Drawing Belgium: Using Mental Maps to Measure Territorial Conflict

Abstract

Governing divided Belgium is not an easy affair. Traditional tools of political research have provided insights about the dynamics of Belgian federalism but they have fallen short in exploring the territorial dimension of the conflict and its political representations within the population. Mental maps, scarcely used hitherto by political scientists, offer an innovative research tool to dig into territorial conflict dynamics since they aim at capturing the mental representation an individual has of a given object or space through the materialization of their representation with a drawing. This article discusses drawings of Belgium made by over 5000 first year higher education students in this country. The drawings confirm the importance of the two most prominent—and thus symbolic—elements of the territorial conflict in Belgium: the internal language border and the position of Brussels. In triangulation with responses to a questionnaire collected simultaneously, the analyses show that differences between the two language groups in Belgium are not very high, but that opposed visions on the country are reflected by those who exclusively identify themselves with Belgium or with Flanders. We state that if used with caution to ensure both internal and external validity, mental maps can prove to be an innovative but robust research tool for the study of territorial conflict broadly speaking. Because of their flexibility and their openness, mental maps capture the shortcuts citizens use to forge their political and territorial representation of their country.