Word: wallonia
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...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...
Last week there was open talk of abolishing the present system of government in favor of a loose federation between two self-governing states, one Flemish, the other Walloon. In Brussels, Socialist Deputies from Wallonia held a meeting without the Flemish Socialist members, issued a communiqué without precedent in Belgian political history. The communiqué noted that "government policies accentuate and accelerate the deterioration of the economic situation of Wallonia," and declared that "if these policies are not changed, the Walloon people will have no alternative but the revision of the unitary institutions of the country in order...