We’ve heard again and again of evidence of disease in the European Union — Great Britain’s refusal to adopt the euro, the rejection of the federation’s draft constitution, the bitter controversy Turkey is provoking by its bid to join. But the most alarming sign of cancer within the EU system has appeared just in the last couple of weeks: the struggles of Belgium.

What’s wrong with Belgium, you ask? Well, nothing, in a sense. The New York Times noted on Friday that “trains run on time, mail is delivered, garbage is collected, [and] the police keep order” in this small, artificially created nation lodged between Holland and France.

The ho-hum normal functioning of the government’s day-to-day tasks makes the panic in Brussels, the city that plays host to both the European Union’s central government and the government of Belgium, somehow even stranger: Belgian leaders’ desire to split the country along Flemish- and French-speaking ethnic lines has grown to record levels, and more than three months after a general election, the heads of the country’s political parties have not been able to put together a government — a phenomenon more common to war-torn areas of Africa than Western Europe. The dire parliamentary situation is provoking warnings that Belgium could soon actually cease to exist. “It’s ‘bye-bye, Belgium’ time,” cackled Flemish separatist leader Filip Dewinter in The Times.

One Belgophilic columnist for the Telegraph of London mourned, “Belgium, that state de Gaulle claimed had been invented by the British to annoy the French, may be about to go the way of the Soviet Union.”

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But it’s hard to take seriously the boy who cries wolf. I lived in Belgium in 2003, and a Flanders-Wallonia split was also supposed to be imminent then, as it has been for decades. (In 1988, Belgium took even longer — 148 days — to form a government.)

After spending some time among the restless natives, I began to suspect the break has never actually occurred less because it’s politically difficult than because Belgians psychologically relish the idea of being a point of anarchy in an increasingly boring and stable Europe; a hot zone boiling with tribal strife, the legacies of imperialistic oppression, and a struggle over the French-speaking, ethnically Flemish capital as bitter as in Baghdad.

The odd joy Belgians take in the prospect of political meltdown is evident in The Times’ story, which features a photo of Flemish leaders eating a “100 Days of Belgian Chaos” celebration cake and a champagne-sipping schoolteacher who says, “Everyone puffs himself up in this banana republic.” But I don’t mean to mock the tensions between Flemings and Wallonians: The former group firmly believes the latter is lazy and stupid, which in turn puffs up the latter with the resentful pride of a runty little brother perpetually tormented by a more talented sibling.

But it’s not true that Belgium has not developed its own spirit since its creation in 1830. Arguing for a split, Dewinter said, “We are two different nations, an artificial state created as a buffer between big powers, and we have nothing in common except a king, chocolate and beer.”

Well, what’s wrong with that? Add frites, the signature rueful sense of humor dished up by the country’s many cartoonists and chansonniers, and the legendarily warm hospitality that led an emotionally wounded Marvin Gaye to retreat not to Bermuda but to Belgium to write “Sexual Healing,” and you’ve got the basis of a national culture I fell more in love with than that of anywhere else I’ve traveled.

In short, there are ties that still bind, and a look at history indicates the country is unlikely to fracture anytime soon. But even if the current trouble isn’t bad news for Belgium, it is for the EU

It’s no coincidence that the most frenzied bouts of ethnic tension and separatist feelings are taking place in the EU’s center of greatest influence. They are a direct rebellion against what the EU was supposed to stand for: the end of such Balkanization and the ever-closer bond of all Europeans.

Perhaps the dream of a world, or at least a continent, in which nationalism melts away and interstate power struggles end was just that: a dream. It seems the desire for a little more autonomy — and a little more excitement in our politics — is in our blood.

Examiner Columnist Eve Fairbanks is an assistant editor at The New Republic.