For example, in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands anti-monarchist talk is often centered around the perceived symbolism of a monarch contrasting with those nation's political culture of egalitarianism.

In Belgium, expressionism had been influenced by artists like James Ensor and Louis Pevernagie who had combined expressionism with symbolism.

In this year he became Statthalter in Belgium and received the army rank of lieutenant field marshal.

After her husband ( Ernest Hoschedé ) became bankrupt, and left in 1878 for Belgium, and after the death of Camille Monet in September 1879, and while Monet continued to live in the house in Vétheuil ; Alice Hoschedé ( 1844-1911 ), helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six children.

In 1956, he became the first African-American instructor at the Museum of Modern Art, where he taught for a year before going to Belgium on behalf of MOMA and the State Department.

Their second son, John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower, was born on August 3, 1922, while they were in Panama ; John served in the United States Army, retired as a brigadier general, became an author and served as U. S. Ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971.

What became of it is unclear, and Neutral Moresnet was annexed to Belgium in the Treaty of Versailles, 1919.

Most of the county's territory became part of an independent Belgium in 1830, and during the 19th and 20th centuries, it became increasingly commonplace to refer to the entire Dutch-speaking and northern part of Belgium as " Flanders ", including the Belgian parts of the Duchy of Brabant and Limburg.

In the late 20th century, Belgium became a federal state in which the Dutch-speaking part was given autonomy as the Flemish Community () and the Flemish Region (); these two entities were effectively merged, and Flanders now refers to the territory of the Flemish Community, which additionally has partial jurisdiction over Brussels.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, it became increasingly commonplace to refer to the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium as " Flanders ".

Belgian journalist Jo Gérard has claimed that a family manuscript dated 1781 recounts that potatoes were deep-fried prior to 1680 in what was then the Spanish Netherlands and is now present-day Belgium, in the Meuse valley: " The inhabitants of Namur, Andenne, and Dinant, had the custom of fishing in the Meuse for small fish and frying, especially among the poor, but when the river was frozen and fishing became hazardous, they cut potatoes in the form of small fish and put them in a fryer like those here ".

Some speculate that the dish may have been invented in Spain, the first European country in which the potato appeared via the New World colonies, and assumes the first appearance to have been as an accompaniment to fish dishes in Galicia, from which it spread to the rest of the country and further to the Spanish Netherlands, which became Belgium more than a century later.

On 3 July 2005, the country became the first country in the world to give full marriage and adoption rights to homosexual couples ( Belgium has allowed same-sex marriage since 2003 and co-parenting since April 2006, and the Netherlands has allowed same-sex marriage since 2001 and now has a law in preparation to provide full adoption rights in equal conditions to opposite-sex marriages ).

In the 1920s and 1930s, Daytona Beach became known as the place to set world land speed records, supplanting France and Belgium as the preferred location for land speed records, with eight consecutive world records set between 1927 and 1935.

Bouts, a Roman Catholic priest, became the main promoter of renewed 20th-century interest in phrenology and psychognomy in Belgium.

The post – World War I accords and the League of Nations charter designated the area a British Mandate, except for a small area in the northwest, which was ceded to Belgium and later became Rwanda and Burundi, as well as a small area in the southeast ( Kionga Triangle ), incorporated to Portuguese East Africa ( later Mozambique ).

In 1989 Vieille Montagne was merged into the Union Minière group, based in Belgium, which became Umicore in 2003.

Hunter gatherers of the Swifterbant culture apparently remained in the sandy north of Belgium, but apparently became more and more influenced by farming and pottery technology.

Belgium thereafter became a sovereign, independent state with a liberal constitution ( constitutional monarchy ).

By 1830 when iron and later steel became important the Belgium coal industry had long been established, and used steam-engines for pumping.

Belgium thus became the railway center of the region.

On January 30, 2003, Belgium became the second country in the world to legally recognize same-sex marriage.

She decided to leave France, and soon ended up in Belgium, where she became the mistress of Henri, Prince de Ligne, and gave birth to their son, Maurice, in 1864.

In 1955, Lumumba became regional head of the Cercles of Stanleyville and joined the Liberal Party of Belgium, where he worked on editing and distributing party literature.

There were immediate suspicions that Belgium planned to re-seize the country while doing so.

Belgium and the Netherlands use the same suffixes, but applied throughout to the notes A to G, so that B is Bes.

