The Belgian Breakup.(The World According to Alan Greenspan)(World Affairs)(split of Belgium's Flemings and Walloons)

Byline: Tracy McNicoll

The European Union was meant to bring Europe together. In Belgium, it is helping drive things apart.

Maybe only Magritte could explain the Belgian political scene. The tiny country that lends its capital to unified Europe enters 100 days without a government this week, a surreal event that has elicited new, frenzied talk of divorce between the nation's Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons. "They're down to sleeping in separate beds, or even separate bedrooms," says Pierre Defraigne, a Brussels economist at the French Institute for International Relations.

Calls for Flemish independence from the once dominant Walloons are ancient, of course. But while Belgium is prone to political crises -- a string of short-lived governments in the 1970s and 1980s would make Italy blush -- this one may be different. A recent poll showed 39 percent of Flemings favor independence, while only 12 percent of the less affluent Walloon minority want a split. Today's push for tiny Flanders' independence is in part a reaction to the continental superproject that surrounds it. The European Union inadvertently makes the process of internal devolution easier and the prospect of separation less dramatic, says Kris Deschouwer, a politics professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Being small isn't a handicap in an enormous common market, where customers in Newcastle or Naples are just as accessible as, say, the Walloons of Namur. As a result, when considering whether to splinter off, a region's cost-benefit analysis changes -- particularly for affluent regions with strong cultural identities. The new calculus, says Brussels economist Andre Sapir, is that independence no longer diminishes trading opportunities, but releases a region from fiscal solidarity with compatriots viewed as a costly burden. At the same time, as borders, trade and mobility open up, there may be a reflex to protect regional differences, culture and language by groups with historically robust identities. In addition, in the Belgian case, membership in the euro and NATO diminishes any potential concerns a separatist breakaway might have about monetary supply or defense. "The smallness of a country is much less of a problem than it was in the past," says Sapir.

As a result, rather than bringing Europe together, the ...