Judging the hypothesis of a ‘Break-up’ of Federal Belgium : comparative perspectives

The idea of a splitting of Belgium in two or three independent states has largely been exposed during the 2010-2011 crisis. But something was, most of the time, forgotten: the fact that splitting a country is not a further step in decentralization or state reform. This paper aim to underlines special features of a state separation by considering this as a process of, basically, two stages. The first one is the triggering of the process of independence. Why the government of a sub-federal entity decides to seek independence instead of classical autonomist of federalist demands? The second one concerns the chance of success of such a process. These two stages follows different patterns. Particularly, success in becoming an independent state requires global international recognition from other states. Thus, judging chances of getting these requires to study international relations and practices about international recognition in cases comparable with the hypothetical Belgian case. In order to have comparable cases of independence, we will consider only those who were non-violent and took place in a liberal-democratic context. With these few cases and academic literature about the subject, we conclude that Flanders does share characteristics to initiate an independence process nor to succeed in it. Indeed, as the majority group in Belgium, Flemish won’t logically seek independence – even if economic and political differences with Wallonia will probably lead to demands for more autonomy. Concerning international recognition, we focus on other European countries attitude concerning recent cases of independence (mainly Montenegro and Kosovo). In a context of growing demands of autonomy and even independence from many regions of Europe, the conditions under which a general international recognition could be granted are very demanding. It appears that a negotiated agreement and a referendum in the seceding region are needed in order to secure a general and quick international recognition. In the case of Belgium we conclude that a negotiated agreement about separation appears impossible, and that a successful referendum in Flanders about independence would be in contradiction with every study (academic or not) made about this subject