the only king with wide-ranging powers in Europe”, considers El Mundo. In the absence of a permanent government seven months after the elections, King Albert II recently asked caretaker prime minister Yves Leterme to cut the 2011 budget deficit. This “unprecedented gesture” coincides with increasing market pressure over Belgium’s inability to handle its high public debt, but in the country’s long-running political crisis the king had previously “mediated between political groups, named transition cabinets, given instructions to acting politicians and convinced leaders to continue negotiating”. El Mundo explains Albert II “already had experience in reigning without government”, because in 2007 it took Leterme nine months to become prime minister, but now “the missions he entrusts are more precise and more political”. The Spanish daily concludes that the Belgian king “has seen his powers reinforced in practice by the paralysis of a country unable to negotiate conciliation between the Flemish and French-speaking populations”.