Belgium

• 1. Introduction

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  Belgium sits at the crossroads of Northwestern Europe, squeezed between France, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and the North Sea, covering just 30,689 square kilometres. Yet that modest footprint has made it one of the most fought-over and politically intricate places on earth. The country earned the nickname "the Battlefield of Europe" not by accident but through centuries of being controlled, invaded, and contested by nearly every major power on the continent. Both world wars swept across its territory and reinforced that reputation in the bloodiest way possible. Today, Belgium is home to more than 11.8 million people, making it the 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the sixth in Europe. Its capital, Brussels, hosts the headquarters of NATO and the de facto institutions of the European Union, including the European Commission and the Council of the European Union. How did a small country, divided by language and politics into half a dozen separate governments, become the administrative nerve centre of the Western world? And how has a place perpetually caught between larger powers shaped a culture, a cuisine, and a sporting tradition that punches far beyond its size?

• 2. From the Belgae to the Battlefield

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  Julius Caesar, writing about his invasion of Gaul in the mid first century BC, singled out the Belgae as the bravest of all the Gallic peoples. He credited their toughness to their distance from Roman influence, their limited contact with merchants selling luxury goods, and their constant warfare with Germanic tribes across the Rhine. The tribes of what is now northern Belgium, among them the Menapii, the Nervii, and the Atuatuci, struck Caesar as particularly warlike and economically undeveloped, with strong kinship ties to the Germanic world east of the Rhine. After Caesar's conquests, the region became the Roman province of Gallia Belgica, and eastern parts were eventually folded into the frontier zone of Germania Inferior. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, Romanized populations and Germanic-speaking Franks shared the territory, with the Franks gradually dominating military and political life. By the 5th century, the Merovingian kings had consolidated Frankish rule over the region, and in the 8th century the Carolingian dynasty, whose power base sat squarely in what is now eastern Belgium, extended that authority across a vast European empire. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 fractured the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms, and most of modern Belgium fell into the Middle Kingdom, later called Lotharingia. The coastal county of Flanders, however, west of the Scheldt river, ended up in West Francia, the ancestor of France. That boundary placed Belgium's heartland in two different orbits at once, a division that would echo through politics for more than a thousand years. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the cloth industry turned the County of Flanders into one of the richest regions in Europe, which drew the ambitions of the French crown and produced one famous act of resistance: in 1302, Flemish militias beat a heavily armed French cavalry force at the Battle of the Golden Spurs. France ultimately reasserted control, but the episode fixed Flemish pride in the historical memory.

• 3. Habsburg Rule and the Long Wars

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  The Habsburg Emperor Charles V was born in Belgium, and he stands as perhaps the single most consequential figure in the region's early modern history. Heir to the Burgundian Netherlands as well as the royal families of Austria, Castile, and Aragon, he issued the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 to give the Seventeen Provinces greater legitimacy as a coherent political entity rather than a temporary personal union. The union of "Burgundy" and "Flanders," as the Burgundian Netherlands was commonly called, had already brought economic stability and extraordinary artistic creation to the region. That stability cracked when the Spanish government's repression of Protestantism triggered the Eighty Years' War in 1568. The northern United Provinces eventually broke away, while the Southern Netherlands, comprising most of modern Belgium, remained under first Spanish and then Austrian Habsburg rule. The territory became a stage for repeated conflicts involving France: the Franco-Dutch War from 1672 to 1678, the Nine Years' War from 1688 to 1697, the War of the Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1714, and part of the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740 to 1748. Following the French Revolutionary campaigns of 1794, the region was annexed by the French First Republic, ending Austrian rule. Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, fought on Belgian soil, led the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 to fold the territory into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands under King William I of Orange.

• 4. Revolution, Industry, and Empire

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  In 1830, the Belgian Revolution broke the Southern Provinces away from the Netherlands. An independent Belgium emerged under a provisional government and national congress, officially French-speaking, Catholic, and neutral. Leopold I was installed as king on the 21st of July 1831, a date still celebrated as Belgium's National Day. Belgium also became the first country in continental Europe to industrialise, with areas in Liège Province and around Charleroi developing mining and steelmaking that made Belgium one of the three most industrialized nations in the world between 1830 and 1910. Universal male suffrage came after the general strike of 1893, though plural voting persisted until 1919; women gained the vote in 1949. The language divide, meanwhile, began reshaping public life: French had been the language of the nobility and the bourgeoisie since independence, but Dutch progressively recovered its status and was officially recognized by 1898. The parliament accepted a Dutch version of the Constitution in 1967. On a far grimmer front, the Berlin Conference of 1885 handed the Congo Free State to King Leopold II as his private possession. From around 1900, international outrage grew over the extreme treatment of the Congolese population, whom Leopold's agents killed for failing to meet production quotas for ivory and rubber. In 1908, the Belgian state took over administration of the colony, now called the Belgian Congo. A Belgian commission in 1919 estimated that Congo's population was half what it had been in 1879. Belgium also controlled Ruanda-Urundi, which it assumed during the First World War and which the League of Nations formally mandated to Belgium in 1924. Germany invaded in August 1914, and the opening months of the war were known as the Rape of Belgium for the excesses of German forces. During the Second World War, Germany invaded again in May 1940, and 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the occupation and the Holocaust. After the war, a general strike forced King Leopold III to abdicate in 1951 in favour of his son Prince Baudouin, because many Belgians believed Leopold had collaborated with Germany. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis; Ruanda-Urundi followed two years later.

