Belgium is a federal state comprising three communities and three regions that are based on four language areas. For each of these subdivision types, the subdivisions together make up the entire country; in other words, the types overlap.
The language areas were established by the Second Gilson Act, which entered into force on 2 August 1963. The division into language areas was included in the Belgian Constitution in 1970. Through constitutional reforms in the 1970s and 1980s, regionalisation of the unitary state led to a three-tiered federation: federal, regional, and community governments were created, a compromise designed to minimize linguistic, cultural, social, and economic tensions.
Schematic overview
This is a schematic overview of the basic federal structure of Belgium as defined by Title I of the Belgian Constitution.
Each of the entities either have their own parliament and government (for the federal state, the communities and the regions) or their own council and executive college (for provinces and municipalities). The entities in italics do not have their own institutions—arrondissements because they are purely administrative; language areas because they merely define the linguistic regime of a municipality; and the Flemish Region because its powers are exercised by the Flemish Community.
Country subdivisions
The three communities are:
the (Dutch-speaking) Flemish Community () the French Community () the German-speaking Community (, DG)
The three regions are:
the Brussels Capital Region (Brussels; , ) the Flemish Region (Flanders; ) the Walloon Region (Wallonia, , )
The four language areas (as in Dutch and in German), occasionally referred to as linguistic regions (from French ), are:
the Dutch language area
the French language area
the German language area
the bilingual Brussels-Capital area
All these entities have geographical boundaries. The language areas have no offices or powers and exist de facto as geographical circumscriptions, serving only to delineate the empowered subdivisions. The institutional communities are thus equally geographically determined. Belgian Communities do not officially refer directly to groups of people but rather to specific political, linguistic and cultural competencies of the country.
All Communities thus have a precise and legally established area where they can exercise their competencies: the Flemish Community has legal authority (for its Community competencies) only within the Dutch language area (which coincides with the Flemish Region) and bilingual Brussels-Capital language area (which coincides with the Region by that name); the French Community analogously has powers only within the French language area of the Walloon Region and in the Brussels-Capital Region, and the German Community in the German language area, which is a small part of the province of Liège in the Walloon region, and borders Germany.
The constitutional language areas determine the official languages in their municipalities, as well as the geographical limits of the institutions empowered for specific matters:
Although this would allow for seven parliaments and governments, when the Communities and Regions were created in 1980, Flemish politicians decided to officially merge the Flemish Region into the Flemish Community, with one parliament, one government and one administration, exercising both regional and community competencies, although Flemish parliamentarians from the Brussels-Capital Region cannot vote on competencies of the Flemish Region; thus in the Dutch language area a single institutional body of parliament and government is empowered for all except federal and specific municipal matters. While the Walloon Region and the French Community have separate parliaments and governments, the Parliament of the French Community draws its members from the French-speaking members of the Walloon Parliament and the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region, and ministers of the Walloon Government often serve as ministers in the Government of the French Community as well.
Subordinate divisions
The Flemish Region and the Walloon Region each comprise five provinces. The Brussels-Capital Region is not a province, nor does it contain any. The three regions are further subdivided into 581 municipalities, which in general consist of several sub-municipalities. These sub-municipalities were independent municipalities in the past, but no longer serve an official purpose.