Brussels Capital of Europe: the new linguistic challenges

Introduction Language wars lie at the heart of Belgian history. Through a succession of bitter battles, endless power struggles and laborious compromises, Belgium’s political leaders gradually managed to elaborate, adjust and readjust a legal framework likely to facilitate a fairly peaceful cohabitation of the populations and a reasonably effective functioning of the institutions. But while squabbles are still going on about the survival of linguistic “facilities” in a number of Flemish commu..