Devolution in Belgium

6 Key excerpts on "Devolution in Belgium"

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  The Politics of Belgium

  Institutions and Policy under Bipolar and Centrifugal Federalism

  • Marleen Brans, Lieven De Winter, Wilfried Swenden(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  aggregation of formerly independent states. Therefore, when speaking of federalisation or federalising a policy or competence we mean the transfer of that policy or competence from the centre to the regions; we use centralisation to denote a movement in the opposite direction. Furthermore, we use the term regions to refer to the newly created meso-level of government, situated between local or decentralised units of government (municipalities and provinces) and the federal centre. Although some readers (in particular international relations scholars) may object to the use of ‘region’, it is in line with standard usage in political science literature. Yet, for three reasons, the Belgian regions are a particular example of regional government.

  First, the Belgian regions are entrusted with considerable political, legal and spending autonomy and by now are very close to being constitutionalised units of a federal state (in fact the 1993 constitutional reform already recognised Belgium as a federal state made up of Regions and Communities). Among the group of European regions, they assume a prominent place in REGLEG, the association grouping the Regions with Legislative Powers. Second, competencies were federalised to two different sets of regions: three Regions and three Communities. (In this issue, we will only capitalise Region/ Regional whenever we refer to the competencies, institutions or policies of the Flemish, Walloon and/or Brussels Capital Regions. Whenever the term region is not capitalised it is meant to reflect the competencies, institutions or policies of the Regions and Communities.) Unlike Regions, Communities do not have a clear territorial basis, but use language as their main criterion.

  Finally, the Belgian regions are relatively homogeneous units in what is a heterogeneous, multinational state. Therefore, some regions, Flanders in particular, have embarked upon a project of nation-building which puts it in the same category as stateless nations such as Catalonia, Scotland or the Basque Country. Various contributions will touch upon this social basis underpinning the Belgian federalisation process: are Flemish and Walloon political cultures really as different as public opinion leaders often make us believe and do differences in political culture also underpin policy divergences in administrative reform and public policy overall?

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  Contemporary European Politics

  A Comparative Introduction

  • José M. Magone(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Belgium is the youngest federal state in Europe. It was established after the ratification of the new constitution in 1993. This was the culmination of a process of decentralisation that had been taking place since the 1960s. Meanwhile there were six state reforms, the latest in 2014, which included a redesigning of the Senate as the chamber of the subnational units. At the centre was an ongoing latent conflict between the Francophone region of Wallonia and the Flemish-speaking region of Flanders. Although there is a third German linguistic group, in the east of Belgium, it has remained outside the major conflict between the two regions. Before the Second World War, when Wallonia dominated the unitary state, the Flemish-speaking population felt disadvantaged in Belgium. After the Second World War, Flanders gradually became the richest part of Belgium and began to demand greater autonomy. Moreover, the population ratio between the two parts of Belgium became inverted. Although before the Second World War, the majority of the population was living in Wallonia, in the 1960s there was a larger share of the population in Flanders. Since the 1960s, there has been a process of decentralisation and also some separation of the two populations (I would rather characterise this as ‘civilised ethnic cleansing’, pushed more by Flanders). Piecemeal reforms were undertaken so that greater autonomy could be granted to the three regions. However, this period was also characterised by many conflicts (Leton and Miroir, 1999). The new federal structure comprises six subnational units: three regions and three cultural communities. The three regions are Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. and the cultural communities are the Flemish, Francophone and German communities. The Flemish region and community have merged and built one government. There are also attempts of coordination and even fusion, between the regional government of Wallonia and the Francophone community, but in terms of boundaries this is more difficult. One characteristic of Belgian politics is that there is no national party system. There are now two party systems, one in Wallonia and the other in Flanders, and, depending on the national strength of each party in each of the two regions, they then negotiate a coalition government at national level. Less known, is that there is a third party system in the German community.

