Belgium: A Hard Case for Liberal Nationalism?
(2017) The Strains of Commitment. The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies — ISBN: [978-0198795452], published
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- Abstract
- Belgium, as a multilingual federal state, is an interesting test-case for liberal nationalist theories of solidarity. At first glance, recent constitutional reforms confirm the liberal nationalist hypothesis that a lack of national identity undermines solidarity as a condition for social welfare. Belgium can also be invoked by the critics of liberal nationalism. The Belgian (welfare) state still works, despite the absence of a pre-political national identity, a common language, or shared history. The conceptions of whether solidarity and political community are different at the level of Belgium, Flanders, and the French-speaking part of the country are explored. It is shown that each of these national projects invoke different conceptions of nationhood. The chapter then illustrates how these dissimilarities are linked with different conceptions of democratic, civic, and redistributive solidarity, and then focuses on how the different conceptions of community building have influenced migrant integration policies in the two language communities.
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Loobuyck, P., & Sinardet, D. (2017). Belgium: A Hard Case for Liberal Nationalism? In Banting, Keith; Kymlicka, Will (ed.), The Strains of Commitment. The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies. Oxford University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/228566