Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 .
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 ...
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.
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 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.
Belgium – sovereign country located in northwest Europe. [1] It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts its headquarters, as well as those of other major international organizations , including NATO , of which it is also a founding member.
The Low Countries as seen from NASA space satellite. The Low Countries (Dutch: de Lage Landen; French: les Pays-Bas), historically also known as the Netherlands (Dutch: de Nederlanden), is a coastal lowland region in Northwestern Europe forming the lower basin of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta and consisting today of the three modern "Benelux" countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, and the ...
The names derived from the Belgae (and thus including Belgica) are now mostly identified with the country Belgium; yet before the division of the Low Countries into a southern and a northern half in the 16th century, it was a common name for the entire Low Countries, and was the usual Latin translation of the Netherlands (which at that point covered the current territory of the Netherlands ...