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  Close Ties in European Local Governance

  Linking Local State and Society

  • Filipe Teles, Adam Gendźwiłł, Cristina Stănuș, Hubert Heinelt, Filipe Teles, Adam Gendźwiłł, Cristina Stănuș, Hubert Heinelt(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1

  Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region in Belgium, counts approximately 6.5 million inhabitants and 300 municipalities from January 1, 2019, onwards. This recent number is the result of a round of municipal amalgamations carried out in 2018, in which 15 municipalities were merged into seven new ones (De Ceuninck 2018 ). In addition to those 300 municipalities and the large number of inter-municipal cooperations they have established,2 Flanders also counts five provinces, functioning as a second tier of local government with a limited number of place-bound competences (Valcke et al. 2011 ).

  As the Local Autonomy Index (LAI) indicates, local government in Belgium, including Flanders, is characterized by a comparatively strong degree of local autonomy (European Commission 2015 ; Ladner et al. 2016 , 2019 ). Indeed, local authorities are entitled to take on a lot of tasks and powers, and thereby dispose over a large autonomy to shape those tasks. The task package of Flemish local government typically includes, among others, public security, education, sports, culture, social policy, health care, environment, economy, urbanism, general administration and so on (De Rynck and Wayenberg 2010 ).

  In certain cases, however, the authorities have to operate within the boundaries defined by central government (i.e., the Flemish region or the Belgian federal state). As a result, the effective political discretion for local government varies between the different tasks and policy domains within its remit. In some areas, it is fair to speak of local self-government (with local authorities holding real authoritative decision-making power) while others are perceived as cogovernance (with some authoritative decision-making power for local authorities), or territorially deconcentrated central government (with no authoritative decision-making power for local authorities; Steyvers 2015

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  The Economic Development of Europe's Regions

  A Quantitative History since 1900

  • Joan Ramón Rosés, Nikolaus Wolf, Joan Ramón Rosés, Nikolaus Wolf(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3.2    Changing spatial inequality in a divided country Belgium, 1896–2010

  Erik Buyst1

  1. Introduction

  During the last decades or so, the annual publication of regional accounts in Belgium has become something of a special event. Although the database contains many figures at various NUTS levels, the public arena is usually focused on one basic question: Which of the country’s three regions performed best in terms of economic growth – the northern Dutch-speaking part (Flanders), the southern French-speaking part (Wallonia) or the bilingual area of Brussels? To add even more flavour to the competition, some commentators give the regional growth figures an explicit political turn by presenting them as indicators of the relative success or failure of the economic policies of the respective regional governments.

  But the interregional rivalry does not stop there. Similar to countries such as Spain or the UK, the policies of the federal government are also put under scrutiny. Do they favour a certain region at the detriment of another one? Since the 1970s, mistrust in the Belgian federal government, together with sociolinguistic quarrels, has provoked a gradual devolution of economic and other important competences from the federal to the regional level, a process that continues until today.

  Although being a small country, Belgium has always been characterized by large spatial inequality. Perhaps because of the persistence of the problem, there is neither among policymakers nor researchers a consensus on the necessity or effectiveness of public transfers of resources from rich to poor regions (e.g. Capron 2007 versus Persyn 2010).

  Despite these controversies, few data are available to analyze the long-term development of spatial inequality in Belgium. Official regional and provincial GDP figures are available from 1955 onwards, but we will demonstrate that until the 1990s, these data are of doubtful quality. For an overview of the whole of the twentieth century, we depend on provincial employment data. Olyslager (1947) pioneered this type of research for several manufacturing branches, but it was De Brabander (1981) who presented the first systematic account of the long-run dynamics of provincial employment for all sectors of the Belgian economy.

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  Rethinking Nationalism and Ethnicity

  The Struggle for Meaning and Order in Europe

  • Hans-Rudolf Wicker(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Claims for autonomy have always existed both in Flanders and in Wallonia. Such claims led to the ‘linguistic laws’ of 1962, which divided the country into two unilingual areas: a Flemish speaking zone in the north and a French speaking zone in the south. Other threats to the unitary state linked to the Femings-Walloons divide were given a legal basis when, in 1970, crucial amendments to the Constitution were passed which began the slow process of federalization of the state (Witte and Craeybeckx, 1987). This ‘top-down’ process of gradual acknowledgement of regional and communitarian autonomies took more than twenty years to complete. Belgium itself has been a federal state since 1993. It is important to note that Belgian federalism does not at all consist of the ‘down-top’ integration of small entities into a larger federation. Rather, precisely the opposite process has progressively taken place.