In the 19th century these deposits prompted the building of a railroad from northwestern Sweden to the Norwegian seaport of Narvik so that the iron ore could be exported by ship to places like southern Sweden, Germany, Great Britain, and Belgium for smelting into iron and steel.

* October 13 – Germany, in a note to Brussels, guarantees the inviolability and integrity of Belgium so long as the latter abstains from military action against Germany.

The major European powers of the time, ( Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria ) were fearful of Belgium either becoming a republic or being annexed to France, and so found a monarch invited in from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in Germany by the British.

In response, Belgium withdrew all of its peacekeepers, blaming UNAMIR for failing to rescue their men, despite not having the mandate or the capacity to do so, leaving the UN mission utterly unable to respond to the ensuing violence.

Belgium had Green members of parliament elected first in the 1970s, and with seats on the local council, held the balance of power in the city of Liege, so were the first to go into coalition with the ruling party on that council.

Finland was the first state to do so, in 2007, Belgium did so in 2008 while Austria or Germany will not change their current designs for the time being.

Smart-card-based " electronic purse " systems store funds on the card so that readers do not need network connectivity and entered service throughout Europe in the mid-1990s, most notably in Germany ( Geldkarte ), Austria ( Quick Wertkarte ), Belgium ( Proton ), France ( Mon € o ), the Netherlands ( Chipknip and Chipper ( decommissioned in 2001 )), Switzerland (" Cash "), Norway (" Mondex "), Sweden (" Cash ", decommissioned in 2004 ), Finland (" Avant "), UK (" Mondex "), Denmark (" Danmønt ") and Portugal (" Porta-moedas Multibanco ").

Leopold I of Belgium was head of Foreign Affairs as an ancien régime monarch, the foreign ministers having the authority to do so only as ministers of the king.

Belgium has resorted several times to international dispute settlement, notably in cases at both the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration with the Netherlands concerning the diversion of water from the Meuse ( 1937 ) the frontier at the enclave of Baarle-Hertog ( 1959 ) and the revitalisation of the so called Iron Rhine railroad ( 2005 ).

But the neighboring countries Prussia and Belgium already used standard gauge, so the two companies had to regauge their first lines.

Indeed some monarchies never had a physical crown, just a heraldic representation, as in the constitutional kingdom of Belgium, where no coronation ever took place ; the royal installation is done by a solemn oath in parliament, wearing a military uniform: the King is not acknowledged as by divine right, but assumes the only hereditary public office in the service of the law ; so he in turn will swear in all members of " his " federal government.

As the " workshop of the world ", the United Kingdom could produce finished goods so efficiently that they could usually undersell comparable, locally manufactured goods in foreign markets, even supplying a large share of the manufactured goods consumed by such nations as Germany, France, Belgium, and the United States.

They were opposed to an offensive so close to the onset of winter, and they were opposed to launching the main attack through Belgium, where the many rivers and canals would hamper armoured operations.

While most realms have, in the documented past, calculated membership in the royal house as descending through the male line ( sometimes allowing females to inherit and sometimes not ), most European monarchies have now constitutionally eliminated preference in the line of succession to the throne for males ( Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark ), and some non-European royal families have contemplated doing so ( Japan, Thailand ).

At that time however, due to the rising political controversy between the Dutch-and French-speaking communities in Belgium, a parliamentary committee ( the so called centrum Harmel, named after Pierre Harmel ) was established to fix, amongst other things, the language boundary once and for all.

Precise figures on the ethnic composition of Belgium are impossible to obtain, for the language question is so controversial that the Belgian census has not included data on linguistic composition of communes since 1947.

Before 1944, however, the main German industrial targets were out of range, so the RAF bombers concentrated on military and transportation targets in France and Belgium.

The pigeon fanciers of Belgium were so taken with the hobby that they began to develop pigeons specially cultivated for fast flight and long endurance called Voyageurs.

A high collaboration with pigeon fanciers from Belgium, Holland, Germany and so forth is also observed.

Assembling an army in Belgium to fight Napoleon ’ s resurgent forces in the spring of 1815, the Duke of Wellington formed it into army corps, deliberately mixing units from the Anglo-Hanoverian, Dutch-Belgian and German contingents so that the weaker elements would be stiffened by more experienced or reliable troops.

In November 2010 Belgium introduced the standard European format as one of the last EU member states to do so.