Belgium Held Hostage: Resolved?

I have in the past posted some thoughts on the, um, situation in Belgium. Previous posts explain why Belgium hasn't had a federal government in nearly 200 days.

Today, I'll talk about the way out...sort of.

The "solution" is to punt. Current "outgoing" prime minister Guy Verhofstadt will remain PM until March 23rd, at which point presumptive PM Yves Leterme will take over. Mind you, possible coalition partners are starting to realize that this "plan" doesn't resolve their objection to Yves Leterme as Prime Minister, rather it delays their reckoning. In the article linked to, one Flemish party leader states in what I imagine is a "hey...wait a minute..." voice that there is no such thing as an interim government.

And that's the good news.

The bad news? Belgians are starting to parallel the break-up of Czechoslovakia in an important way. After the "Velvet Revolution" whereby Czechoslovakia became truly independent from the USSR/Russia, the country slowly and amicably broke into the two countries that exist today, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This break-up was actually driven by the top (rare for nationalist problems), and the elites' inabilities to work together eventually filtered down to the people of the country, who slowly came to agree with the idea of separation.

Well, this may be happening here. Belgians' greatest expression of nationalism has been over the transfer of massive funds from the Dutch-speaking Flemish to the French-speaking Walloons. This is economic regionalization, common around the world (happens in the US and Canada as well), but now Belgium is experiencing divisions over language. In addition to dislike for Yves Leterme for his ignorance of Walloon culture, now it's leaking into beauty pageants. This lovely French-speaking contestant at the "Miss Belgium" pageant is whistled and booed for her ignorance of Dutch. Such a thing would be unheard of three years ago:




In the developed world, division over language use and knowledge is the most pernicious and intractable symptom of a real problem, and we are seeing it here.