THE BELGIAN government is thinking about falling, again. The trigger for the crisis is a dispute over the language rights of Francophones who live in a clutch of Dutch-speaking suburbs just outside the city limits of Brussels (which is a legally bilingual island surrounded by monolingual Flanders). The dispute is obscure to outsiders, but familiar and divisive to Belgians who know it by the shorthand BHV (the heart of the dispute is a district known as Brussels-Hal-Vilvooorde).

To my slight alarm, the Flemish newspaper De Morgen asked me to write an oped for them about BHV in their weekend edition. It would be a brave or foolish foreigner who tried to tell Belgians about their own domestic politics, which rival those of the Borgia-era Vatican for intrigue and arcane disputes (though with fewer murders, and less fine art).

No, we want a piece about how foreigners view Belgium and the BHV dispute, they said. Here is what I wrote for them (the Dutch version is in the paper edition of De Morgen, but not online):

IN THE 1947 musical “Brigadoon”, an enchanted Scottish village emerges from the mists for a single day each century. In between times, the village vanishes, and its existence seems an impossible dream. As a foreign reporter based in Brussels for five years now, I feel the same way about the BHV problem.

Every now and then, I am obliged to try to understand this most complex of quarrels, long enough to write about it. For a few hours, my brain hums with the difference between an electoral and a judicial arrondissement, the conflict of interests mechanism and the Peeters circular. And then I forget it again. A day later, BHV is just a misty dream.

As a foreigner, I do not dare say who is right or wrong about BHV. (Though I will say that some of the arguments on each side sound more rational than others). Belgians have the perfect right to argue about BHV: there is no law that says domestic political disputes must be simple enough for foreign correspondents to understand them. But foreign reporters do understand this. BHV—or rather the whole story of inter-community fighting—damages Belgium abroad and in the eyes of the foreigners who love living in Belgium, like me.

For one thing, it makes the country look less stable than it is. Belgians know that it is not that big a drama when their prime minister tries to resign. Why, they say, it is the third time Yves Leterme has offered to quit (or is it the fourth?)

Newspapers worried this week about the negative impact of a fresh political crisis on the financial stability of Belgium, or its role as holder of the next EU rotating presidency on July 1st.

In fact, fears of an acute crisis are exaggerated. Fund managers in Wall Street or the City do not care that much who the prime minister of Belgium is. What they know about Belgium is more or less this: its banks looked wobbly at the start of the crisis, and public finances are still a bit scary, but Belgian governments are good at tough budget discipline when it is needed. Whatever happens with BHV, that Belgian consensus looks pretty safe. As for the EU presidency, it is a smaller job now, thanks to the Lisbon Treaty. Belgium was always planning a modest presidency, not least because that will help local hero Herman Van Rompuy establish his authority as President of the European Council.

The problems for Belgium's reputation are not acute but chronic. For Belgians, disagreements about languages are part of the political landscape: they make sense. For outsiders they make less sense.

For instance, Steven Vanackere was due in Estonia on April 22nd for a NATO foreign minister's conference. The assembled ministers debated the future of American nuclear weapons in Europe—a subject on which Belgium presumably has things to say, being the host of some of those bombs. But at the last minute, Mr Vanackere had to stay in Belgium to help deal with the BHV crisis. Imagine the little notes slipped by diplomats to Hillary Clinton and the other ministers: “Vanackere not coming. Belgian government about to fall—again. Some row about languages—again.”

An estimated 115,000 people live in Brussels because of the EU. We spend our days speaking a second or third language. We are told that Europe was built on overcoming historical grievances. Our understanding of BHV is not always perfect. But fairly or unfairly, here in Europe's self-proclaimed capital the row sounds weird, and un-European.

Look further afield. The new world order is about the rise of big powers. Outsiders wonder why Belgium seems determined to splinter into pieces. Here is a small example. Imagine a British tourist tempted by a trip to Brussels and Bruges. Google leads her to something called the “Belgian Tourist Office” to Britain. The website, www.belgiumtheplaceto.be offers tips about Brussels, and city breaks in Tournai, Mons and Liege. There is no mention of Bruges. That is because this is actually the Brussels and Wallonia tourist office (its offices are in east London). For Bruges, our tourist needs to know she must consult the Flanders Tourist Office (whose office is 13km away in London's West End). By now thoroughly confused, she checks the main map on that website: www.visitflanders.co.uk. There is Bruges, in a country called Flanders, shown between “Holland” and a country to the south labelled “Belgium”. Such nonsense does not help attract more tourist euros.

It all leaves an impression that Belgium may be an obsessive, bitter place. That would be a false impression: the Belgium I know is a laid-back, relaxed place with a well-developed sense of humour about itself. Unfortunately, it is hobbled by strangely irresponsible politicians, some of whom do not care if a quite different impression is sent to the outside world.