  The aim of this chapter is to show that the existence of a broad consensus, which once warranted the unity of the state, requires serious questioning. The recent evolution towards completion of the federalization of the state has been accompanied by a rise in ethno-nationalism in Flanders which has been primarily stimulated by the extreme-right-wing party, the Vlaams Blok (VB), by a rebirth of regionalism in W allonia and by a resistance of Belgian patriotism, above all in the newest region, namely Brussels, and in the Eastern German-speaking · Belgian community. Consequently, the debates about separatism are no longer taboo. The mere existence of a Belgian state in the twenty-first century is less taken for granted than ever before in the short history of the Belgian Kingdom. It will be shown that the process of federalization and the evolution of the domestic ethnic conflict in Belgium have led to the ideological and political re-assertion of different conceptions of the nation in Flanders and in Wallonia. Furthermore, federalization has brought about some degree of de facto separation between the various ethno-linguistic groups. Consequently, the hypotheses of separation and secession are worth examining due to the fact that they constitute one realistic scenario, amongst others, for the future of Belgium.

  The Politics of Nationalism and the Federalization Process

  In 1992, the Belgian Constitution was modified for the fourth time in twenty-two years. Since 8 May, 1993, Article 1 of the ‘new’ Constitution states that Belgium is a federal state composed of Communities and Regions.2

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  The Regional Politics of Welfare in Italy, Spain and Great Britain

  • Davide Vampa(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In sum, in Great Britain the asymmetrical nature of institutional decentralisation has been primarily driven by territorial mobilisation. In this respect, British devolution is very different from Italian regionalisation, which has been a top-down, rigid process granting the same formal autonomy to Lombardy and Latium even though the demands for autonomy were much stronger in the former than in the latter. It is also quite different from Spain, where the central government has tried to counterbalance the demands for self-government coming from sub-state nationalities and ‘historical regions’ by devolving some competencies and creating representative institutions even in those regions with no territorial identity.

  The Labour Party and the Challenge of Devolution

  At the time of its foundation, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Labour Party was not hostile to processes of political devolution. This is because it had needed to compete with the Liberals, which, for instance, were supporters of Home Rule for Scotland. Yet this initial commitment steadily dissipated as Labour replaced the Liberals as Britain’s main ‘progressive’ party from the 1920s onwards. Thus, ‘Labour rapidly adopted a centralist approach to governing—a national, rather than nationalist, perspective—whereby it both portrayed and perceived itself as a Party and (when in Office) a government for the whole United Kingdom’ (Dorey 2008 : 203). Therefore, even though the Labour Party continued to represent the interests of the periphery—Scotland, Wales, but also the north of England, by the mid-1920s it had become a ‘centralising party’ that sought to help peripheral regions by relying on nationalisation and centralised economic planning (Bogdanor 2001 : 167).

  Volkens et al. (2013 ) have provided data on parties’ attitudes towards decentralisation by performing a content analysis of their manifestoes. Support for decentralisation is measured by subtracting the percentage of semi-sentences against decentralisation or in favour of centralisation (code 302) from the percentage of semi-sentences in favour of decentralisation. Also, these data suggest that in the post-war period the Labour Party was a centralist political force (Table 9.1 ). Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s, both Liberals and Conservatives seemed to have had more positive attitudes towards devolution than Labour. In this period the Labour Party came to believe that the establishment of a universal welfare system and effective social policies also required centralisation. Therefore benefits should depend on need and not on geography. In a debate on devolution, the Labour MP Colin Phipps stated that ‘the underprivileged child in Eastbourne is as important as the child in Glasgow’.

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  In sum:

  For most of the post-war period, there was a cross-party consensus on the acceptance of the Welfare State and its ideals of uniformity and symmetry of welfare provision across the territory. The Labour Party in Scotland and Wales were strongly in favour of this and […] many of their members originally opposed devolution on the grounds that it might endanger its consensus and the benefits their societies […] received from it. (Loughlin 2011

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