Belgium is in crisis, apparently, though I have to say it doesn't really look it. At least, no more than it usually does. The theoretically handsome Place Flagey in Brussels, which was a building site three years ago, is still a building site, only more so and much muddier. The trains are running normally, but Bruxelles Midi station is as beaten-up and pissed-upon as ever. The frites remain excellent, of course, as does the chocolate. And in the street the people curse the taxman, as they have always done, and the price of petrol, which is new. The papers and the politicians, though, are predicting apocalypse. Believe them, and the country is in the worst trouble of its admittedly brief history, or at the very least since the dark days of the last war. Because Belgium, remarkably, has spent the past 156 days without a government. And while this is plainly not yet in itself a catastrophe, there is a very real fear that the fragile and complicated arrangement of string and sticky tape that holds this impossible country together may finally be beginning to come unstuck. Belgium, it is whispered (and none too quietly), could soon be no more. Should we feel remotely concerned by this? If you dislike unfeasibly potent beer, naff statues of permanently peeing boys, mayonnaise with your chips, and Tintin, maybe you will not. If, on the other hand, you feel a vague sentimental attachment to the idea of a country whose very existence, in the absence of anything resembling a national language, a national culture or much more than a century-and-a half of national history, depends on the virtues of goodwill, understanding and compromise, then you should.
Belgium's citizens, in any event, look pretty much resigned to it: recent surveys show that in the north as many as 63% think the break-up of their 177-year-old country, a place their prime minister-in-waiting himself has called "an accident of history", is now more or less inevitable. "The place has had it," says René Vanderweiden, a fiftysomething telecoms engineer queueing in the penetrating Brussels drizzle for a No 93 tram. "Maybe not now, maybe not in 10 years' time. But within my lifetime, I'd guess. The Flemings [Belgium's Dutch-speaking majority] want out of it, and they're no longer afraid of saying so. There's a scorn, and an impatience, that wasn't there before."
Sheltering from the rain in a stylish cafe in the Galeries St Hubert, Joelle Rutten, who works in a bookshop, blames the politicians. "We obviously don't need them," she says. "Look at us - we're all going to work, paying our taxes, nothing has changed. They're utterly out of touch with ordinary people, anyway, arguing about things that mean nothing to most of us. It's a scandal! They have no idea what they're doing at all."
Sadly, though, the politicians - or some of them, at least - seem to have a very clear idea of what they are doing. In a neat and functional town hall office in the neat and functional Brussels suburb of Halle, Mark Demesmaeker, deputy mayor, remarks cheerfully that he "can no longer see the value-added of Belgium, actually. There are six million of us Flemings, we work hard, we make money, and we're perfectly capable of standing on our own two feet. Indeed, we would be one of the wealthier small countries of Europe. For us, Belgium is simply counterproductive. We'd be better off without it."
It takes a while to get one's head around just how complicated Belgium is: this really is not your model nation state. Vanderweiden is a Walloon, from near Liège in the region of Wallonia, which forms, roughly speaking, the southern half of the country. He speaks French. Rutten is Brussels born, and speaks primarily French but, she claims, "not bad" Dutch. And Demesmaeker is a Fleming, from the region of Flanders, the northern half of the country. He speaks Dutch.
The Flemings make up roughly 60% of the population; the Walloons 40%. The two communities lead essentially parallel lives; outside the royal family, the national football team, the foreign office, the justice system and the army, no national institution - not a single political party, a TV station, a charity or even a university - serves them both. Consequently, running Belgium currently requires one federal government, three regional ones (because bilingual Brussels also counts as a region), and another three on top of those, one for each language group (French, Dutch and, just to make matters interesting, a small German-speaking community). Thankfully, the Flanders regional government and the Dutch-language community government are one and the same, so the lucky Belgians are today ruled by a mere six different administrations.
Add to that the fact that Wallonia was historically far richer that Flanders, but, with the decline of its heavy industry, is now considerably poorer; that unemployment in Wallonia is more than double that of Flanders, and that twice as many Walloons as Flemings are employed by the state; that a sizeable chunk of Wallonia's income comes from the taxpayers of Flanders and is spent (to be polite) in a rather relaxed, Latin kind of way; and - the icing on the cake, this - that Wallonia traditionally votes left while Flanders traditionally votes (quite far) right, and perhaps the real surprise is that Belgium has managed to survive as long as it has. As one of the country's more famous sons, the painter René Magritte, might have said: "Ceci n'est pas une nation." Although typically, like his other famous compatriots Georges Simenon and Jacques Brel, most people tend to think Magritte was French.
