Brussels, a disputed capital
Brussels is a particularly apt symbol of this asymmetry. “[It is] a little Belgium, in inverted order”, writes Min Reuchamps, a professor of political science at the UCL, in a chapter on the institutional structures of Belgian federalism. “The institutions of Brussels are bipolar, asymmetrical and likely to change, but in a different proportion, since [it has] a majority of French speakers living with a Dutch-speaking minority”.
The capital has long embodied the disagreements between the north and the south. This is not accidental; 18 years of negotiations were required before Brussels, in 1989, was designated a separate region by itself. Today it is still a disputed city. Flemish people dislike having a Francophone “grease spot” in the middle of the Flemish region, and Francophones don’t want to share any more of the responsibility for managing a city they would prefer to manage alone. Rather than planning for Brussels to expand, the parties have preferred the option of a “metropolitan community”, something that was decided within the framework of the sixth reform of the State. This reform provided for collaboration between the capital and its periphery with regard to subjects of inter-regional concern (jobs, mobility, management of the territory…)
A new aspect of uniqueness, thus, in a political system that already had quite a bit of it… In contradistinction to other types of federations that exist in the world, Belgium is the only one that does not have national or unitary parties, with the exception of the Green Party, which is referred to as Écolo in the south and as Groen in the north, but which still constitutes a single political group. Belgium also does not have national media outlets. Each region has its own media outlets, as the political scientists Régis Dandoy (ULB), Dave Sinardet (VUB) and Jonas Lefevre (University of Antwerp) observe in their chapter devoted to the analysis of media coverage of the campaign leading up to regional and European elections in June 2009. Unsurprisingly, they conclude that the newspapers belonging to each linguistic community devoted more coverage to the political parties and personalities that belonged to that community. If things were treated differently on one side or the other, this difference is not related to the particular linguistic community that media outlets belong to, but rather to an editorial distinction between mainstream newspapers and tabloids.
Nonetheless, in recent years media outlets belonging to one community have made attempts at a better understanding of the other community. Francophone politicians have been given opportunities to express themselves in the Flemish press, and vice versa; Francophone journalists have gone to Flanders to report on events, and regular features of the type “the view from Flanders” have appeared. The editorial boards of newspapers from the two communities have attempted to collaborate on several occasions. “There have been many initiatives of this type”, Matagne says. “But the question is: is this a matter of the media simply becoming conscious of a ‘problem’, or is this a tendency that might one day lead to lasting change?”
Permeability
The world of the media changes in a discontinuous fashion, and the same is true of change which affects political elites. This is true not only because the hypothesis of a Federal circumscription, which has been put forward at times, has never come to pass, but also because the negotiations intended to set up a governmental majority at the Federal level have remained almost the only occasion on which politicians from all parties regardless of language meet to discuss these matters (with the exception of collaboration within the Federal government or in Parliament).
