The paperback edition of my book A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianisation of Europe has just been published. Thomas Fleming reviewed the book in the February 2006 issue of Chronicles. Read it here. John O’Sullivan wrote a review in the November 2005 issue of The American Spectator. Here.

 

As Dr Fleming writes, the book

“illustrates three themes of Belgian history: first, an unremitting campaign to eliminate or minimize the Flemish language and identity; second, a political system, dominated by the king, based on coercion and corruption; third, which flows from the combination of the first two, the development of a state without a nation. [...]

Belgium, Belien concludes, is, in every respect, the model for a new Europe that prates of democracy while establishing a centralized dictatorship, defends ethnic minorities while destroying real nations, and, though professing the highest ideals of humanity, sinks into a sewer of vicious depravity. Only half joking, he proposes to establish the Belgian Saxe-Coburgs as the constitutional monarchs of the European Union.”