Mr. Lessig, Mr. Friedman, could you please reboot Belgium as well?

(Flick picture by Jacob Botter, Creative Commons Licence)

Another nice day in Belgium. Former prime minister Wilfried Martens has been on an information mission since Monday to find a prepare the way for a new government. Today, on Friday, he would make an announcement. He did so, saying that he had constructive talks with the presidents of the five political majority parties (basically the Christian-democrats parties, the liberal parties and the French language socialists).

In other words, it is as yet not known whether a new government will carry on till June 2009, or till 2011. Neither is known who will be the new prime minister. In the meantime there is total uncertainty about the situation of  Fortis and in a lesser degree uncertainty about the French Belgian bank Dexia. Of course Belgium not only has to tackle the dramatic developments concerning its major banks, but also the international recession.

But that is not all. The damage done by the worldwide financial meltdown and the recession is only accentuating problems which were already there, but could remain relatively undetected as long as the times were good.

Just look around in the streets to understand what I am talking about: on the one hand important groups of immigrants which have great difficulty to become part of the social, political and business life of the country. On the other hand a rapidly aging population.

Take the commuter trains between the largest cities of the country and just try to work using wireless internet - a very frustrating experience. Have a look at the high prices for broadband connection and the very limited internet literacy of young graduates - even those finishing Media Studies hardly can use wikis or RSS feeds and think Twitter is an exotic bird.

Other Communication graduates finish their studies in a major university in Brussels, a city crowded with European and international institutions, only to discover that maybe, just maybe it would have been useful to learn English beyond the "two beers please" level.

So you can imagine I felt a lot of sympathy with Thomas L. Friedman, the author of The World is Flat, reading his column Time to Reboot America in The New York Times.

Coming home after a trip to Asia, Friedman describes his shock and dismay about the state of the infrastructure in the US, especially compared to a place such as Hong Kong. His conclusion:

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history.

It is not only about building bridges and telecoms infrastructure. It is also about

training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants.

The blogosphere got yet another important article to consider, this time from professor Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law School), Reboot the FCC in Newsweek. The FCC is the US Federal Communications Commission and Professor Lessig is really not a friend of this institution:

President Obama should get Congress to shut down the FCC and similar vestigial regulators, which put stability and special interests above the public good. In their place, Congress should create something we could call the Innovation Environment Protection Agency (iEPA), charged with a simple founding mission: "minimal intervention to maximize innovation." The iEPA's core purpose would be to protect innovation from its two historical enemies—excessive government favors, and excessive private monopoly power.

Why this much attention for what happens in the US?

1) First of all, many of the problems described by Lessig and Friedman are similar to issues in Belgium. The weight of government agencies and institutions in the Belgian economy is far too high. While Belgium and especially Flanders has good schools and some excellent research centers, the universities could do a better job in preparing young people for an interconnected world and in stimulating risk-taking and innovation.

The infrastructure, whether it be systems to alleviate the traffic congestion or cheaper and better wireless broadband networks, is becoming problematic in a country which wants to be a central hub in Western Europe.

2) I am convinced Barack Obama will at least try very hard to tackle the problems mentioned by Lessig and Friedman. The US may be in a crisis right now, but chances are (I hope) that the country will emerge from this crisis as an even more formidable global competitor.

These are the real problems we are confronted with. Instead of tackling the most immediate and dramatic problems (Fortis, the recession) as well as the fundamental issues confronting many nations, Belgian politics is playing games.

I don't think this is because Belgian politicians are totally cynical or dumb. It has a lot to do with the structure of a state with two communities (French and Dutch speakers) which are ever more alienated from each other, with seemingly very different views of the world.

My impression is that the French speaking part of the country is still a strong believer in state intervention and in the supremacy of the French language (hence universities which "forget" to organize decent English language courses). The Dutch speaking part, a part of the country with lots of small en medium sized companies, is more market oriented and young people are so in love with the English language they "forget" to learn decent French.

Either we overcome the alienation by organizing a federal circonscription (so we would have real federal political debates engaging the media and audiences of both parts of the country) or we go for a con-federal/separatist solution (but than a solution should be found for the capital region Brussels). If we stay in the current quagmire, our country will end up in a deep crisis.

Roland Legrand