The Walloons are both less productive and believe themselves to be culturally/morally superior to the Flemings. They also expect a leading role in the state and a privileged position for the French language (they don’t have to learn Dutch, but the Flemings have to learn French). What incentive is there for the Flemings to cooperate, beyond Wallonian threats to snatch part of Flanders and Brussels and attach them to Wallonia? There’s also no incentive for the Flemings to wait around as the French speakers exert left-over institutional and even in some cases illegal power to make Flanders more and more French-speaking.

I’m not optimistic about these negotiations so long as the parties don’t seem to understand each other’s grievances.

Des, I actually hope I can stop with these updates soon (read: that the situation would turn back to ‘normal’), but all Belgian commentators that I’ve heard agree that nothing fundamental has been solved, so I expect we’re continuing with posts on Belgium in 2008….

From my perspective, it looks as though Verhofstad, having lost the election, has comprehensively won the aftermath. Most delicious of all, he has put his enemy and the alleged winner of the election, Leterme, in charge of negociating a constitutional reform, as a “reward” for having failed (twice!) to form an executive.

Leterme has surely been set up to fail, and the best thing is that Verhofstad really couldn’t have arranged it otherwise. Whether even he will be able to pick up the pieces when Easter’s deadline comes and goes with no movement on the substantive questions is another matter, but at the moment he is way out in front of the Smoothest Benelux Politician Who Isn’t Jean-Claude Juncker Stakes.

(PS to Ingrid: Endless thanks for these updates – it is difficult to keep track of Belgian politics even from the Netherlands. One nano-nit: the conventional English spelling is “Christian Democrats”.)

As for the long time ‘without’ government, I get the impression that people from countries without coalition govenment think too much of this point. Normal formations can already take up 70 days or so, and longer periods are not unheard of. The former Belgium record was, I think, 150 days and our Dutch record is 208 days. There is a good system in place that grants limited powers to the former government, that will simply keep doing its job. In the meantime, negotiations on issues beyond the limitations continue, so that when the new government is there, a range of pent up decisions can be made relatively quick.

Of course, such a system can’t last forever, and apparently Belgium was reaching the end of the possiblities under a limited government. But it has not spend the last 200 days without any government at all.

On top of all this, the richer small nations have little to do with the IMF or world bank, since they tend to be lenders to it, not borrowers. The EU is of couse a different matter, but at this moment it is, in my and most people’s opinion, far less powerful and influential than national governments.

As a counterexample, developments in Australia are if anything the opposite. The national government has expanded at the expense of the states that federated to form it, and the old imperial/commonwealth ties to the UK have withered to the point of insignificance. That’s been replaced by a client-state relationship with the US, but even this is probably more distant than 30 years ago.

Between international finance and its organizations (World Bank etc.), American military preponderance in a unipolar world, the EU, and the UN, nations don’t have much to do any more. Even in my childhood back in the 50s, Belgium often faced the world as part of the “Benelux countries”.

Even France, Britain, and Germany are uncertain about their role in the world these days. Belgium must be much more so.

For people I don’t know me, I should add that I am not at all happy with American preponderance or the IMF et al. But the international playing field does seem to have been changed.

I understand that the obsolescence of the nation-state is an old theme by now, and up until recently I’ve resisted it, but the fact that Belgium’s not having a government has caused so few problems seems like evidence for it.