Still Nationalist or Going Post-National? The Discursive Construction of Federal Entities in Belgium
(2021) 26th DiscourseNet Conference: Post-National Discourses — Location: Gießen (21.May.2021)
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- Abstract
- At the end of the 20st century, Belgium became a federal state. Through several constitutional reforms, two kinds of political entities were progressively set up: three Communities (gathering Dutch-speaking, French-speaking and German-speaking citizens respectively) and three territorially defined Regions – Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia. While the former can be understood as rather nation-like political spaces, the latter do not necessarily group individuals which can be defined as a single “nation” on the basis of traditional ethnolinguistic criteria – and it is especially true for the Brussels region whose citizens belong to the Dutch-speaking or the French-speaking Community. The aim of this paper is to analyse how these political entities are constructed in media and political discourse. More precisely, through the analysis of a corpus made of Belgian media articles and political manifestos, we are interested in understanding how Communities and Regions are discursively portrayed as clearly specific and separated entities, as if they had some objective or natural differences and were not the result of arbitrary political decisions. In particular, we will examine the way nationalist and post-nationalist discourses are mobilized in the construction of these imagined collective identities.
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Rondiat, C. (2021). Still Nationalist or Going Post-National? The Discursive Construction of Federal Entities in Belgium. 26th DiscourseNet Conference: Post-National Discourses, Gießen. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274714