Book Review
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076710390853 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
ßThe Author(s), 2010.
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0952-0767
201000 26(4) 437–439
Book Review
The Good News from Ghent
Filip De Rynck, Bram Verschuere and Ellen Wayenberg (eds) (2009)
Re-thinking the State: Critical Perspectives on the Citizen, Politics and
Government in the 21st Century
Mechelen, Belgium: KLUWER, ISBN: 978-9046524374, 904652437X (pbk),
187 pp.
This is a Belgian book about a European, a global issue, which justifies the
somewhat expansive title. Its twelve articles – by a range of mainly Ghent-
based Belgian (and as far as I can tell) Flemish, or Dutch authors and including
a thoughtful piece by the Leuven (i.e. Belgium)-based British scholar Chris Pollitt
– is published, interestingly, and maybe slightly mysteriously, in English, and as
far as one can tell it has been written directly in that tongue and not translated.
Simply put, the issue is how can a state – or the society that that state rules – hold
together when it lacks, as Talcott Parsons would have said, ‘ultimate common
values’? Belgium has still one king, national government and administration in its
national capital, but it is deeply divided by language and geography. As Kas
Deprez puts it (cited in Van Parijs’s article, p. 87) ‘a genuine Belgian we-feeling
is no longer possible’ when the two main separate communities (the Dutch-
speaking Flemish in Flanders in the north and the French-speaking Walloons in
the south) watch different television, read different newspapers, may only vote for
their linguistic representatives even in state-wide elections; and where there are
rules that seek to prevent children speaking in the non-approved tongue in their
school playgrounds. The visceral nature of the conflict over language in Belgium
has to be seen to be believed, and as the world knows, the country has been
without government for many months in recent times as a consequence of this
issue and its endless complexities.
DOI: 10.1177/0952076710390853 437
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