Belgium Belgium Belgium officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Western Europe bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the southwest, and the North Sea to the northwest. It covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.4 million. The capital and largest city is Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi and Liège. The sovereign state of Belgium is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. Its institutional organisation is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It
Second city of the United Kingdom districts by population). However, most sources do not use formal city boundaries as the sole criterion for population comparison. The surrounding conurbations and the areas that can be considered informally part of each city are hard to define. However, after the 1974 reorganisation of local government and the creation of metropolitan counties, the City of Birmingham was included with the City of Coventry and five other metropolitan boroughs (one, Wolverhampton gained city status in 2000) in a new West Midlands county. The City of Manchester joined with the neighbouring City of Salford and eight other Metropolitan boroughs within the County