For the second or third time in a week, I have heard jokes about Belgium. The best version of the joke is that there are only two things that come from Belgium, chocolate and child molesters. And they only make the chocolate to entice the children. I cannot find how long this joke has been funny because I cannot find through my buddy Google exactly when child molestation became a public problem in Belgium. Nor can I determine whether or not it is strictly something associated with the Catholic Church or with something else. I imagine there's a good history of Belgium somewhere other than Wikipedia, but I'm not that interested.
What strikes me about Belgium is how tiny it is and how vulnerable it might be despite the fact that it is the nominal capital of Europe. Or is that The Hague? Maybe I'm thinking of Van Rompuy as President of the EU being from Belgium. If you put the Netherlands and Belgium together, you get something about 2/3rds as populous as California in about 1/7th the land area. So it's a smaller mistake than Northern California vs Southern California. In fact, you can put Israel into that mix as well and the three of them combined still don't add up population-wise.
I think of Israel because, well, it's tiny too. And given that Belgium is a kingdom and so is Holland you wonder what keeps them around. Guess what? It's the money. Belgian GDP is 468B and Holland's is 807B. Israel is 200B that adds up to just short of 1.5T. California is 1.85T. So if you have a decent enough GDP, and population, then perhaps you can stick around despite your constrained space. It explains a bit.
But Belgium also notoriously has little national spirit. That certainly cannot be said of Israel. In Belgium, they literally split the country in two for French speakers and Dutch speakers, or Flemish which kind of sounds like a combination of German and Afrikaans spoked with an almost dead flat American English accent. I noticed this a couple weekends ago when my daughter was filming an infomercial for her history class about immigration to NY and NJ - they wanted to know what Dutch accented English sounds like. Neil Farage of course had his notorious barrage against the Belgian state, and I remember some of the Brits I made pals with on my trip to the Midlands saying rather tedious things about the Belgians themselves. The word most commonly used was 'morose'.
So will Belgium survive? How does Belgium survive? I mean its population is smaller than the net number of Mexican Illegals here in the States. At some point we should care, but exactly how much is difficult to say. I think that the safest thing to say is that Belgium can purchase its survival in a steady Europe where state on state conflict is considered passe, but that nobody trembles in fear of the Belgian Army, even if it could manage joint operations between its two linguistic partitions. It is in thinking about the linguistic partitions of Belgium that questions about European union should be considered. If Belgium itself can work, then perhaps that is part of the spirit that animates hope about the European economic and political union. But I can tell you for damned sure that political union across cultural lines is NOT working in Holland.
Holland aka the Netherlands is one and a half times larger in population than Belgium, and that is the place which is dealing with a troublesome matter of Islamic integration. To keep it short and simple, it ain't working - c.f. Hirsi Ali and the murder of Theo Van Gogh. So if the Netherlands and Belgium are Balkanized, it doesn't bode well.
Consider Spain for a moment. Nobody thinks that they would do well if this global recession continues, and they're at 1.4 Trillion in GDP. That's more than three times Belgium. And Spain, also a kingdom, has 46 million people. You would think that they're more likely to survive than Belgium - after all Spanish and Catalan mix better than Dutch and French. It is all about the people.
All of this is speculation of course. Belgium might have a financial system that is an order of magnitude more fiscally sound than that of other troubled EU nations, and indeed there may be an extended time of peace in which assets alone can and will buy security. If you're Belgium, you have to bet your life on it. As far as my thinking goes were I Belgian, I'd do everything possible to get in the EU umbrella and figure out some kind of Federated approach that can corral and manage economic, cultural and linguistic diversity.
But the jokes continue. Who really cares about Belgium? Can a tiny Eruopean kingdom survive Islamism?
Recent Comments