Belgium is a relatively new country in European history. The area we now call Belgium was the center of all major Franco-German conflicts since the 1400s, both due to its wealth and its lack of natural defenses. During the time of the Roman Empire, the northern part, Flanders, was gradually Germanised by German tribesmen who wanted a part of Rome's prosperity (Rome for its part wanted good German soldiers). The southern half, Wallonia, remained largely Latin in its language, something which did not change hugely following the fall of the Roman Empire, beyond the emergence of the Walloon dialect of the northern offshoot of Latin; French.

The creation of Belgium had nothing to do with nationalism. The split with the rest of the Low Countries, or the 'Netherlands' occurred when Calvinism entered the area in the late sixteenth century and managed to gain enough followers to engineer a tax revolt against the ruler of the Netherlands, the Spanish. This originally began in Flanders, but it slowly moved north as the Calvinists realised that it would be far more easy to control the north of the area, based around Holland, as it was across from the defensible Rhine river which cuts the Low Countries in half. This revolt eventually succeeded, and the newly independent United Provinces of the Netherlands went on their own path while the Spanish Netherlands, as the south was called, was slowly brought back to the Catholic faith.

After about 40 years, an international congress took the area from Spain and gave it to Austria, and after a century of Austrian rule, the Austrian Netherlands, as it was called, was conquered by Napoleon. When he finally lost, this Roman Catholic area was granted to the newly formed United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which encompassed all of the Low Countries and was politically (but not population-wise thanks to 'Belgium') dominated by the Calvinist northern Netherlands.

This annoyed southern Netherlanders, even many in Flanders, where the language of the middle and upper classes was French. And eventually in 1830 the area revolted against Dutch rule, and in response, the Great powers of the day convened a congress to deal with the issue in a (relatively) bloodless manner. The French wanted to annex Wallonia, but the memories of Napoleon were still fresh for many and so the other other powers overruled France, making the area a Francophone republic called 'Belgium' in order to preserve the area as a buffer to further potential French conquests. The Dutch would not recognise the independence of Belgium for almost 10 years.