From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Kingdom of Belgium is a country in northwest Europe bordered by the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg and France, and is one of the founding and core members of the European Union. Belgium has a population of over ten-and-a-half million people, in an area of around 30,000 square kilometres (11,700 square miles).

Straddling the cultural boundary between Germanic and Latin Europe, Belgium is linguistically divided. In the Dutch-speaking northern region Flanders lives 58% of the population. Another 10% inhabits the officially bilingual Brussels-Capital Region, for approximately 85% using French. In this enclave within the Flemish Region however, neither language is the primary one for roughly half of the residents. French is the language in the southern region Wallonia apart from most of the 73,000 inhabitants of its German-speaking Community. This linguistic diversity often leads to political and cultural conflict and is reflected in Belgium’s complex system of government and political history.

Belgium derives its name from the Latin name of the northernmost part of Gaul, Gallia Belgica, named after a group of mostly Celtic tribes, Belgae. Historically, Belgium has been a part of the Low Countries, which also include the Netherlands and Luxembourg and used to cover a somewhat larger region than the current Benelux group of states. From the end of the Middle Ages until the seventeenth century, it was a prosperous centre of commerce and culture. From the sixteenth century until the Belgian revolution in 1830, the area at that time called the Southern Netherlands, was the site of many battles between the European powers, and has been dubbed “the battlefield of Europe” or “the cockpit of Europe”. More recently, Belgium was a founding member of the European Union, hosting its headquarters, as well as those of many other major international organizations, such as NATO.