Word: hoeilaart
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...keen sense of what ails the Kingdom of Belgium, the disarmingly picturesque town of Hoeilaart is the perfect destination. Located just a few miles south of Brussels, it has a multiturreted town hall resembling a fairy-tale château, and a rich history involving Roman armies, Augustinian monks and medieval dukes. Since late last month, it also has a new law that makes proficiency in Dutch, the official language of Belgium's Flemish region, a precondition for buying public land. That puts a hard new edge on the increasing alienation between the country's linguistic communities, but Mayor...
What concerns him and other elders of Hoeilaart is the influx in recent years of people who commute to jobs in Brussels, the polyglot capital of the European Union and headquarters of nato. Hoeilaart's newcomers are mostly French speakers, but also Brits, Americans and Germans. More than a third of Hoeilaart's 10,000 or so residents do not consider Dutch their mother tongue...
...Hoeilaart, at least, there is a sense that Belgium's two principal communities already lead separate lives. "We don't need the French. We could easily live separately," says Jean Paul Goosens, a retired builder. Jean Hennau, a veterinarian, doesn't see them coming together either: "Flanders and Wallonia don't talk to one another...
...without a national government. The trains run on time, the beer flows cold and plentiful, and the Belgian national soccer team still can't score. The drifting apart of Belgium's linguistic communities could augur the end for a country once hailed as a model of compromise and coexistence. Hoeilaart's elders have clearly had enough of that model. But no one knows what can replace...
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