Word: wallonia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rivalry had been comparatively quiescent during the two-year reign of Premier Paul Vanden Boeynants' center-right coalition government. Then Louvain's Flemish students, who make up 55% of the enrollment, demanded that the linguistically divided university be broken up and the French-speaking part moved into Wallonia (a linguistic frontier drawn up in 1963 places Louvain seven miles inside Flanders). Moving the French-speaking students and professors to Wallonia would cost an estimated $140 million and seriously damage the prestige and resources of the 543-year-old institution...
...split, reflecting the national linguistic quarrels, goes back to the revolution of 1830, after which the area now called Belgium-half French (Wallonia), half Dutch (Flanders)-was carved into a country. The literate, liberal French-speaking Walloons in the south dominated Louvain and built it into a university of international reputation ranking with Oxford and the top Roman Catholic University in the world. At the recent Vatican Council, the 13-man delegation of theological experts from Louvain was influential enough to spawn such wisecracks as "Vatican II? No, Louvain...
...hotter Flemish heads, even this is not enough. A wall near Louvain's medical school is daubed with big red letters: WALEN BUITEN (Walloons Go Home). The extremists are demanding nothing less than moving the French half of Louvain into Wallonia. FlemishWalloon bitterness has caused occasional riots at the school...
...overstating the case. Since the end of World War II, Flanders has capitalized on a healthy dollop of U.S. aid to industrialize and acquire a patina of prosperity, while Wallonia, with its played-out coal mines, has been plagued by chronic unemployment. Last year, when violent riots broke out between the two factions, the Flemish majority in Parliament passed a law dividing Belgium into two separate unilingual sections along a line extending from the German border south of Aachen to the French frontier; to the north, Flemish would be the official language in schools, courts and administrative offices...
...Flemings now have the numerical edge-5,250,000 to 4,000,000-a majority in Parliament, a Flemish Prime Minister and, thanks to a postwar inflow of U.S. firms to capitalize on Flanders' cheap, ample labor, a glossy sheen of wellbeing. Wallonia, meanwhile, is practically a depressed area, dotted with played-out coal mines and plagued with rising unemployment. But the Flemings still see all sorts of injustices, complain, for instance, that they have only 13 of Belgium's 83 diplomatic jobs abroad. While Brussels is officially bilingual from its street signs down to its liquor labels...