One reason why Flemish Belgians resent having to prop up the Walloons with their tax money is that they regard them almost as foreigners. Most Flemish readers don t read French language newspapers or novels, and vice versa.

Meetings also took place with various authorities of the French speaking and Flemish regions and communities.

Alas for them, however, the Flemish have no such desire. Belgium, after all, became an independent state in 1830, precisely in order to liberate the Catholic Flemish, as well as the Walloons, from being second class subjects in a Protestant Dutch monarchy.

Don t we feel sympathy for the Tibetans in their struggle for freedom? Why shouldn t the Flemish go their own way?

Vlaams Belang, the Flemish nationalist party, may not be the biggest party in Belgium, but it has done well in local elections. Like the Swiss People s Party, Vlaams Belang feeds on popular resentment of immigrants especially Muslim immigrants of the European Union, and, of course, of the French speaking Walloons, from whom the Flemish nationalists would like a divorce.

If Flemish citizens don t want their taxes to go to the Walloons, what about helping out unemployed immigrants from Africa, a large chunk of which the Belgians once owned and exploited as a major source of their prosperity? It should come as no surprise that the Flemish nationalist party (Vlaams Belang) is hostile to immigrants too.

Perhaps the citizens of Belgium do not have enough in common anymore, and Flemish and Walloons would be better off being divorced. But one hopes not.

Belgium stated that the French , Flemish and German speaking communities and the regions of Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels Capital were also bound by its signature of the Convention.

Belgium declared that the French , Flemish and German speaking communities and the regions of Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels Capital were also bound by its signature of the Migrants Protocol.

Belgium declared that the French , Flemish and German speaking communities and the regions of Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels Capital were also bound by its signature of the Trafficking in Persons Protocol.

In Spain, some Catalonians have episodically demanded independence, as have some Flemish in Belgium and some Québécois in Canada. Iraq periodically verges on splitting into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish states (the Kurds already have considerable autonomy).

For more than six months, the country has been unable to form a government that is able to unite the French speaking Walloons (32 ) and Dutch speaking Flemish (58 ). The Belgian monarch, Albert II, is desperately trying to stop his subjects from breaking up the state.

In addition, in Belgium, the Flemish Government has formalized an extensive consultation and discussion process with representatives of civil society (employers and environmental associations, trade unions, etc.) about climate change, in a very significant bottom up approach that was the subject of a special presentation at the Eleventh Session of the Conference of Parties to the Climate Change Convention.

In the run up to the referendum, Scotland s independence movement became an important point of reference for Catalans and Basques in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, the Veneto and South Tyrol regions in Italy, Corsicans and Bretons in France, and the secessionists of Quebec. All hoped that Scotland would pave the way for the peaceful breakup of their own states.

It's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in Brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions, but one of whom speaks Flemish and one of whom speaks French or two families that live in a rural district in Nigeria, one of whom speaks Hausa and one of whom speaks Igbo.

Although the French speaking Belgians started the European Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, they are now living in a deprived rustbelt in need of federal subsidies, a substantial amount of which comes from taxes paid by the more prosperous, high tech Flemish. A handful of right wing Dutch dreamers care, too, for they have visions of uniting Belgian Flanders with the Dutch motherland.

In the 1968 Belgian Linguistic Case, the European Court of Human Rights found that Belgium had not violated the right to education contained in Art. 2 of the First Protocol to the ECHR when it denied French speaking parents living in a Flemish speaking part of Belgium the ability to have their children educated through the medium of French the court ruled that this right to education did not include a right to be taught in the language of parents' choice.