ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Belgium is an unlikely place for the emergence of the G1000. The unlikelihood of the G1000 as a democratic innovation spanning both linguistic groups is further amplified by the regionalist incentive structure of the party system. Belgium is a country characterized by deep divisions, by multilingualism, by a balkanized public sphere and by an ever-widening gap between passive citizens and polarizing elites. This is why Belgium is generally considered to be a so-called deeply divided society, a society that by the very nature of its cleavage structure fosters civil strife and political breakdown. However, despite its deeply divided nature and its deliberative stress, Belgium has not known any violent outbursts of ethno-linguistic conflict since the 1960s. For deliberative democrats, this divide between language groups should be of great interest, because linguistic diversity poses one of the greatest threats to deliberative democracy.
