Belgium

Abstract

Whereas in most domestic political discussions numerous cleavages exist between both political parties and linguistic communities in Belgium, the discourse and debates on European integration and EU politics have always been characterised by a relative consensus across party lines and language borders. This is especially true of the institutional development of the EU. The mainstream political parties (i.e., the socialist parties, the liberal parties, the Christian democrats and the greens) favour a more federal and democratic organisation of the Union, in which the communitarian institutions, especially the EP, play a key role. The more nationalist, populist and extreme right parties reject a stronger European ‘interference’ and favour a ‘Europe of the Regions’, in which not the Belgian state but the federated entities play first fiddle (Lippert and Leppik-Bork, 2008: 130). Due to this relative consensus among the major parties, attention to European dossiers in Belgian parliaments is rather limited and only seldom a priority (Baetens and Bursens, 2005: 123–124). Notwithstanding the Belgian discourse on an increasing role for the national and regional parliaments in the EU policy-making process alongside the EP, Belgian parliaments are not very active when it comes to European topics. The same holds for parliamentary debates around EU treaty amendments. The ratification of the treaty amendments reflected this consensus. Apart from the extreme right parties, which voted against the Treaty of Lisbon, all the political parties in all Belgian parliaments approved it. Although the national parliaments were directly involved in the European Convention drafting the Constitution for Europe, that, paradoxically, did not provoke a broad discussion in the national and regional parliaments.