ABSTRACT
When Luc Huyse tried in 1971 to apply Lijphart’s model of consociational democracy to Belgium, he initially looked at the period between 1944 and 1961. He had very good reasons to finish his analysis in 1961, because that marked the end of a long period of political stability. After 1961, and especially after the critical elections of 1965, the Belgian political system went through radical changes. Many have therefore assumed that 1961 or 1965 marked the end of Belgian consociational democracy (Deschouwer, 1994a). The most striking change in the Belgian political system since the 1960s has been the reform of Belgium’s unitary state into a federal one, and yet an examination of both the way in which this task was undertaken and the manner in which the federal state functions, allows one to recognise some typical features of consociationalism, which would thus appear to have been reintroduced through the back door.
