Belgium: A Course in Government-Toppling

Though militant students have often shaken governments, particularly in the world's less stable areas, they have seldom actually brought them down. Yet last week, in stable, bourgeois Belgium, the government was toppled by students at the University of Louvain, the world's largest Roman Catholic university. The students' weapon: a major exacerbation of the longtime tension between Belgium's Dutch-speaking Flemish majority and its French-speaking Walloon minority.

Bottles & Songs. The ever-present rivalry had been comparatively quiescent during the two-year reign of Premier Paul Vanden Boeynants' center-right coalition government. Then Louvain's Flemish students, who make up 55% of the enrollment, demanded that...

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