Abstract

Belgium is a rare example of a centralist state who federalized itself in a peacefull way by several steps since 1970. This process - still going on - is fundamentally provoked by the development of two subnations within the Belgian body: the flemish and the walloon. Within both of these nationalist movements there was a small elite who saw each other as allies in the struggle for federalization. They took contact during the sixties, a decade of heavy nationalistic agitation.Studying these contacts makes clear that the alliance had no fundaments in the broader base of the movements. But still they are necessary to understand the previous history of the federalization process.