Or not. At least not that last part, for it’s hard to get very enthusiastic about a country which a while ago broke the world record for operating without a proper, approved government after its last elections (which happened at the beginning of June, 2010). Instead we have newspaper editorials marking the day like the one impishly offered by Liesbeth van Impe in the Nieuwsblad, entitled Fear and Cynicism. And as the latest in a long line of formateurs (politicians appointed by the king to cobble together a workable governing coalition), a bow-tie-wearing dude called Elio di Rupo, finds himself having to deal with squabbling political parties and scheduled negotiation-meetings that fail to convene, the prospect continues to hang over the country that a split-up might be the only solution left.

Hmm . . . a National Day for a nation on the verge of separating roughly down the middle. Don’t know about you, but that reminds me of 150 years ago and July 4, 1861, when all of the states that were to make up the Confederacy had seceded, and blue and grey armies were headed towards each other on respective sides of the new internal border. Especially since that day was described recently in an excellent New York Times piece, one in its “Disunion” series marking that 150th anniversary.

OK, there are no Flemish and Walloon armies mobilized and headed for each other, and it’s a sure thing there never will be – for one thing, the rest of the EU would never allow it. And while the very real cultural differences separating the two sides here are accentuated by different languages in a way that was never the case between the American North and South, the crucial difference between the two situations is that, in Belgium, it’s not the case that one side senses an existential threat to one of its main economic asset-classes (i.e. Southern slavery – not that the North was truly aiming to enforce abolition; it’s a complicated question, but most historians agree – see the NYT piece as well – that it was Union, not the destruction of slavery, that motivated the North to mobilize against the seceding South).

Indeed, it’s actually the differences between these two situations that are the most enlightening, and there may well be another crucial one here. Check out the Nieuwsblad title again: Fear and Cynicism. Then read that NYT piece on July 4, 1861; whatever there was in North and South public opinion way back then, there was precious little fear and absolutely no cynicism. The South wondered whether it really should celebrate the Fourth, as it mobilized to protect what it saw was its legitimate choice to declare independence and go its separate way; the North, on the other hand, celebrated the Fourth with steely determination to remind itself why it shortly had to take up the grim task that awaited it of bringing the Southern states back to heel.

The Flemish-Walloon dispute that threatens to rend Belgium in two is very different. It is safer from the prospect of bloodshed, as mentioned; but then it is also cheaper, more petty, more ignoble. It doesn’t really have to do with property, or certainly with questions of freedom, but it does have to do with money, with base accusations of one side sponging off the other and with the resentments coming the other way those give rise to. And it’s about long-held grudges, about memories of past slights, about revenge against a French-speaking Establishment that dominated business and government for most of the state’s 181-year existence (until recently), and which sent a largely Dutch-speaking rank-and-file to die in the trenches during the First World War for a nation they had little enthusiasm for even then.

So that now, Ms. Van Impe writes:

The equilibrium in this land seems lost for quite a while now. For the fourth time in five years we celebrate the National Holiday without an approved government. After more than 400 days of negotiations the chance of any improvement is distant.The land is in just a dreary state as the wavering summer. Cloudy, with chance of rain and local thundershowers.

Then again, to continue her weather simile, the Belgians will surely take that “wavering summer” (kwakkelende zomer) any day over the ferocious heat now rampant over former Civil War battlefields in the United States. Likewise, perhaps even a miasma of small-mindedness is preferable to outright internecine warfare. Just ask anyone from the former Yugoslavia.

                          

When last we left portly, avuncular old King Albert II, he had received Prime Minister Yves Leterme’s resignation but had yet to decide whether to accept it. In fact, he did not, but what he did do was appoint three “mediators” with assignment of working out some way to breakthrough the current government deadlock. The fundamental problem is that the political representatives from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of the country, of whom Leterme is currently the leading representative, are not willing to let things go on without some concessions from the other half of the country, French-speaking Wallonia, which would increase the former’s and reduce the latter’s influence over the national government, especially concerning what federal tax monies are spent on (of which the Flemings contribute the larger share). And interestingly, the three “mediators” King Albert appointed have nary a Fleming among them: they are two politicians from Wallonia (François-Xavier de Donnea, Raymond Langendries) and one from the tiny German-speaking part of the country (Karl-Heinz Lambertz).

