Once upon a time...

...there was a country that had no government. Other countries before had lost their government for a while but they always got it back, even if it took as long as 249 days. This country, though, was able to keep going for longer. In fact, even after a year it still doesn't have one.

All the same, the people don't seem to be unhappy - well, of course some of them are but not apparently any more than there were when there was a Government. For the most part, they get on with drinking some of the best beers in the world, eating what are definitely the best chips in the world, getting looked after in hospitals that are better than the ones you find in most countries where there is a government - and so on.

The country in question is, of course, Belgium - a country where I lived for three and a half years (they did have a government then) and which has many happy and exciting memories for me. It's the country where I've set the story I'm working on at the moment and I happen to be visiting it this week. Moreover, despite the gibe about finding it hard to name ten famous Belgians, it has given us more than its share of Europe's great painters, as well as people like Adolphe Sax, Georges Simenon, Jacques Brel - and let's not forget Jean-Claude van Dam (sorry, scratch that - I wish we could forget him). It would be at least as hard to name ten famous Swiss.

The reason it has no Government, of course, is that, despite being at the centre of the rich medieval territories of Flanders and Burgundy, it has only been a nation State for less than two-hundred years and lacks a real sense of national identity. Before that the territories that make it up bounced back and forth - in bits and pieces - between Burgundy, Austria, Spain, France and the Netherlands. It's divided along linguistic lines between those who speak French and those who speak Flemish, which is, essentially a dialect of Dutch (there is a tiny German-speaking minority but they are too small to make a difference). The two linguistic cultures have a long history of mutual mis-treatment. While one could argue that it was the French speakers who "started it", by now there's a pair of them in it. So they have ended up with a political system which is paralysed when the representatives of the two main language communities can't agree on power-sharing - exactly what happened last June.

Will it break up? I doubt it. The Flemish are just as estranged from the Dutch by their conservatism and Catholicism as they are from the French speakers for other reasons. And the French tend to regard their co-linguists with patronising contempt. Moreover, it is fundamentally a wealthy country - home of the EU infrastructure and a burgeoning IT industry.

All the same, it has problems that will need a government if they are to be fixed. Apart from the time and energy wasted by sniping between the language communities, there is a growing national debt, as well as issues of race integration and a massive State bureaucracy.

I hope it comes through these woes. For now, Vive la Belgique!