Hey guys, we were asked to sum up a few ideas of the situation in Belguim and then compare them with Catalonia. So here is the result. Enjoy the read :)

The federal state of Belgium is located in the geographical center of Europe and hosts the European Union headquarters so becoming also a political center.  With this centralistic characteristics it’s paradoxical that the country has been about to split into three regions (Brussels, Flanders, Wallonia) in recent times.

To get a quick overview of the situation here are some data.

Flanders, situated in the North of Belgium, is the Dutch speaking part of the county. Its capital, Anvers, has one of the biggest ports in Europe and a strong economy. That provides prosperity and high growing rates to the region. The possibility of being economically self-sufficient and the defense of their language have ended up in an independence claim.

Further south we find Wallonia, which is a French speaking region that also integrates a small German speaking community. Their economic situation isn’t as good as the one from their Dutch neighbours and therefore the government has made huge investments to promote it. The German community has high prosperity rates and deserves also more independence.

In the middle of the two big regions we find Brussels, the encounter area between the two cultures. Traditionally dominated by the Dutch speaking population, Brussels has been conquered little by little by the Walloons and is nowadays the hotspot of the national debate.

As we can see, Belgium is a country with internal fights. Therefore some sociologists have set a comparison between Belgium and Catalonia and Spain. The truth is that in some aspects there are the same problems in both cases, the economic issue for example. But analyzing the matter in a cultural way, we can see that Catalonia and Spain aren’t by far as separate as Flanders and Wallonia are.