Writing in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins takes a look at the (welcome) success of the Flemish separatists (lite) in the recent Belgian elections, and ponders the wider ramifications:

During the election Wallonia’s [Wallonia is the original Francophone part of Belgium] socialist leader, Elio di Rupo, ignored Europe’s economic crisis by calling for ever more transfers from Flanders, for higher state spending on health and pensions and for price controls on food. Belgium is thus a microcosm of the EU, a treaty state in which political entities claim resources by territorial negotiation. The result was inevitable. Just as German taxpayers are finally fed up with subsidising Greek pensioners, so Flemings are fed up with subsidising Walloons.
In these circumstances Belgium’s elite has looked to supranational bodies such as Nato and the EU for its status, even as statehood disintegrates beneath its feet. . . . However much Euro-enthusiasts wish it were otherwise, the craving for lower tier self-government refuses to die. Indeed, it is booming. In Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, even the UK, concession after concession is made to devolutionary sentiment. It is made with a patronising nod at the parish-pump quaintness of separatist leaders, dubbed populist, extremist or right-wing, never just democratic. . . .
The crisis in the euro was the widely predicted result of the EU’s leaders running faster economically than they could ever walk politically. At first they thought they could even out the performance of nations by transferring huge sums from rich to poor. This infuriated the rich and enslaved the poor in dependency. The move from what was a free-trade union to what is touted as a “fiscal-transfer union” has gone beyond what is tolerable to the disparate European electorates who must foot the bill. The euro saga is Belgium times 10. . . . Since the debacle of the Lisbon referendums, Euro-pluralism has emerged as proof against ever closer union. The Single European Act of 1986 appears to have been a sort of psychological boundary, beyond which political unity should not have strayed. Go too far, as did the Lisbon treaty, and the threads would snap. Europe would lose touch with its component countries, and they would lose touch with their subnational identities. In extremis, they would face break-up, as have Spain, Austria and now Belgium… When a country – let alone a continent – lacks the bonds of a collective nationhood it is no longer a country, merely a state. Nations forged in war do not necessarily survive peace. Belgium may retain the trappings of sovereignty, a monarch, an army, a customs union and (perhaps) a football team. But taxes and cross-subsidies will only be acceptable within self-governing communities with a shared sense of co-responsibility, not across whole continents. Ignoring this maxim is what is sorely testing the eurozone and is breaking Belgium.

Read the whole thing. (H/t: Reason.)