Belgium

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**Belgium** was a human nation located on Earth in the Sol System. It was bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, and France to the southwest.

The country was established following the 1830 Belgian Revolution, when it seceded from the Netherlands, which had itself only existed since 1815.

Belgium first attempted a manned spaceflight in 1895 but the rocket suffered a catastrophic failure during the launch, killing the astronaut. Belgium would make its first successful manned suborbital spaceflight two years later, in 1897, which would be followed by its first manned orbital spaceflight in 1898. The Belgian King Leopold II was enthusiastic about eventually developing interplanetary spaceflight capabilities and establishing colonies on Mars and Venus, but the development of an interplanetary spacecraft proved to be challenging for the small country.

Belgium declared neutrality when the Great War began in 1914. On the Western front, the German Empire's strategy was based on the Schlieffen Plan, which involved a rapid invasion of France through Belgium using combined land and air forces to quickly knock France out of the war. The violation of Belgian neutrality by German forces was one of the factors that spurred Great Britain to join the war on the side of France and the Russian Empire. Despite the best efforts of the Belgian, British and French militaries, roughly 95% of Belgian territory had been captured by German forces before the German advance was stalled in northern France. The remnants of the Belgian government continued to control a small area around Ypres, where the nation's capital was temporarily relocated. Most of Belgium was placed under the control of a German Army occupation administration. In German-occupied Belgium, unemployment became a major problem and Belgian civilians became heavily reliant on charity distributed by international civil aid organisations. Industrial machinery was looted from closed Belgian factories by German authorities. The rump state of Belgium, which consisted only of the city of Ypres and the surrounding area, was regularly targeted by German heavy bomber and rocket attacks, making Ypres virtually uninhabitable during the war.

In 1916 the Great War ended in a mutually-destructive exchange of orbital weapons and long-range rockets between European powers, resulting in the destruction of many cities in Great Britain, France and Germany. Although they had been devastated by the conventional fighting between 1914 and 1916, Ypres and German-occupied Belgium were not attacked with any orbital weapon strikes.

Although the German Empire collapsed shortly after the end of the war and was replaced by a democratic government in the form of the German Republic, the new German government announced that the remnants of its military would continue to occupy most of Belgium as a buffer zone due to concerns that Britain and France were planning to launch a ground invasion to finish off what was left of Germany. This outraged the citizens of German-occupied Belgium as well as many left-wing German nationals. The new German government granted Belgians the same rights of assembly, expression and movement as German citizens, and Belgians could elect local government officials, however they had no representation in the Reichstag.

After the Great War combatants signed the Treaty of Geneva in 1918, the German government announced that it would formally create new positions elected by the Belgian people to advise the German cabinet and the Reichstag on Belgian affairs and concerns. However, these reforms were considered inadequate as the German government was not mandated to follow the advice of these officials.

By the early 1920s, there were regularly street demonstrations by left-wing German nationals and calls from Reichstag members for Germany to grant self-determination to Belgium and Luxembourg. In 1923 Germany voluntarily relinquished control over the parts of Belgium and Luxembourg which it had occupied since the Great War. This led to a dramatic improvement in relations between Germany, Great Britain and France. The Belgian government consequently moved its seat back to Brussels in 1923. The world remained in the grip of a post-Great War economic depression for more than two decades, and it took until the mid-1940s for Belgium's economy to return to its pre-Great War size.

In 1951, Belgium became one of the founding members of the European Union (EU). The EU established a monetary union using a single currency (the Euro), which replaced the franc as Belgium's currency.

In 1961, the resources of Belgium's small civil space research agency were folded into the newly-formed European Space Agency (ESA), a unified space agency formed by the members of the European Union.

In 1965, the member states of the European Union made the decision to unify their military forces under a single European command. The Belgian military was dissolved, and its resources were integrated into the newly-formed European Union Defense Force.

In 1968, the supranational political and economic structures of the European Union and the Commonwealth of Nations were combined to form the United Commonwealth. The resources of the European Space Agency and the separate space agencies of Commonwealth of Nations member states were combined to form the United Commonwealth Space Agency. The European Union Defense Force of the former European Union and the separate Earth and space military forces of Commonwealth member states were also reorganised into the United Commonwealth Defence Force. The Euro was replaced as the currency used in Belgium by the newly-established currency of the United Commonwealth, the Commonwealth credit.

In the wake of the start of the Allied-Cramori War and the Cramori Empire's attempted invasion of the Sol System in 1976, in 1988 the citizens of the member states of the United Commonwealth voted to give the United Commonwealth Parliament and the United Commonwealth Secretariat the powers of a federal government, effectively transforming the United Commonwealth from a supranational political and economic union to a single federal republic. It was thought that granting the United Commonwealth greater economic, political and military control over the resources of its constituent states would be more effective for planetary defence against the Cramori. The Belgian government was therefore effectively absorbed into the United Commonwealth Government in 1988, and Belgium is largely regarded to have ceased to exist as a separate nation-state on that date.