Word: frenchness
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When he first approached the podium, Gorbachev drew a standing ovation from a crowd that included hundreds of students along with media mogul Ted Turner, a former French prime minister, and a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union...
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...
...milestone: six months after Belgium's general election on June 10, the nation still has no government. Yves Leterme, whose Flemish Christian Democrat party was the biggest winner in that election, promised more self-rule for Flanders in areas such as taxation, social security, economic policy and immigration. But French-speaking parties whose support he'd need for a majority balked at his demands. So earlier this month, Leterme abandoned his stop-and-start efforts to forge a coalition government for Belgium. The political limbo has fueled speculation about whether Belgium is heading for the sort of divorce that...
...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...
...common economy, territory, culture and language are typical features of a nation, it's easy to see where Belgium falls short. For more than a century after the country's birth in 1830, French-speaking Wallonia - the southern part of the country with roughly a third of the population - was in an industrial whirl, thanks to its success in mining and steelmaking. Flanders was considered a backwater; it wasn't until 1930 that Flemish students could study in their own language at a Belgian university. Now, with the decline of heavy industry, Wallonia is in a slump while Flanders...