[BRIEF NOTE] A German Wallonia?

[rfmcdonald]

Belgium has been without a government for three hundred or so days, and it's unsurprising that the speculations about the future of Belgium's major components--Netherlandophone Flanders, Francophone Wallonia, and nominally French/Dutch bilingual but predominantly Francophone and increasingly English-usiing Brussels--are continuing. Most of the possible permutations of post-Belgian boundaries, save those involving the German-speaking enclaves in eastern Wallonia, have been laid out in maps at this pro-independence Flemish site, with either Flanders or Wallonia or both annexing themselves to their colinguals in the Netherlands or France respectively, or to Brussels, or not at all. There has been a fair amount of speculation that Wallonia would not opt for sustained independence, that its relative poverty would see it end up merging with France.

Arte those the only choices? An article last October in the newspaper Libération, "Un ministre belge préfère voir la Wallonie allemande plutôt que française" ("A Belgian minister prefers to see Wallonia German rather than French"), came up with something new. My translation, having aimed for idiom, is below.

If Belgium is divided, Francophone Wallonia has an "interest" in attaching itself to Germany, because France has "a culture diametrically opposed to ours," said Thursday the Belgian Francophone Socialist Minister of Energy and Climate Paul Magnette.

"If we must attach ourselves to someone one day, it would be Germany. That's more in the interest of industrial Wallonia," Paul Magnette, rising figure of Francophone Belgian Socialist Party (PS), said in the newspaper La Libre Belgique.

"When I see the situation in France, I know that there are only three rattachistes in Wallonia," added the minister, referring to the moovement, a very small minority, which advocates the union of the Francophone region of southern Belgium and France.

"Being attached to a country with a culture at odds with ours, it's ridiculous. With us, there is never a car that burns because we negotiate, because we have a culture of dialogue. We will not suddenly be forced into a pension plan by an authoritarian government," stressed Paul Magnette, a former political science professor and chairman of the right arm of PS Elio Di Rupo.

"There is a cultural break with the French," says he again, while like the Belgians "the Germans are in a federal system, proportional" and "social" and they "know how to do coalitions."

Paul Magnette cautions that "these ideas are completely crazy."

Completely crazy, but amusng and certainly creative.