Further, a big source of trouble was the elite’s unwillingness to accept that the working class had a valid claim on power, despite huge votes for the Social Democrats that cross-cut the ethnic divides.

None of these points really apply to Belgium.

1. As has been suggested, the Belgian federal government shrinks down to the King, PM, and a handful of ministers (such as the Foreign Minister and Defense Minister). The Austro-Hungarian arrangement actually worked fine until the federal government started a European wide war, which the federal Belgian government is unlikely to do. The main problem I see with this is deciding on the internal boundaries.

2. Belgium splits up, similar to how Czechoslovakia splits up, with the Wallon part maybe joining France. The main problems are again the internal boundaries, and there doesn’t seem to be any advantages over #1. A clean break may be psychologically necessary.

3. The opposite solution: Belgian becomes a unitary Flemish state, but the French speaking minority is guaranteed language rights (ie education and other government services in French, subsidies for French language TV, etc.). The main problem is that historically Belguim has been governed by a French speaking elite. The model here would be Quebec, where the nationalist movement was spurred by the disproportionate influence of a smaller anglophone elite.

What are the showstoppers for any of these proposals? Why the need for muddle?

This tradition brought in the past the
Plakkaet van Verlatinghe [Oath of Abjuration], which was already in earlier medieval traditions that the people could get rid of non-functioning rulers. Het Plakkaet served as a model for a.o. the American Declaration of Independence.

So when majors in B-H-V want to hold local referenda, on proposal by other tiers of government, discussing legality is useless. Just holding them will already create a first order political impact.

Belgium’s been around since 1830. It’s had a functioning government for the vast majority of that time. It hasn’t fought a civil war. Democracy can be a messy, ugly thing, with a lot of gridlock and shouting. Citizens of a democratic state aren’t require to like each other and often don’t. We muddle along, complain about the government or our neighbors, and generally avoid killing one another.

One way or another, Israelis and Palestinians will always have issues they’ll need to make joint decisions on: water use, trade, security, environmental issues, etc. On one hand, you’ve got two states with their own militaries negotiating over sensitive issues. On the other, you’ve got two groups of politicians with their own constituencies negotiating. I think Israel and Palestine would be lucky if it were possible to trade their current horrors for Belgium’s political crisis. And if Belgium does split in two in the future, well, no political arrangement works forever. Taking that as a lesson that binational democracies don’t work is like seeing an elderly couple divorce after 50 years of marriage and saying “I knew it would never last.”

Anyway, none of this is to suggest that a one state solution is remotely plausible or likely to work, or that a federated Israel/Palestine would be as peaceful and functional as Belgium has been. I just don’t think Belgium’s latest crisis proves binational states are necessarily a bad idea – or worse than their alternatives. They have friction. All political systems do.

The idea of new elections is alraedy been suggested. I think, though, that they would probably first try to form a coaltion around another group of parties, which would include the currently excluded social-democratic parties PS and SPA.

Is there some reason this situation can’t continue indefinitely? Years, even?

Isn’t the norm in parliamentary systems that if it’s impossible to form a government, a new election is held?

Those reasons, and because the Constitutional Court has ruled the current arrangement was unconstitutional. So something had to be done anyway, or it would have been impossible to hold new elections (now that would have been an interesting outcome of the collapse of the current talks…).

On referendums: I don’t think the Belgian constitution foresees in referendums on any level of government, meaning that a referendum would only have consultative status anyway (formally at least).

On the referendum wish of the Brussels and Brussels border region mayors: Of course such proceedings should, apart from referendums in each municipality concerned, also include referendums in both Flanders and Brussels. Re how the (French-speaking) Swiss canton Jura was created by splitting from canton Bern in 1978-79.

*If this completely derails this comments thread and provokes yet another aimless yet nasty discussion of the Israel-Palestine situation I apologise. But it does seem to me that proponents of the one state solution are simply not living in the real world, and what is happening to Belgium (and what happened to the Czech Republic and Slovakia) would seem to prove it.

As screwed up as American politics can often be, our elections almost always provide relatively decisive outcomes. As Ingrid Robeyns reminds us, that’s not true everywhere, not even in Europe.
Today is 150 days after the Belgian elections, and t…

Since federal taxation and redistribution is at the center of the debate/problem, that wouldn’t be a compromise.

And look how that ended…