Belgian Erasmus

" The surrealism of its linguistic, economic and social problems will soon become very real”- Marc de Vos, from Wall Street Journal. Situated on the borderline between the Latin and German cultures in Europe, Belgium was formed almost by accident in the 19th century. It was founded as a strategic state between France and Great Britain. Artificial in its origin, Belgium's profound cultural differences—symbolized by different languages and an international capital whose identity is to have no identity—have been compounded by its own history. The newly born Kingdom of Belgium imposed French as the official language despite it has a Flemish majority. This historic discrimination originated the fundaments of the Flemish autonomy movement. This movement was the first who fought for equal rights and since 1970 has fueled the gradual evolution from a unitary kingdom to a federal country, with ever more regional autonomy. Belgium has acquired a linguistic border, formally s...

--> Erwin Ringel, Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, 1988: “suicide is a eternal solution for something that it´s often a temporal problem”. “My friend Marÿke suffered borderline and lived in a menthal institution for more than 2 years. Then, she had an apartment in Bilzen with a therapeutical program. A few weeks before her bithday she had already told me and another friend that she was feeling really bad, she used to drink a lot, and fight with her boyfriend and sometimes even was aggresive without having a lot of control of her own feelings. But still we never expected her to take an overdose of pills on the evening of her birthday. When they looked through her belongings they saw that she had a note, saying how she wanted her funeral arranged. And she had written it in August. So she had been planning this for two months and she kept all the pills somewhere so she could take them when she thought she needed them.”- Claudia Stienaers (23), friend of a ...