Belgium is like a puzzle that can never be complete that you must put together while riding a unicycle on a tight tope... while the other hand is solving a rubick's cube.

....But DAMN the Chocolate and Fries are good.

There is a fierce rivalry between Belgium and Northern Ireland.  We have a competition to see who can go longest without a government.

As a Belgian, if you're still confused about our government after this video, that means he has done a good job

As someone from Antwerp, Belgium. Let me explain my POV:
Belgium is basically 2 college roommates that had to share a room with each other while they actually really don’t like each other but they don’t hate each other either. But they still have each others back.
And oh yeah about the German speaking folks, basically they’re the guy that got kicked out of his room and the two others found him in the hallway sleeping and they decided like “yeah why the hell not”.

With all the differences Belgians have and problems the country faces, I think our country is a shining example how peaceful democracy can work. We always find a way to make it work - it might be convoluted and difficult, but we find a way.

4:20 this guy hasnt seen our passports yet. They are awesome, with drawings off many caracters like tintin and such.

Belgium makes no sense—it's like if waffles and bureaucracy had a baby, and that baby spoke three languages but still couldn't agree on what to call a potato fry.

Belgium may not make any sense, but we couldn't ask for any better southern neighbours. Luv from NL <3

6:50 Nah, belgian won't fight you for best chocolate.
Best fries tho...

18:07 we keep united because our fries🖤💛❤

As a Belgian: You actually did really good explaining all of this. Our country is complicated but I'm happy to be Belgian

Easiest way to defuse that situation would've been to ask: "And who here is from the German speaking community?"

Would have given everyone a good laugh.

If someone explained Belgian politics to you and you understood them they clearly didn't explain properly...

An important aspect to understand the dynamics of our country is the economic and cultural emancipation of the Flemish region. While in Brussels, French is dominant, this no longer is the case in Flanders, where French has become largely absent from public spaces.  Historically Brussels was Dutch-speaking (except the elite), but it essentially went through a language change. In short, this was largely due to the status of French in the old Belgium that would increase one's social mobility, bilinguals being counted as French by the govermental language censusses and discrimination of Flemings.

Within Flemish movements, Brussels is often depicted as an "oil spill" that will gradually erase Flemish language and culture through urban sprawl, if not constricted. This is one of the reasons why our institutionalized "language Communities" are fixed by geographical limits instead of relying on personal language knowledge. To pacify the conflict we have stopped doing language censusses in the 1947, our current "language borders" reflect the results of this census.

The Belgian province named "Luxembourg" was formerly part of the country. Luxembourg used to be noticeably larger than it's current borders.

Hey Barbs, great video! Lifelong belgian here with a couple of corrections and clarifications 😄

5:12 Sorry, but this factoid is entirely incorrect. Just in Europe I could name Greece (1832), Serbia (1882), Bulgaria (1908), Montenegro (1910), Yugoslavia (1918), Iceland (1918), and I'm probably forgetting quite a few. I think where you got confused is you probably heard that Belgium is last one of these monarchies to STILL BE IN OPERATION TODAY. But that's unsurprising considering how few monarchies remain today in general.

7:02 Asterix is french, not belgian

7:49 Two things here. Firstly, yes you're absolutely correct that the french language has historically been overrepresented in Belgium. But that's primarily because French served as the INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE OF PRESTIGE AND DIPLOMACY. This was the case from Belgium all the way to Russia. Elites spoke french and trasmitted it to their children, but the vast majority of the population did not. In Belgium, people spoke varieties of flemish, limburgish, brabantian and, importantly in the case of Wallonia, WALLOON. And there's the second thing: my own grandfather, born in 1935, DID NOT SPEAK FRENCH as a child, despite being 100% Walloon, and was forced by his mother to learn it because she believed it to be a requirement for any good education. Wallonia is a similar case to Ireland in this sense: it's a region where a local native language (Gaelic/Walloon) was progressively overtaken by a foreign language of prestige and commerce (English/French) to the point of being entirely adopted as the region's primary language. French is NOT THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF WALLOONS. Walloon is, but is unfortunately dying out, with pretty much only our grandparents' generation speaking it fluently.

8:08 I'll give our flemish brothers their credit! They also produce a TON of quality comic books! Sure it's true that the 3-4 most famous belgian comics are french-language, but keep in mind that many of the comics you're seeing in this comic book store in brussels will be in french simply because that store (beign in brussels) is selling the french language versions. My own favourite comic as a kid was "Bob et Bobette" (Suske en Wiske in the original flemish).

8:46 People tend to overexxagerate differences between belgians. We are also like "cousins with family drama" . Like half of walloon prime ministers had flemish last names, and half of flemish prime ministers had walloon last names. Additionally genetic studies have clearly demonstrated that walloons and flemings are virtually identical, and importantly, more similar to each other than to their neighbours. I'm walloon, but my grandmother was flemish, and that's the case of pretty much everyone either side of the language border. Our difference is entirely LINGUISTIC, which hsitorically speaking is not very special. France used to contain dozens of mutually unintelligible language. Belgium is only special insofar as we've retained a little bit of this historical diversity.

16:56 It's not just Wisconsin! Neighbouring Michigan also has a "Lake Walloon" and saw a large influx of walloon immigrants in the 19th century. Local architecture reflects belgian styles, there's a documentary about it on youtube.

“You gotta hit me hard and fast that’s the way I like it” bro WHAT 😭

As a French-speaking Belgian - I'm amazed that "about half" were French. I'd have assumed your Belgian fans were 90% Flemish.

1:24 "you are all Belgians". That could have backfired spectacularly. All that was needed for that was either a few Flemish who want an independent Flanders or a few "Rattachist" Walloons who want Wallonia to join France.