October 1, 2007
Fly a flag for Belgium
One industry doing well out of Belgium’s political crisis is flagmaking. The red, yellow and black tricolour is sprouting from homes across Brussels as people express their support for the continuance of the multilingual state.
The movement has even crept into Dutch-speaking Flanders, where around 40 per cent of people want independence. A tipping point has been reached in my street on the edge of Brussels. On Sunday afternoon one of the 40 houses was flying the flag. By nighttime there were 11.
Mind you, my neighbours have a vested interest. At last count there was only one native Flemish speaker in the street, the rest Francophone or expats like myself. And they don’t want to find themselves suddenly foreigners.
Belgium multi-lingual population is an asset,right now Europe must focus in how to provide the hardware-infrastructure to India and Asia, which needs huge works: natural resources transport, bridges, rails, trains, harbors , roads, machinery, turbines, engines, training,etc.etc.,Europe has a massive job to do in Asia: why is Brussels and Belgium looking at their own feet?
Posted by: blogger | October 1st, 2007 at 8:36 pm | Report this commentAmong us 500 million Europeans (already in EU and those not yet) there are about 65-70% of us Europeans who are AGAINST Turkeys full membership in EU, eventualy some form of special favoured partnership, because:
Posted by: Marjan Starc | October 1st, 2007 at 10:04 pm | Report this comment- we are not Euroseptic but we like and want united Europe to realy suceed.
- a NONeuropean, Asian, Muslim Turkey is NOT Europe, and todays 70-75 million Turkey would become in a couple of decades the major populated single Nation within EU and would definitively destroy the roots of European basic values so badly needed for us to “be together” as a working Union.
- Europe in order to realy integrate and obtain some its own IDENTITY, can only achieve it by sharing some basic COMMON VALUES. Mechanical frazes and demagogy of socalled “democracy” and “human right” are just that and that alone, just “mechanical” frazes without VALUES. Europe is very tired and aging already and does NOT have the energy to transform also other NONeuropean societies. Europe will very badly need its limited energy available to regenerate its own values and strenthen its own identity. If she fails to do it, everything will just fall apart and vanish.
Maybe some European “friends” want just that, everything to colapse.
Perhaps the EU ‘identity’ is the answer to Belgium’s problems. Perhaps.
But only because Belgium has no identity of its own, hence it has nothing to loose. Surely it is no coincidence that Luxembourg too is historically among the most pro-European; with no identity of its own it has nothing to loose.
Real countries have meaningful cultural identities. And real countries are not so willing to capitulate to an EU identity of homogenized cultural banality. Try telling the Germans to act Polish, or the Greeks to work like Danes, or - heaven forbid - the French to speak English.
Unless the EU can operate in support of differences between member states it is going nowhere, regardless of Turkey’s membership status.
Posted by: Stu99 | October 2nd, 2007 at 5:06 am | Report this commentStu99, not sure the comparison with Luxembourg works. If it had no identity, it would have been swallowed up by a big neighbour long ago. How did it survive when Wales, for example, with a very strong identity, did not. I think it saw EU as a way of retaining its independence after second world war. Now its a very useful source of forced tourist cash, given that I am sitting in a bunker there now attending an EU ministerial meeting.
Posted by: Andrew Bounds | October 2nd, 2007 at 9:02 am | Report this commentStu99, you obviously don’t know the Luxemburg national motto “Mir wolle bleibe wa mir sin” (not sure about the spelling since I’m not a Letzeburger), it means “We want to remain what we are”. In 1830, they seceded from Holland along with the Belgians but were later forced to accept a member of the Dutch dynasty as their Grand Duke. Being very poor until the thrid quarter of the 19tgh century, they were forced to export their men abroad, not as mercenaries like the Swiss, but as civil servants, a field in which they acquired a top reputation in Europe
Posted by: john somer | October 2nd, 2007 at 10:16 am | Report this comment‘an EU identity of homogenized cultural banality’
Sorry, mate, but it’s not the EU doing that, it’s globalisation, corporate consumer capitalism and US-led culture/entertainment industries.
I’ll tell you the best thing about Belgium and a truly unique national characteristic:
No Starbucks.
Posted by: Jonesey | October 2nd, 2007 at 2:22 pm | Report this comment