 |
Straddling the cultural boundary between Germanic and Latin Europe, Belgium is linguistically divided. The Dutch-speaking northern region, Flanders, houses 58% of the population. Another 10% inhabits the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region, for approximately 85% using French.[2][3] In this enclave within the Flemish Region however, neither language is the primary one for roughly half of the residents.[4][5][6] French is the language in the southern region Wallonia apart from most of the 73,000 inhabitants of its German-speaking Community.[7] This linguistic diversity often leads to political and cultural conflict and is reflected in Belgium's complex system of government and political history.[4][8][9][10] Belgium derives its name from the Latin name of the northernmost part of Gaul, Gallia Belgica, named after a group of mostly Celtic tribes, Belgae.[11]Historically, Belgium has been a part of the Low Countries, which included the Netherlands and Luxembourg and used to cover a somewhat larger region than the current Benelux group of states. From the end of the Middle Ages until the seventeenth century, it was a prosperous centre of commerce and culture. From the sixteenth century until the Belgian revolution in 1830, the area at that time called the Southern Netherlands, was the site of many battles between the European powers, and has been dubbed "the battlefield of Europe"[12] and "the cockpit of Europe".[13] After its independence the country became more prosperous as a center of the industrial revolution and, later, as a colonial power. History Over the past two millennia, the area that is now known as Belgium has seen significant demographic, political and cultural upheavals. The first well-documented population move was the conquest of the region by the Roman Republic in the first century BC, followed in the fifth century by the Germanic Franks. The Franks established the Merovingian kingdom, which became the Carolingian Empire in the eighth century. During the Middle Ages the Low Countries were split into many small feudal states. Most of them were united in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the house of Burgundy as the Burgundian Netherlands. These states gained a degree of autonomy in the fifteenth century and were thereafter named the Seventeen Provinces. The history of Belgium can be distinguished from that of the Low Countries from the sixteenth century. The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), divided the Seventeen Provinces into the United Provinces in the north and the Southern Netherlands in the south. The southern provinces were ruled successively by the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs. Until independence, the Southern Netherlands were sought after by numerous French conquerors and were the theatre of most Franco-Spanish and Franco-Austrian wars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Following the Campaigns of 1794 in the French Revolutionary Wars, the Low Countries —including territories that were never under Habsburg rule, such as the Bishopric of Liège— were overrun by France, ending Spanish-Austrian rule in the region. The reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the end of the French Empire in 1815. The 1830 Belgian Revolution led to the establishment of an independent, Catholic and neutral Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress. Since the installation of Leopold I as king in 1831, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. Between independence and World War II, the democratic system evolved from an oligarchy characterised by two main parties, the Catholics and the Liberals, to a universal suffrage system that has included a third party, the Labour Party, and a strong role for the trade unions. Originally, French, which was the adopted language of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, was the official language. The country has since developed a bilingual Dutch-French system, but only in 1967 an official Dutch version of the Constitution was accepted. The Berlin Conference of 1885 agreed to hand over Congo to King Leopold II as his private possession, called the Congo Free State. In 1908, it was ceded to Belgium as a colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo. Belgium's neutrality was violated in 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan. The former German colonies then called Ruanda-Urundi —now Rwanda and Burundi— were occupied by the Belgian Congo in 1916. They were mandated in 1924 to Belgium by the League of Nations. Belgium was again invaded by Germany in 1940 during the blitzkrieg offensive. The country was occupied until the winter of 1944–45 when it was liberated by Allied troops. The Belgian Congo gained its independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis, and Ruanda-Urundi became independent in 1962. After World War II, Belgium joined NATO and, together with the Netherlands and Luxembourg, formed the Benelux group of nations. Belgium is also one of the six founding members of the 1951 established European Coal and Steel Community, and the 1957 established European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community. Belgium hosts the headquarters of NATO and a major part of the European Union's institutions and administrations, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament, as well as parts of its administration. During the twentieth century, and in particular since World War II, the history of Belgium has been increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main communities. This period saw a rise in intercommunal tensions, and the unity of the Belgian state has come under scrutiny.[8] Through constitutional reforms in the 1970s and 1980s, regionalisation of the unitary state had led to the establishment of a three-tiered system of federal, linguistic community, and regional governments, a compromise designed to minimise linguistic tensions. Nowadays, these federal entities uphold more legislative power than the national bicameral parliament, whereas national government still controls nearly all taxation, over 80% of the finances of the community and region governments, and 100% of the social security. Geography, climate, and environment Belgium, with a land area of 30 528 square kilometres (33,990 km² in total), has three main geographical regions: the coastal plain in the north-west, the central plateau, and the Ardennes uplands in the south-east. The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders. Polders are areas of land, close to or below sea level that have been reclaimed from the sea, from which they are protected by dikes or, further inland, by fields that have been drained with canals. The second geographical region, the central plateau, lies further inland. This is a smooth, slowly rising area that has many fertile valleys and is irrigated by many waterways. Here one can also find rougher land, including caves and small gorges. Belgium shares borders with France 620 km, Germany 167 km, Luxembourg 148 km and Netherlands 450 km. The third geographical region, called the Ardennes, is more rugged than the first two. It is a thickly forested plateau, very rocky and not very good for farming, which extends into northern France and in Germany where it is named Eifel. This is where much of Belgium's wildlife can be found. Belgium's highest point, the Signal de Botrange, is located in this region at only 694 metres (2,277 ft). The climate is maritime temperate, with significant precipitation in all seasons (Köppen climate classification: Cfb; the average temperature is 3 °C (37 °F) in January, and 18° C (64 °F) in July; the average precipitation is 65 millimetres (2.6 in) in January, and 78 millimetres (3.1 in) in July).[25] This century's year round average daily minimum temperature is 7 °C (45 °F), maximum at 14 °C (57 °F); average monthly rainfall is 65 millimetres (2.6 in).[26] Because of its high population density, location in the centre of Western Europe and too little political effort, Belgium faces serious environmental problems. A 2003 report suggested that the water in Belgium's rivers was of the lowest quality in Europe, and bottom of the 122 countries studied. Part of the information are from www.wikipedia.org respecting the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
||||||
