To Federalise or to Refederalise: Citizens’ Attitudes towards More or Less Autonomy in Federal Belgium

Belgium is often portrayed as a textbook example of peaceful federalization. Indeed, while the country was for over a century a unitary state, it went through a deep process of federalization in a few decades of time to form a federal state where substates enjoy substantial autonomy. Yet, today a rather new debate among political elites has emerged: whether to refederalize some of the powers that have been devolved to the Belgian substates, the Regions and Communities. Such an idea had been a taboo in federal Belgium, especially among the Flemish majority, but the debate seems now more open than ever. In this debate, however, little is known about how citizens see this question. Of course, there is a long tradition of surveys including questions on federalism and autonomy devolution, still, more qualitative data are needed to understand better what motivates citizens’ attitudes towards the question of more or less autonomy devolution in federal Belgium. The objective of the paper is thus to explore and compare how Belgian citizens attitudes regarding the process of federalization in Belgium. In particular, we analyze what motivates the opinion of Belgian citizens in favour of more or less autonomy devolution. To this end, three citizen forums were organized in 2017-2018: one in Liège in French, a second one in Antwerp in Dutch and a third one in Elsenborn in German. Their aim was to collect data on all three language communites with a very unique research design. These three forums gathered diversified groups of 40 Dutch-speaking, 41 French-speaking and 25 German-speaking ‘ordinary’ citizens. For four hours, they informed themselves on the topic and discussed federalism and democracy in Belgium. These forums were retranscribed and analysed using thematic analysis.