Whoops On Belgium

D'oh! I took down a just-posted story about the dissolution of Belgium as I had linked a story from September last year. I think it popped up in my news reader yesterday in a list of stories about European markets responding to the US banking meltdown. Here's the more current story.

The turbulence at Fortis, the Belgo-Dutch banking and insurance group, could hardly have erupted at a worse time for Belgium, whose linguistic rivalries and disputes over regional autonomy are so intractable that the country has been in almost total political deadlock for 15 months.

Fortis is the leading provider of retail financial services in the three Benelux countries, holding about €94bn in customer deposits as of June. It is also a pillar of the Belgian establishment, with a history stretching beyond the country's creation in 1831.

Yet the ability of the political classes to respond to a crisis at Fortis is in question because of the atmosphere of crisis that has hung over Belgium since a general election in June 2007.

Politicians representing Belgium's Flemish north and Francophone south are at such loggerheads that the government of Prime Minister Yves Leterme has been brought to its knees six months after he took office. More and more Belgians wonder aloud if their country will have no alternative to peaceful self-dissolution.

My apologies. The possibility of the dissolution of Belgium is not as immediate as the previous story indicated.