They might have been handed something very close to a “Mission: Impossible” if the analysis from “V.R.” in today’s La Libre Belgique is anything to go by (Ten Days to Get Out of the Impasse). The deadline to accomplish something seems to be 31 July, but who set that deadline? The King? Well yes, in a way, in that that is the day the King wants to see some sort of preliminary report from the three. But it was Bart De Wever, head of the somewhat militant Flemish political party Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA), who set a more seriously deadline by announcing on Friday that he expected to see some concessions from the French side by that 31 July date on the subject of reforming the Belgian State along the lines his party desires (as summarized above). De Wever can throw his weight around like that, you see, because his N-VA is a large part of the coalition with the more moderate Flemish party of Yves Leterme (the Christen-Democratisch en Vlaams, or CD&V) – and with three parties from the French side – that forms the present Belgian federal government. It’s the existence of that coalition that enabled the King to reject Leterme’s resignation in the first place, in effect saying “No, you go back to your coalition and resume governing the country.” If/when the N-VA leaves the coalition, then it no longer commands a majority in the federal parliament and some other Prime Minister has to be found who can put together a coalition that does – the King certainly does not have the power to appoint as Prime Minister anyone he pleases, only one that has that kind of support in parliament, because after all Belgium is a parliamentary democracy. (Yes, a prime minister can be appointed from a minority coalition, but of course only then with additional guarantees from outside-the-government parties that they will not vote to topple it in vote-of-no-confidence – in the present situation, basically tantamount to having to have a majority coalition behind you.)

Leterme The Only Choice

At this point I finally realize how naïve I was in my previous entry over Belgium’s latest crisis, when I concluded that the King would not reject Leterme’s resignation because “that’s really not the sort of thing you do.” In fact, that was likely the only thing the King could do here because, with Leterme gone, there was really no one else Albert II could think of who would be both willing and able (defined as being able to command a majority coalition) to replace him as head of government. Of course you keep the guy who is already there, otherwise Belgium is plunged again into a chaotic and annoying situation in which there is no government, there is no prospect of a government, and while everyone argues about what should be done there is no duly-constituted national authority in place to make the policy decisions that need to be made about affairs both inside and outside the country. Belgium has already faced that situation too many times in the recent past – generally, after every recent national election, including most especially the nine months of this exquisite sort of political purgatory after the latest such elections in June, 2007.

So Albert II avoids that for now by telling Leterme to get back to work – but the point of that July 31 deadline from the N-VA is that the N-VA will start getting what it wants politically or else it will withdraw from the coalition then, so that Leterme cannot be Prime Minister anymore, and so plunge the country once again into this purgatory. Really, imagine that sort of thing happening in your own country: no national government, and nobody able to say when there will be a national government or who it will be. It’s really something that’s barely tolerable, and the important thing is that, each time it happens, everyone gets that much more exasperated with the present system. Belgium happens to be a very federal country already, with substantial powers and responsibilities handed over to the regional governments who never have crises of this sort, for the simple reason that the regions more-or-less correspond to the separate cultural/linguistic areas. So the answer that becomes more and more obvious to the electorate is to do away with this national government that seems to be always paralyzed – do away with the nation – and proceed with only the regional governments. (But then there remains the question of who takes charge of the notable island of prosperity, tax-revenue, and EU institutions that is Brussels: a French-speaking island – but not by much – surrounded by Dutch-speaking Flanders . . .)

Rainy, Gloomy Celebration

Anyway, it was 21 July yesterday so the show had to go on with the usual festivities. Appropriately, though – just so that no one would forget themselves or the situation and get into too festive a mood – yesterday was also a very rainy Monday, coming after quite a rainy weekend, and De Standaard reported that, temperature-wise, it was one of the coldest July days of the last hundred years. Still, Brussels Celebrated Despite the Political Crisis. The royal family attended the traditional Te Deum Mass at the Brussels cathedral, accompanied by Yves Leterme who slipped into the cathedral by a side door. Naturally, the cardinal president at the service preached for mutual understanding in his sermon. Then, despite the rain, the customary military parade took place in front of the Royal Palace, starting at 4:00 PM. In addition to Army soldiers and vehicles, representatives from the police also took part in the parade; De Standaard notes their particularly notable demonstration of riot control personnel and equipment. And King Albert gave his National Day speech: “In our land we must think of new forms of society.”

