Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies, Volume 2: Belgium

Raj S. Gandhi is a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary.

This volume constitutes the second of four case studies investigating in some depth the circumstances that have given rise to political tensions between language communities in four multi-lingual Western democracies. The first volume examined the case of Switzerland. In this volume, the author examines Belgium’s linguistic demarcations. In six detailed chapters which firmly root the discussion in an historical background, the author discusses group images and attitudes and the constitutional and institutional framework for Belgian multilingualism. Yet, conflicts do lead to compromises, and the study concludes with a penetrating look at contemporary problems in Belgium, problems stemming from the very richness of multilingual culture. This analysis of Belgium is concerned not only with conflict between language groups as such, but with evolving relationships between language diversity and economic development, language diversity, and distributional fairness, language and other societal cleavages, and the implications of language diversity for democratic politics.

In the timely appendix at the end of the book, the author writes a postscript on the Belgian events of 1985 which demonstrate the continuing presence of communal and linguistic tensions. The book has 58 statistical tables, two maps and one figure, and an extremely detailed bibliography. I eagerly await the next two volumes focusing on Finland and Canada, as they would provide excellent comparisons with the data on Switzerland and Belgium already published by the author.