What if...

Hear! Hear! Today, the Kingdom of Belgium celebrates its 175th birthday. Or not? Apart from a small item on the RTBF teletext service, there was nothing that suggested that this day is special.
On October 4, 1830 the Provisional Government in Brussels declared the independence of Belgium. (Less known is that on the same day, Crown Prince William of Orange also declared Belgian independence in Antwerp.) The old Netherlands, divided since the Union of Utrecht (1579) and only reunited since 1815, split again, never to be whole again.

One could wonder how Europe would look like if the Netherlands didn't split. I have to admit, except for a few politicians and king William, there was not much enthousiasm for the reunification, both in the North and the South. The Catholics distrusted their Protestant king, the liberals didn't like his enlightened despotism and the North was not too happy about the reopening of Antwerp's harbour. And still, if King William would have been a little wiser, it might have worked. On the other hand, France would have kept poking around in order to reannex the lands south of the Rhine and the Meuse.

But let's imagine the United Kingdom of the Netherlands did survive its puberty. Belgium would most likely not have been invaded by the Germans in August 1914, since the united Low Countries would have been too strong to implement the von Schlieffen plan. Britain actually intervened in World War I to protect the Belgian neutrality, so chances are high we would have had a Franco-Russo-Serbian coalition fighting the Germans and the Austrians and nothing more. Most likely, Germany won that war. There would have been no Versailles, a constitutional monarchy in Germany, no NSDAP coup and no World War II, no holocaust, and maybe even no communist coup in Russia.

The Netherlands would be an economic power bigger than Italy or Canada and thus part of the G-7 and considering its geopolitical importance around 1920, they would have been a permanent member of a League of Nations or its equivalent. A flourishing period without wars would have enable the much richer Netherlands to be far ahead of the Scandinavian countries, that started with a disadvantage. We could go on and on and this is only one of the possible scenarios that could have existed in the case of a united Benelux. The UK and France would certainly not be happy in that case and who knows about the Germans?

But the situation is as it is. And that should not be an excuse for the clumsy way politics is done in Belgium and the last few years also in the Netherlands...