You wonder how Belgium can be bothered having a national question. Does a country this small really need a velvet divorce? You can drive across it in a couple of hours and hardly notice you've been there. And, despite two years of constitutional upheaval, Belgium certainly doesn't look like a failed state. Travelling between picturesque cities such as Bruges and Ghent, with their chocolates and dentilles, you pass through endless neat suburbs and orderly villages of restored cottages. Bosnia, it isn't. Belgium is twee in a way rural England is supposed to be, but is not. I'm even told that garden gnomes came originally from Belgium, brought back home by British soldiers fighting in Flanders in the First World War. Now the gnomes of Flanders want their own country.

Belgium has had one of the most intractable ethnic disputes in western Europe. The enmity between the Dutch-speaking Flemish in the north and the French-speaking Walloons in the south of the country is deep, and intense, though fortunately not bloody. There are no pogroms or street fights, just the occasional flag-burning. But these two peoples really don't seem to want to share the same space. Last year, a failure to agree a new division of powers between Flanders and Wallonia left Belgium without a government for six months. The king had to step in to force the warring political parties to come to their senses and form an administration. In the capital, Brussels, a kind of linguistic ethnic cleansing has been taking place, with shopkeepers in Dutch-speaking localities being ordered to take down signs written in French. Last year, it was reported that a couple in one suburb of Brussels were forced to prove that they spoke Dutch at home before getting access to childcare.

Following last month's elections, in which the Flemish separatists made further substantial gains, there is an expectation, almost a presumption, that Belgium, after 180 years as a functioning nation state, is on the road to partition, if not perdition. The Flemish, with around 60% of Belgium's 10.5 million population believe they are the entrepreneurial, go-ahead partners in the Belgian national project, and tend to regard the Walloons, with their socialist politics and trades unions ways, as a drain on the exchequer. Wallonia supplies less than 40% of Belgium's GDP while consuming more than half of public spending. This is hardly surprising, however, since unemployment in declining industrial Wallonia has been running at 20% - twice the rate of Flanders.

The way some Flemish nationalists talk about the Walloons is similar to the way Tory MPs used to talk about the Scots - subsidy junkies sponging off English taxes. Since 1993, Flanders and Wallonia have had their own regional parliaments with extensive economic powers, but devolution does not appear to have resolved the constitutional issues. Belgium is a de facto federation, except that neither of the dominant regions is prepared to give the federal government sufficient power to hold the country together. What is emerging is a confederation of two largely independent regional states living apart together within the boundaries of a nominal national entity. Brussels, a kind of city region, has been the piggy in the middle. The climate of constitutional uncertainty led the neurotic drawing of linguistic boundaries in its suburbs.

Paradoxically, it may be that the only thing now holding the country together is the financial crisis which has forced Flanders and Wallonia to recognise their common interests in the face of economic adversity. The collapse into state ownership of the largely Belgian bank, Fortis, was a blow to national self-confidence but it also showed that there was some point in having a Belgian-wide government capable of nationalising failed financial institutions. But as the debris of the credit crunch is cleared away, the rivalry between Flemish and Walloon is likely to resurface and intensify as both sides blame each other for rising unemployment and higher taxes.

Mind you, some Eurosceptic conspiracy theorists believe that Belgium's constitutional crisis is a plot by the European Union to break European countries into regions, the better to pursue its objective of creating a European super state. This has little foundation in fact; the Belgians' break up is home-grown. Indeed, constitutionalists can claim equally that the EU is a countervailing force against disintegration since Flanders and Wallonia would have to reapply separately for membership of the European Union if Belgium did actually disintegrate.

Nations such as France and Spain, worried about their own regional autonomist movements, might try to block the entry of the newly divorced states of former Belgium. It would, though, be an irony too rich to contemplate were Brussels, the administrative heart of the EU, to be denied entry to itself. But Euro paranoia aside, what lessons, if any, are there from the Belgian constitutional trauma? Well, if nothing else it confirms that language remains the most divisive factor in inter-communal disputes. Fortunately, we don't need to worry about English language commissars ordering Scottish families to speak English at home or vice versa. Linguistic apartheid is the most disturbing dimension of the Belgian constitutional imbroglio. It is overlaid by racial antagonism to Muslim immigrants - the Flanders nationalists have tended to be parties of the far right, more BNP than SNP. The Flemish separatist party, Vlaams Blok, was successfully prosecuted for racism and xenophobia in the Belgian supreme court in 2004. We are fortunate that the Scottish National Party is a civic nationalist party with a social democratic centre of gravity.

But language and race aside, is the UK going the way of Belgium? On the face of it, with a Nationalist administration in Holyrood, and with a possible future Conservative government in Westminster looking to address the West Lothian Question, it might appear as if we are on an the same trajectory. But, somehow, I don't think so, if only because of the British tradition of constitutional innovation. Already the First Minister, Alex Salmond, is making discreet overtures to David Cameron, the likely future UK Prime Minister. I suspect there will be an understanding reached about giving Scotland more economic powers in exchange for a review of the Barnett formula. There need be no histrionics. If a divorce is on the way, it will be a very British divorce, not a Belgian passion play.