Ten years after the first effort, this second article compares a number of english political science publications about Belgium. Twenty-five contributions are questioned on two grounds. First, what is their information value for a non-Belgian audience. Except for a few striking factual errors, the quality of the books and articles ranges from reasonable toexcellent. The second question, on the surplus value for Belgians themselves, provides a less optimistic image. There is evidence of very little theory building activities in this last (...) decade. The key-authors of theprevious period do not have successors. Also, in contrast to the earlier period, the « politics of accommodation » and « pillarization » issues are abandoned in nearly exclusive favor of the language problem. Monotony has taken the place of diversity. (shrink)

From September 1944 on the military courts that handled matters of wartime collaboration had to scrutinize 350. 000 charges and prosecute 57. 000 suspects white political authorities, parties, the media and public opinion kept a close watch. The aim of this article is to study the place the issue of the purge of the Belgian collaborators took on the political agenda of that time. It was found that the topic in question seldom received a top priority position and that when (...) it attracted major attention interests outside the issue of the purge itself were at stake. (shrink)

The authors discuss «judicial» policy-making in the seventies by such various actors as police authorities, local and national government, the Bar associations, legal aid agencies, the judiciary, and prison authorities. They stress the quasi-absence of reliable statistical information, of good annual reports, and of the minimum goodwill of the authorities that would open this area for social science research. They also analyse some of the major decisions that have been made by the Belgian department of justice in the last ten (...) years. (shrink)

Political science in the West has long dealt quasi-exclusively with the experiences of the stable two-party systems of the Anglo-American type and the so-called continental European polities.The smaller European democracies have been neglected. Belgium too was terra incognita to most political scientists.In the late sixties the tide has turned. A vast literature on the political processes of countries such as Belgium has come into being. This article deals with studies on Belgian politics which have been published in the United States (...) and in Britain between 1965 and 1975.Two themes in particular were selected: «verzuiling» and « he politics of accomodation». The main conclusion is that the studies under review have added a considerable amount of insights, findings and hypotheses to our knowledge of political processes in Belgium. We might impute this positive balance to three characteristics which mark most of these studies : a strong tendency towards comparative analysis, the use of fruitful theoretical concepts, and the use of sophisticated techniques for handling empirical data. (shrink)

The purge of Second World War collaborators in Belgium has not been the subject of many serious scientific research sofar. However, progress in theorizing and in data handling make it now possible to clear away the major impediments to such scientific research.After the war, extracts of the judgements of the military courts, which were responsible for the trial of collaborators, were published in the government gazette, « Het Belgisch Staatsblad ». These extracts provide the empirical basis of the project, which (...) is put in the theoretical context known as « the ambivalence theory ». A brief look at the military judiciary system sheds some light on the processes behind the judging of collaborators. The article unveils some first results of the analysis of 5,000 court cases. The most important finding sofar is the absence of consistency - in time as well as in space - in the judging of collaborators in Belgium. (shrink)