Quote Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat View Post
And the Flemish scores would be higher still if they had taught you people proper English spelling.


For a century and a half, Belgium has dumped its own proletariat, and the large import of cheap uneducated foreign labour, on the industrialised south. Then heavy industry in Europe dissapeared in the 1960s. Suddenly, like Sleeping Beauty, dormant, rural and quaint mediaeval Flanders emerged as Belgium's economic centre. The steelmills, coal mines, smokestacks of Wallonia's sillon industriel, once the proud symbols of the richest and most industrialised area on the continent - suddenly they became tombstones, massive tombstones adorning the landscape of a dead area.

The north of France, the British Midlands, the German Ruhr area, American cities such as Pittsburgh and Detroit, all these areas of former heavy industry, these too were left with great social problems, left with an impoverished population. But these were part of a larger country. Talent and new investment could move in, the poor could migrate internally, be spread out more. In Europe, these cities like Lille and Manchester and Essen have been reinvigorated. In America, they are abandoned, Detroit is simply left to die, slowly rotting away under the weight of the undereducated population that got left behind. In Belgium, uniquely, federalisation happened simultaneously with de-industrialisation. Suddenly Wallonia was trapped. A rundown industrial area was suddenly declared a nation, left to its own devices. Nobody wants it, neither Flanders nor France. Its ecomony is bankrupt, its population is a vast proletariat.



Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Wallonia:






Flanders:


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