• 5. Six Governments, One Country

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  By 1970, Belgium's linguistic fault line had grown impossible to manage under a unitary state. Consecutive constitutional revisions in 1970, 1980, 1988, and 1993 transformed Belgium into a federal state structured around three regions and three language communities. The Flemish Region covers the north and is home to the Dutch-speaking Flemish Community, which makes up roughly 60 percent of the population. The Walloon Region covers the south and is home to the French-speaking French Community, about 40 percent of the population. A small German-speaking Community of around one percent lives in the East Cantons. The Brussels-Capital Region sits in the middle and is included within both the Flemish and French Communities simultaneously. The result is a system of six separate governments: the federal government, three language communities, and two of the three regions, since Flemish politicians merged their regional and community institutions into one body. The treaty-making power of Belgium's regions and communities is described in the source as the broadest of any federating units anywhere in the world. Political parties split along linguistic lines from about 1970 onward, and the country's fragmented landscape produced a record-breaking crisis after the June 2010 federal elections: Belgium went 589 days without a formal government, a world record at the time, before the Di Rupo Government led by Walloon socialist Elio Di Rupo was sworn in during December 2011. A string of further crises and caretaker governments followed. On the 3rd of February 2025, Bart De Wever, leader of the New Flemish Alliance, became prime minister, the first Flemish nationalist to hold that post. The economic divide amplifies the political one: as of 2007, Wallonia's unemployment rate was more than double that of Flanders, which had become one of the wealthiest regions in Europe while Wallonia struggled after the collapse of its steel industry.

• 6. Science, Art, and the Table

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  Gerardus Mercator, the cartographer whose projection still shapes how most people picture the world, was among the Belgian-born scientists who shaped the 16th century. Andreas Vesalius laid foundations for modern anatomy in the same era. In the 1860s, chemist Ernest Solvay gave his name to the Solvay process and later funded the Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry, which from 1911 onward had deep influence on the development of quantum physics. Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, was developed between 1907 and 1909 by Leo Baekeland. Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and physicist at the Catholic University of Louvain, proposed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in 1927. Belgian scientists collected three Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine: Jules Bordet in 1919, Corneille Heymans in 1938, and Albert Claude and Christian de Duve in 1974. François Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, and Ilya Prigogine took the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. In painting, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden defined 15th-century religious art in the Low Countries, while Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck dominated the Baroque of the early 17th century. René Magritte and Paul Delvaux brought Belgian surrealism to international attention in the 20th century. Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846. Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, singer Jacques Brel, and more recently Stromae carried Belgian music across borders. The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé is the best-known of Franco-Belgian comics, though Peyo's Smurfs and Morris's Lucky Luke are recognised worldwide. At the table, Belgium produces over 1,100 varieties of beer, and the Trappist beer of the Abbey of Westvleteren has repeatedly been rated the best beer in the world. The country's claim to French fries remains disputed, but the national dishes of steak and fries and mussels with fries are unambiguous, as are chocolate brands such as Neuhaus, Leonidas, and Godiva.

• 7. Cycling, Football, and Saint Nicholas

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  Eddy Merckx, with five Tour de France victories, is widely regarded as one of the greatest cyclists who ever lived. Belgians hold more Tour de France victories than any country except France, and also hold the most victories on the UCI Road World Championships. Philippe Gilbert won the world championship in 2012 and Remco Evenepoel in 2022; Tom Boonen, Wout van Aert, and Lotte Kopecky have kept the tradition alive in recent years. Classic races such as the Tour of Flanders and Liège-Bastogne-Liège are held annually on Belgian roads. In football, Belgium reached the top spot of the FIFA World Rankings in November 2015 for the first time, and since the 1990s has spent more time at number one than any country except Brazil and Spain. A generation including Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, and Thibaut Courtois won the bronze medal at the 2018 World Cup. The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp. Tennis produced two world number ones in Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin, both named Player of the Year by the Women's Tennis Association. In motor racing, Jacky Ickx won eight Grands Prix and six editions of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Away from sport, folklore runs deep. The three-day Carnival of Binche, near Mons, with its Gilles dressed in plumed hats and bright costumes, is recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Saint Nicholas Day on the 6th of December, when children put shoes by the hearth the night before for a figure who travels down the chimney with gifts, is a tradition Dutch immigrants carried into the United States, where Saint Nicholas became Santa Claus.