Petra Meier

State Feminism and Women’s Movements in Belgium: Complex Patterns in a Multilevel System

In the aftermath of the Second World War Belgium developed a welfare system with extensive unemployment allowances, social security, pension rights, accessible health and care infrastructure. Notwithstanding a rather conservative gender regime, fed by the Catholic tradition and its impact on politics, the participation of women in the labour market is higher than in the neighbouring countries like Germany or the Netherlands. A decrease in the number of children per woman, but also extensive child care facilities and a growing number of measures to reconcile work and care make women stay on the labour market.

Institutionalizing Intersectionality in the Low Countries: Belgium and The Netherlands

Belgium and the Netherlands are generally classified as consensus democracies, with common characteristics such as a multiparty system based on religious and class cleavages, resulting in coalition government, a tradition of pillarization and strong corporatist arrangements. But in the 1960s their development started to diverge, and we argue that this divergence has led to very different institutional arrangements for gender equality machineries, anti-discrimination bodies, and consultative bodies. Although both countries witnessed secularization, decline of pillarization, and party-de-alignment, the rise of post-materialist values and new social movements, and the decline of the mass party, traditional political cleavages, and civil society’s presence in decision making in Belgium remained more salient than in the Netherlands (Deschouwer and Lucardie 2003). In Belgium the increasing salience of the linguistic cleavage and communitarian politics led to a fully fledged federal state in the mid-1990s, with neo-corporatism and civil society consultation remaining key features of Belgian politics. In the Netherlands traditional political cleavages dissolved nearly completely, resulting in a more thorough-going de-pillarization. The former neo-corporatist decision-making arrangements were weakened, opening opportunities for the women’s and the new social movements.