POWER SHARING
Both Belgium and Sri Lanka are examples of deeply plural societies with significant ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. Despite their geographic and cultural differences — Belgium being a Western European country and Sri Lanka an island nation in South Asia — both countries have faced challenges regarding how to manage their internal diversity.
In Belgium, the ethnic and linguistic division mainly exists between the Dutch-speaking Flemish population, who make up around 59% of the population, and the French-speaking Walloons, who account for about 40%. The remaining 1% is German-speaking. The capital, Brussels, is dominantly French-speaking, although Dutch-speaking people constitute the majority in the country. This dichotomy created tension between the two communities during the 1950s and 1960s.
To manage this diversity, Belgium has a complex system of governance that includes power-sharing mechanisms and a high degree of autonomy for the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking regions. Brussels has a separate status, where both communities have equal rights. This sort of arrangement is an attempt to ensure that no single community can dominate the others and impose its will on them.
Sri Lanka’s diversity is primarily along linguistic and religious lines: Sinhala speakers (74%) are mainly Buddhists, and Tamil speakers (18%) are mostly Hindus or Muslims. The Sinhala-speaking majority could easily dominate the Tamil minority given their numerical advantage. Indeed, Sri Lanka faced a brutal civil war from 1983 to 2009, where the ethnic conflict between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils escalated into a full-blown armed conflict.
Sri Lanka initially took a very different approach to Belgium by trying to assert the cultural and linguistic supremacy of the Sinhalese. This led to significant grievances among the Tamil population, culminating in decades of civil war. The war ended in 2009 with a military defeat for the Tamil Tigers, but the underlying issues of ethnic tension remain.
Belgium has managed to contain potential ethnic conflicts through institutional arrangements that allow for power-sharing and autonomy. Sri Lanka’s initial approach of majoritarianism led to years of devastating conflict. It shows that even countries with similar levels of ethnic diversity can take very different paths, with different outcomes, depending on how they manage this diversity.