Regional and local identities are strong, and the rivalry between the country’s main languages, French and Dutch , remains as fierce as ever. But on the national soccer team, which also includes players of Moroccan, Malian, Kosovar and Spanish backgrounds, the problem is solved by having a Spanish manager who communicates with his players in English.

In Belgian politics, the big story of the past 40 years is Flemish emancipation from the dominance of the French-speaking elite. The attitude as summed up by generals in World War I who it is said addressed their troops in French before adding, dismissively, “Et pour les Flamands, la même chose” (“And for the Flemish, the same thing”) is long gone.

French-speaking Wallonia, with its coal and steel, used to dominate economically. But after the death of those industries in the 1980s , Flanders moved ahead. Some 80 percent of Belgian exports now come from that region. And while the country has a French-speaking prime minister, his ruling coalition is made up of four parties: one French and three Flemish, with the Flemish nationalist party, the N.V.A., the largest .

Historically, the land on which the modern state sits was frequently invaded, with bigger powers fighting wars on its territory. The Belgian landscape still bears the jagged scars of the battles of World War I. Even independence (from the Dutch) after the revolution of 1830 was largely the work of outsiders.

“We were constructed as a sort of buffer zone between English, Germans and French,” the Flemish novelist Ivo Victoria told me recently. “We’ve always been this small country almost surprised to find ourselves an independent country.”

This feeling of insecurity was exacerbated by Belgium’s relationship with its self-confident neighbors in the Netherlands. The Dutch-speakers of Flanders, in particular, used to look up to these neighbors. (The feeling was not reciprocated. The Dutch told jokes about supposedly stupid Belgians and saw the country merely as a place to pass through on the way to France.)