Exceptions to this rule relate to the participation of Belgians in peacekeeping operations on the basis of agreements between Belgium and other States.

The Belgian legislation failed to define mercenaries, but it prohibited the recruitment of Belgians for military services given to foreign armies or irregular troops, both in Belgium and abroad.

Polls show that more than 80 of Belgians want yet more integration, whereas roughly 50 of the Dutch describing themselves as Euroskeptics. They value the Union for its economic benefits, but are wary of its politics.

One reason why Flemish Belgians resent having to prop up the Walloons with their tax money is that they regard them almost as foreigners. Most Flemish readers don t read French language newspapers or novels, and vice versa.

They were joined by Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, and almost 30 other nationalities Czechs, Slovaks, Belgians, Danes, French, Greeks and Dutch, and also German political prisoners, to name just a few of the nations who suffered in the camp.

But even people who are relatively prosperous are frustrated by some features of globalization. They may oppose the use of their taxes to subsidize poorer people who do not share their identity, such as immigrants, French speaking Belgians, southern Italians, or Greeks.

Similarly, northern Italians don t like their tax money being used to help the south, but at least they still have a language more or less in common, as well as TV stars, a national soccer team, and Silvio Berlusconi. The Belgians only have a king, who is descended, like most European monarchs, from Germans.

List noted how Britain s emergence as the first industrial nation at the end of the eighteenth century depended on prior state policies to promote British industry. Had the English left everything to itself, he wrote, the Belgians would be still manufacturing cloth for the English, England would still have been the sheepyard for the Hanseatic League .

If Flemish citizens don t want their taxes to go to the Walloons, what about helping out unemployed immigrants from Africa, a large chunk of which the Belgians once owned and exploited as a major source of their prosperity? It should come as no surprise that the Flemish nationalist party (Vlaams Belang) is hostile to immigrants too.

Although the French speaking Belgians started the European Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, they are now living in a deprived rustbelt in need of federal subsidies, a substantial amount of which comes from taxes paid by the more prosperous, high tech Flemish. A handful of right wing Dutch dreamers care, too, for they have visions of uniting Belgian Flanders with the Dutch motherland.