Meanwhile, as his own contribution to National Day, the mayor of Antwerp, Patrick Janssens, noted that Belgium was reverting to where it was back in the beginning in the 19th century, when only Finance, Justice, Interior and Foreign Affairs were competences handled at the national level, everything else was in the hands of the regions. (French-language reporting in Le Soir here, to give a bit of balance.) It’s not sure whether he thought that a good thing. But the Gazet van Antwerpen issued the results of its own poll, which indicated that 33.7% of the Flemish people would like to unite Flanders with the Netherlands. (The respondents had some funny ideas about how that would happen, perhaps reflecting their over-estimation of the hand they would hold in negotiations to bring that about. Name of the new country? How about “Vlaanderenland” or “Nedervlaanderen,” although “Nederlanden” would probably be best – cf. the current “Nederland” as the Dutch name for the Netherlands. Capital? Amsterdam, or maybe Antwerp. Head of state? Preferably no royal family; if there has to be one, then let it be the House of Orange, i.e. the Dutch Royal Family, certainly not the Belgian Royal Family. Etc.) On the other hand, a collective of “progressive Flemish intellectuals” marked the National Day by releasing a manifesto (“The Flanders That We Want,” printed here in the French-language paper La Libre Belgique) in which they regretted that political interests in the 21st century still seem to have to be based upon regional and language interests, denounced the long-standing demands from the Flemish political parties for a “re-balancing” of the federal government more in favor of Flanders, and called for a new political order in Belgium.

                          

But delving into the news and commentary on both sides of the Belgian divide (i.e. Flemish/Dutch vs.Walloon/French) provides a more nuanced picture of the situation, as you would expect. For one thing, the Economist’s concern, “Time to dissolve Belgium?”, seems not to be the question at the forefront of Belgian political minds right now; rather, it is “What do we do now?” As the authoritative Flemish newspaper De Standaard reports (King sets confederate steps), that is a question that it is the immediate task of King Albert to decide – and he is expected to take until the end of this week, at least, to do that, in the meantime holding consultations like crazy with the country’s various political and societal actors. (One of the main assertions of the front-page De Standaard article is that the pattern of whom the king has consulted with so far suggests he is leaning towards finding a solution that would make Belgium a somewhat looser-knit confederation.)

Leterme @ Wit’s End

Theoretically, the king could simply decide to refuse Leterme’s resignation, but that’s really not the sort of thing you do except in a grave emergency, one that usually involves war in some way. The text of his resignation statement makes his position clear that he does not know what else it is that he could do: “It turns out that the opposing visions between the communities over the needed new balance in our state institutions cannot be bridged today. This indicates that the model for consultations at the federal level has reached its limits.” It’s also not clear that much of the country would welcome his staying on as Prime Minister, in any case. Commentators in the French-language papers are not pleased with him at all. In his editorial in Le Soir (A Country on the Edge of the Abyss), Luc Delfosse dismisses Leterme as “the little man from Ypres [a city in West Flanders]” and accuses him of selling out to his Flemish coalition partner, the N-VA (Nieuw Vlaams Alliantie, to gain power at the cost of giving full rein to the N-VA’s more stubborn Flemish-nationalistic political stance. (The Dutch-language financial newspaper De Tijd concurs in its lead article on the crisis, concluding from its analysis that Leterme indeed chose maintaining his party’s coalition with the N-VA over maintaining the government.) And in La Libre Belgique Michel Konen writes (Yves Leterme Leaves Without Glory) that “it is the nerves of Yves Leterme that ended up cracking.” There is no reason to make such a big deal of failing to meet the 15 July deadline, but, then again, maybe it’s good to finally see the back of the Prime Minister anyway: for the last 13 months of his time in office he has accomplished precious little, and has certainly shown absolutely none of the political courage that he breezily asserted he would bring to the job when he was originally approved for it.

