Belgium

The Kingdom of Belgium (Dutch: Koninkrijk België; French: Royaume de Belgique; German: Königreich Belgien) 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. more...

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Belgium has a population of over ten million people, in an area of around 30,000 square kilometres (11,700 square miles).

Straddling the cultural boundary between Germanic and Romance Europe, it is linguistically divided. Mainly two languages are spoken in Belgium: Dutch is spoken by 58% of the whole Belgian population, in Flanders to the north, that is to say by 6 million people ; French is spoken by 42% of the entire Belgian population, thus 4.2 million French-speaking people : 3.3 million people in the Walloon Region in the south and about 0.9 million people in Brussels out of 1 million inhabitants. The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual, with an estimated 85-90% of its residents speaking French. Less than 1% of the Belgian people, around 70,000 citizens, live in the German-speaking Community in the east of the country. 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 most northern 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, Belgium, 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 organisations, such as NATO.

History

Over the past two millennia, the area that is now known as Belgium has seen significant demographic, political and cultural upheavals. The first well-documented population move was the conquest of the region by the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC, followed in the 5th century by the Germanic Franks. The Franks established the Merovingian kingdom, which became the Carolingian Empire in the 8th century. During the Middle Ages, the Low Countries were split into many small feudal states. Most of them were united in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries by the house of Burgundy as the Burgundian Netherlands. These states gained a degree of autonomy in the 15th century and were thereafter named the Seventeen Provinces.

Read more at Wikipedia.org