You might recall me mentioning that Belgium was in a bit of a sticky wicket because they couldn’t manage to form a new national government, and there was quite a bit of serious talk about splitting up the country.
Well, it’s nearly three months later, and they still don’t have a national government. Fortunately, nobody seems to have noticed or cared, and life goes on in its own peculiar way from day to day. Much of the talk about splitting up the country hasn’t gone a lot further than just talk, since neither the Dutch nor the French really want to take on new citizens (and the Belgian national debt), but Brussels might evolve into a sort of city-state on its own (even though the EU might move its capital elsewhere).
The IHT article in the link points out that the success of the EU as a super-national state is having similar effects elsewhere (to wit: Scotland), since the existence of the federal European government obviates most of the purposes of the original national governments. It will probably take a good deal more convincing to get countries like Germany and France to devolve back into their smaller components, but some of the other more loosely-organized European countries (the largest and most obvious being Italy) might also go the way of the dodo in time.
