A quote from Macleans blogs [Canada], 12 May 2008

What is happening in Belgium is very serious. The subject at hand, language rights in the suburban area around Brussels, is touchy but for our purposes it is secondary to the parliamentary situation. For the first time in the country’s history, the Flemish parties – from the hard-right Vlaams Belang to the Greens – are voting in unison to impose the larger community’s will on the francophone Walloon parties, which as this authoritative blog from France’s Libération newspaper points out, are also voting as a languistic block. This kind of situation, in what amounts to an asymmetrical two-partner federation (there are smaller partner bits in Belgium, but basically it’s Flemish and French), is radically destabilizing. You need, and historically in Belgium have always had, coalitions that reach across language divides. Canada’s ability to produce such coalitions across French-English language divides, thanks often to Quebec’s ability to build coalitions of circumstance with one or several majority-English provinces, has been a key to our country’s survival and success. Once it breaks down into us-against-them, a two-partner federation faces immediate existential danger. The smaller partner will see it can never have its way on sensitive issues. Despite nearly a year’s hard work, Belgium is in something very close to that situation.