The pointless but rather difficult parlour game of naming five well-known Belgians could be about to become even more surreal. There might not be a Belgium much longer. Flanders and Wallonia have never gone together quite like Tintin and Snowy, or moules and frites. But now there is open talk of divorce between the two headstrong halves of the Kingdom of Belgium following a bad-tempered general election that has failed to produce a new governing coalition.
More than three months after polling day, politicians in the French-speaking south are still deeply wary of forming a new administration with the most successful party in the Dutch-speaking north, the Flemish Christian Democrats, led by Yves Leterme. Partly, the suspicions are fuelled by one of the absurdities of the Belgian constitution that, since the 1970s, actually bans Francophone parties from standing in Flanders and vice versa.
Leterme might sound French but he actually grew up in Flanders and is widely mistrusted as a closet separatist by French-speaking voters after calling Belgium "an accident of history" and declaring that the only things that bind the country together are "the King, the football team and some beers".
His programme, endorsed by the electorate in the north, proposes greater devolution to the three regions (Brussels has its own - bilingual - city authority). The regions already have control of education, housing, agriculture and culture, but Leterme wants to decentralise taxation, health and labour-market measures, further loosening the bonds of Belgium's federal system.
No major party is openly campaigning for a break-up, but the media has worked itself up into a frenzy over the "Czechoslovakia option" as coalition talks grind on. One poll showed that 43 per cent of Flemings would like to secede.
The refusal of both the Wallonian Liberals and the Christian Democrats' sister party in the south, the Centre Démocrate Humaniste, to play ball with Leterme has led to the current impasse. King Albert II, under a constitutional obligation to encourage coalition-forming, has so far appointed several mediators who have struggled to find common ground.
The vanquished prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, is back in office at the head of a caretaker government while the row plays out.
Would Belgium be missed? Recognised by the Great Powers in 1830 after a revolution to break free from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, it has been the butt of European jokes ever since. The Dutch quip that there are "No smoking" signs at the bottom of Belgian swimming pools. Douglas Adams even made "belgium" the most profane swearword in the galaxy in his Hitchhiker's Guide.
As the seat of the European Union, a break-up would be taken by Eurosceptics as a powerful symbol of the folly of a greater federal programme for Europe, something that is in any case on the back-burner under José Manuel Barroso's European Commission.
Not that Brussels itself would mind. It is all set to become a "Brussels DC" for Europe after the announcement this month of a major building project to redevelop the city's eurozone to the east of the centre.
Wallonia would be the real loser, which explains why its elected representatives have played such a pivotal role in creating the present crisis. In resisting Leterme and his devolution plans, they are thinking of the huge cost of separation, including an unbearable chunk of Belgium's national debt (currently 87 per cent of GDP) and a ?4m annual shortfall in the social security budget, currently met by Flemish taxpayers.
Wallonia has 15 per cent unemployment, double that of Flanders, and none of the nice tourist attractions such as Bruges, Gent and Antwerp. Despite an appeal by a columnist in Le Figaro, Nicolas Sarkozy shows no sign of offering a bail-out if Flanders were to go it alone.
The outcome of this bout of soul-searching is most likely to be a short-term compromise and a cranky coalition but the genie of separatism is out of the bottle, as it is elsewhere in Europe.
The difference in Belgium is that the two language communities have never really gelled. In 1912, Jules Destrée, a Francophone socialist, wrote to King Albert I: "What excites one, leaves the other stone cold. The Walloon belongs to the Latin civilisation, the Fleming to the Germanic culture. There are no Belgians, sire."
So which five names would be on the tombstone? Well, there are 259 to choose from, according to www.famousbelgians.net. My choice of five dead Belgians: René Magritte, Jacques Brel, Georges Simenon, Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone) and Audrey Hepburn (born in Brussels).
Five living Belgians? That's not getting any easier.
