|
Belgium diary
Oct 3rd 2007
From Economist.com
Beer-soaked and moronic, but it's home
THERE are many bits of the world whose identity is shaped, at least in part, by not being a bigger neighbour. Canada is not America; Portugal is the Iberian country that is not Spain; much of the Nordic world thinks of itself as not Sweden.
Belgium is a rare nation that is defined by not being two of its neighbours. Within its borders live, in grumpy co-existence, six million Dutch speakers who are not Dutch, and four million Francophones who are not French.
The Flemish argue that they are a self-confident bunch, and suffer no inferiority complex in regards to the Dutch who live just over their northern border. Young Flemish people see themselves as cooler than their counterparts in the Netherlands, for one thing. Though the cliché is that the Flemish watch a lot of Dutch television, Flemish linguists nowadays fret about the growth in Belgian television shows using dialects that only the Flemish can understand. This, they argue, undermines years of teaching everyone standard Dutch in Flanders.
By contrast, the Flemish accuse their Francophone compatriots of hero-worshipping the French. "Francophone Belgians are among the first to mock themselves for having a bit of a complex about France...But one could argue that stance stemmed from sound foresight: while Mr Sarkozy has hardly stopped for breath since being elected, Belgian political leaders have spent the post-electoral interval squabbling amongst themselves and failing to form a government, for more than 100 days now.
|
