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The fourth state reform, which took place in 1993 under Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, consolidated the previous state reforms and turned Belgium into a fully-fledged federal state. The first article of the Belgian Constitution was amended to read, "Belgium is a Federal State which consists of Communities and Regions". During the fourth state ...
Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries, historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. The capital and largest metropolitan region is Brussels ; [ c ] other major cities are Antwerp , Ghent , Charleroi , Liège , Bruges , Namur , and Leuven .
Congo Free State, a former name: As above, a translation of the French État indépendant du Congo ("Free State of the Congo"), formed by Leopold II of Belgium in 1885 to administer the holdings of the International Congo Society acknowledged as separate from the country of Belgium at the 1884 Berlin Conference.
The name is a portmanteau formed from joining the first few letters of each country's name and was first used to name the customs agreement that initiated the union (signed in 1944). [12] It is now used more generally to refer to the geographic, economic, and cultural grouping of the three countries.
Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms are also used for various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words. (Sometimes, the use of one or more additional words is optional.) Notable examples are cuisines, cheeses, cat breeds, dog breeds, and horse breeds. (See List of words derived from toponyms.)
Belgians (Dutch: Belgen [ˈbɛlɣə(n)] ⓘ; French: Belges ⓘ; German: Belgier [ˈbɛlɡi̯ɐ] ⓘ) are people identified with the Kingdom of Belgium, a federal state in Western Europe. As Belgium is a multinational state , this connection may be residential, legal, historical, or cultural rather than ethnic.
The Low Countries—and the Netherlands and Belgium—had in their history exceptionally many and widely varying names, resulting in equally varying names in different languages. There is diversity even within languages: the use of one word for the country and another for the adjective form is common.
If, for whatever reason, a new language becomes spoken in the area, a place name may lose all meaning. At its most severe, the name may be completely replaced. However, often the name may be recycled and altered in some way. Typically, this will be in one of the above ways; as the meaning of place-name is forgotten, it becomes changed to a name ...