Belgium and the Brussels Question: The Role of Non-Territorial Autonomy

Abstract

This article describes and assesses the process of territorial and non-territorial devolution in Belgium. After providing a description of the linguistic structure of the country and the background that led to its transformation from a unitary consociational democracy to a federal one mixing forms of territorial and non-territorial autonomy, it provides an assessment of the functioning of non-territoriality in Brussels and its capacity to accommodate linguistic diversity and conflict. It concludes with an overall positive assessment, since the solution that was reached allowed linguistic conflict to be kept at a tolerable level and granted a substantial degree of autonomy to each linguistic community. Nevertheless, the Belgian case also points to some problems. First, non-territorial autonomy has mainly been based on a system of dual monolingualism rather than true bilingualism, and this has contributed to separation between the two communities and to the centrifugal forces unleashed since the linguistic territorialisation of Flanders and Wallonia. Second, because of the coexistence of territorial and non-territorial autonomy, the definition of the border of the non-territorial area has been problematic and contested. This has favoured the persistence of conflict, though concentrated on the border between the two areas; but it has not escalated into expressions of violence.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks John Coakley and the anonymous reviewers of Ethnopolitics for their useful comments on earlier drafts.

Funding

The research for this paper was partially funded by a mobility grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation awarded to the author in the course of his doctoral work.

Notes

1. The question asked referred to what language the interviewees spoke only or most frequently. The data provided in the text refer to the current Belgian regions, which did not exist at the time of the census. Using the then Brussels administrative arrondissement, which included the district of Halle-Vilvoorde, currently in Flanders, the percentages are as follows: 57.1% were Francophones, 42.5% Dutch speakers and 0.3% German speakers (calculated from Institut national de statistique, 1954).

2. In 2008, the share of foreigners in the total population was 9.1%. Since successive reforms of the process of naturalisation have made it substantially easier to obtain Belgian nationality, however, figures based only on the current foreign population may lead to an underestimation of the total population of foreign origin in recent years.

3. ^.The census asked which language was regularly used by the respondent and thus did not provide clear information about bilingualism and monolingualism.

4. The number of parents, among those resident in Brussels, sending their children to Dutch-speaking maternal schools (kindergarten) increased from 10.4% to 24.6% and those sending them to Dutch-speaking primary schools from 8.9% to 19.2%, respectively, between 2000 and 2012 (Janssens, 2013, pp. 55–59).

5. An exception to this rule is the responsibility for the pedagogical coordination of minority schools in the municipalities with facilities, which is exercised by the community of the linguistic group to which the minority belongs. Administratively and financially, however, the schools are set up and managed by the region in which they lie (McAndrew & Janssens, 2004, p. 71).

6. Although they provide recognition of some cultural and linguistic rights and differentiated services based on a linguistic personality principle that derogates from the territorial character of the area in which they lie, the facilities offered to francophone minorities in Flanders and to Dutch-speaking minorities in Wallonia cannot really be considered as forms of non-territorial autonomy because the special services offered to these minorities are managed by the community exercising authority over the relative territory—that is, the Flemish one in Flanders and the French one in Wallonia.

7. The government of the BCR is formed by four ministers plus the Minister–President. Two of them must be Dutch speakers and two Francophones. The Minister–President is by convention Francophone.

8. This, however, is a very recent phenomenon dating from around the mid-2000s.

9. This information has been provided by the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training upon the author's request.

10. In 2014, the bilingual section of the Council of State rejected the Peeters directive, ruling that residents of the six municipalities willing to receive administrative documents in French had to apply for them once every four years (Graziadei, 2015).

11. This was already pointed out by Witte (1987, pp. 57–72) at the end of the 1980s.