Belgian Federalism: Threats to Integrity

Abstract

In the era of globalization, economically prosperous democracies are increasingly confronted with the problem of maintaining territorial integrity. The desire to gain independence, isolation, self-identification is a defensive reaction to the rapid integration processes that lead to increased migration flows, erosion of national identity. One of the effective ways to counter such destructive processes in multi-ethnic and multi-religious states is the formation of a federal form of government. However, the very nature of federalism often contains a number of threats that lead to the destruction of territorial integrity. This article analyzes the formation and development of the federalization process on the example of Belgium in order to identify threats and risks of the development of federalism. The main centrifugal and centripetal forces stimulating the development of contradictions in Belgian society are given. The author concludes that at present, the key factor in the emergence of the crisis of federalism is the presence of significant economic imbalances between the regions. The author proposes to introduce special economic zones to attract investment flows to the regions taking into account their characteristics, as well as to reform the existing model of federalism based on regional competition into federalism aimed at encouraging cooperation between regions, linguistic communities and institutions of federal and local authorities.