A quote from Ian Traynor in The Guardian, 17 September 2007

The Walloons want to keep Belgium because they get much more out of it. The public sector is twice as big in Wallonia as in Flanders, unemployment at 17% is also double the Flemish rate. Flanders is wealthy, successful, bigger and votes for the right, complaining endlessly that it is being hobbled by transfers of public money to Wallonia, which is smaller, poorer and tends to vote for the left.

French-speaking socialists have run Wallonia for a long time (although they lost in June) and Flemish nationalists quip that Wallonia is the last Soviet republic in Europe. [...]

The tectonic plates of Germanic and Latin Europe rub up against each other along the line that separates Flanders from Wallonia just south of Brussels. The tremors are getting worse.

As the estrangement deepens, the city of Brussels runs in the opposite direction as Belgium's melting pot, which immensely complicates the strategies of separatists. The prospering EU capital is also home to Nato headquarters and a large immigrant population mainly from central Africa. Historically, Brussels is a Flemish city, but now it is a large French-speaking enclave in Flanders.

If push comes to shove, neither side would surrender Brussels, fuelling talk of extra-territoriality, turning the city into a post-national "capital of Europe".

"Brussels is the last obstacle," says Bart De Wever, a Flemish party leader. "We would have divorced years ago if it wasn't for Brussels."

A Throne in Brussels Author: Paul Belien ASIN: 184540033X