Big Deal Deadline

Indeed, there does seem to be something to the point that, pace that Economist article, 15 July did not need to have such a cataclysmic significance. Yes, a new plan for federal power-sharing was supposed to be presented by then and, yes, it was nowhere close when the time came. But there was no crying need to make such a big deal out of it – that deadline was essentially of Leterme’s own making (and I don’t think I’m going way overboard if I speculate that missing deadlines for completed action like this is pretty much par for the course in Belgian politics). De Standaard has an excellent analysis piece on this (What Brought Yves Leterme Down?), which even terms the resignation “surprising,” as if no one really expected that Leterme would plunge the country again into crisis over a mere missed deadline. After all, the article points out, it had been pretty obvious for a long time that it was not going to be met, but there had been no real sign that Leterme was going to react like this – people probably just complacently assumed that he would not go so far as to resign. So why did he? Well, again, it was Leterme’s own deadline, and it turned out that he was serious about it, mainly (one can speculate) as a prod to get the other side (i.e. French-speaking/Walloon) to finally make some concessions to move talks forward toward “re-balancing” the Belgian federal government (code for “tipping the balance of power a bit more towards Flanders”). But it wasn’t working; the De Standaard article reports that the Walloon side seemed resigned to the stalled talks and looking forward to the next federal-level elections in 2009 in hopes of coming up with a new political alignment that would enable forward progress. This attitude was unacceptable to Leterme – either to him and/or to his coalition partner, the N-VA, which indeed has a more militant attitude about gaining power concessions for Flanders and gaining them soon. So you could say that Leterme did indeed choose maintaining his CD&V party’s coalition relationship with the N-VA over maintaining the government; or you could say that he had tried “brinksmanship” tactics – setting a scary deadline – to finally get some progress, the other side had called his bluff, and so he felt obliged to take the country over the brink.

In any event, whether 15 July really is supposed to mean anything or not, 21 July definitely does: that is the Belgian National Holiday (think the American 4th of July, or the French Bastille Day). How embarrassing to be in the middle of a government crisis that threatens to split your country apart on your National Day! Could that prospect move King Albert to quicken his deliberations and find some solution? More to the point, what will the streets of Brussels look like next Monday? The last couple of years the Belgian National Day has been marked by impressive solidarity demonstrations, especially in Brussels, of citizens marching to show their determination to keep the Belgian state whole. Will any more of those materialize next Monday in the shadow of this latest crisis?

Hitting Belgian Pocketbooks

De Tijd being the good business newspaper that it is, it also devotes an article to analyzing what the paralysis in the government means in practical terms for the Belgian electorate (What does the crisis mean for your pocketbook?). Quite a lot, it seems, mainly because all this hullaballoo is unfortunately occurring just when, in an ideal world, the government would instead presumably be devoting its energies to shielding Belgians from an oncoming storm of economic pain (including recent 5,8% inflation which the newspaper terms a “record” – but that can’t be right). Yes, the Belgian authorities have managed within the thirteen-month life of the latest government to divert themselves from inter-communal bickering enough to move forward on a number of economic measures, including raising pensions and even agreeing on a whole “social-economic program” for the period 2009-2011. The problem is that many of these still need to go through the final step of being formally approved by the legislature. Now that the government is once more in danger of falling – the PM has submitted his resignation, after all, even if that has not (yet) been accepted by the King – there is the real danger that these measures will have to start all over again with the legislative process.

Finally, indulge me for a moment as I bring into the record a perspective on this whole affair from outside Belgium, if only from its neighbor to the North, the Netherlands. Naturally, the Dutch are following Belgian developments with close attention, and the leading newspaper NRC Handelsblad even devotes an in-house blog to the situation there, whose latest entry is Navel-Staring in Belgium.

Unfortunately, the blog is not by-lined; but whoever is writing it does hope that Belgium could come up with some way to keep itself together as one country: “Seen from the North, Belgium is an interesting, prosperous, diverse and cosmopolitan land. As a cultural-economic twin-state it has more dimensions and options than the homogeneous Netherlands.” A split would simply result in two more islands of homogeneity, Dutch and French. More practically, as much as the Flemings and Walloons may want to claim they don’t need each other, in actual fact they are quite deeply intertwined economically, and wrenching that apart will inevitably carry high costs. And these precisely at a time when the winds of economic distress are rising! It is hardly a formula for the sort of peaceful “velvet divorce” (on the pattern of the split at the beginning of 1993 between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, of course) that some in the country may think is achievable. Any split could turn out to be more violent than people may expect.