The chapter describes the main nature conservation challenges in Belgium, its main policy responses and actions, and their achievements and lessons, primarily over the last 40 years. This covers the country’s natural characteristics, habitats and species of particular importance; the status of nature and main pressures affecting it; nature conservation policies (including biodiversity strategies), legislation, governance and key actors; species measures (e.g. the national bee plan); protected areas and their management; general conservation measures (e.g. management of High Nature Value farmland and use of agri-environment schemes, forest management, and habitat restoration); nature conservation costs, economic benefits and funding sources; and biodiversity monitoring. Likely future developments are also identified. Conclusions are drawn on what measures have been most effective and why, and what is needed to improve the implementation of existing measures and achieve future nature conservation goals.

Belgium was a casus belli for the Great War in 1914 and its post-war fate was part of president Wilson’s Fourteen Points, yet there is no such thing as a Belgian canon of First World War poetry. Famous civilian poets like Émile Verhaeren were hailed in Allied propaganda, but their wartime verse is largely forgotten. Poems written in Flemish (a local variant of Dutch) are hardly ever read in the Francophone part of the country. The war and many of the Flemish poems written about it testify of a gradual crumbling of Belgian unity. Paul van Ostaijen’s 1921 Bezette Stad (Occupied City, also translated into English, French and German) is a powerful example of avant-garde typography but it is also a testament to the radical Flemish activists who, during the course of the war, started to despise their native Belgium even more than they did the German occupier. Those wounds have never really healed.

“Worlds of Color,” first published in Foreign Affairs in 1925, argues that the labor problem in Europe is only a facet of a much greater global labor problem, the “World Shadow” of colonial exploitation. It offers a comparative study of the Portuguese, Belgian, French, and British empires in Africa and their distinctive regimes of race relations, land ownership, and labor, paying particular attention to the fate of educated Africans in the various colonies. It scrutinizes the variety of colonial regimes and economic systems instituted by the British across Africa in their efforts to extract resources under different local conditions. The essay reflects on the proceedings of the 1923 Third Pan-African Congress and draws on impressions and information gained during Du Bois’s first visit to Africa. The essay was republished in Alain Locke’s landmark Harlem Renaissance anthology, The New Negro (1925).

Bodies of Work examines the transnational development of large-scale national systems, international organizations, technologies, and cultural materials aimed at rehabilitating Allied ex-servicemen, disabled in the First World War. It considers the ways in which rehabilitation was shaped by both durable and discrete influences, including social reformism, paternalist philanthropy, the movement for workers’ rights, patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, nationalism, and internationalism. In recognising rehabilitation systems as complex and multi-faceted sociocultural constructions, it sheds light on the ways in which they became sites for the contestation and maintenance of boundaries of belonging. Internal to such systems, the book argues, were the limits of expansion of services to the industrially disabled. In interrogating the post-war quest to extend rehabilitation rights to civilians, the book provides insight into the development of social rights and statist welfarism and the evolution of ideas about the means, ends, and objects of humanitarianism.

The western part of Europe has played a pivotal role in the early development of modern testing starting with the work of scholars like Alfred Binet, William Stern, and Hugo Münsterberg in the early 1900s. However, most of the experts were driven out of the country by the Nazis and the Wehrmacht psychologists who largely replaced them favored non-psychometric methods. In the more recent history after World War II, there were several successful psychometric testing programs. While the Netherlands have embraced psychometric testing since the 1950s and widely apply it in education, testing and especially psychometric methods have traditionally been less frequently used to make important decisions in Germany, France, and Belgium. A recent trend is the increasing use of testing and assessment for quality control in education especially in the Netherlands and Germany. Another more recent trend is a shift of higher education to a global level which creates a new need to assess foreign applicants for Western European institutions. This chapter focuses on the development of modern testing in the Dutch, German, and French-speaking parts of Europe (France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, most parts of Switzerland, Austria, and the South Tirol region of Italy).

Chapter 6 compares evidence from qualitative case studies of similar countries that did and did not adopt a quota law, shedding light on the mechanisms linking quotas to policy change and the conditions under which they hold. One of the unique features of quota laws compared to increases in the number of women in parliaments without quotas is that quotas tend to increase the share of women on the right in particular. Quotas thus lead to more women from across the political spectrum entering parliament and, over time, taking on leadership roles. I find that the mechanism of factions (women’s increased leverage within parties and parliament) played an important role in both Belgium and Portugal, as women pushed for greater gender equality in government and formed the majority of a new working group on parenting and gender equality. However, the importance of women as ministers depends on the institutional context: even when quotas increase women in parliaments, they might not increase women in governments. In the counterfactual (non-quota) cases of Austria and Italy, women were often key protagonists in policy reform, but there are fewer of them, especially on the right and far right. This can result in policy stasis or backsliding.

The introduction describes the book’s major themes, including the distinctive features of reformation in the Low Countries: a reformation from below, the sustained judicial persecution it underwent, its entanglement with the political contest between the Habsburg government and local powers, the wars it helped spark, and its contribution to the emergence of two separate Netherlandish states by the end of the sixteenth century. It also includes a brief discussion of the historiography of the Netherlandish Reformation since the nineteenth century.

This chapter adopts a two-stage analysis of legal resilience against far-reaching restrictions of migrants’ rights. It first investigates the resilience of the Belgian constitutional system against potential hostile take-over by right-wing populists. It is concluded that the constitutional framework provides relatively robust protection against democratic decay, as a result of which the separation of powers remains intact. At the same time, most constitutional safeguards that prevent a hypothetical slide towards authoritarianism in Belgium only provide weak constraints against the very real and systematic undermining of migrants’ rights. Therefore, during the second stage of the analysis an assessment is made of the room for legal resilience in Belgium. Unlike in Poland and Hungary, it is shown, civil society actors have been able – and often forced – to resort to the independent courts in a bid to safeguard migrants’ rights in Belgium. In practice, the chapter concludes, this has led to mixed results, in that courts have only safeguarded minimal respect for migrants’ rights rather than adopting a maximalist interpretation. The room for legal resilience against restrictive migration laws and policies in Belgium thus remains more limited than could be expected.

Deciphering the seasonality of predation is a key question in prehistory to understand spatiotemporal human strategies to overcome fluctuating ecological and environmental pressure. In NW Europe, despite periodic rough environmental conditions, the Belgian Ardennes were regularly occupied by humans in the Late Pleistocene, using numerous natural shelters of the karstic valleys and the ungulate biomass reservoir. However, humans competed with several large predators, in particular cave hyaenas. In this multi-taxon, multi-site cementochronological study, we tested season-at-death of different prey accumulated by either hyaenas or hominins during the second half of MIS 3 in the Belgian Ardennes. In conjunction with a classic seasonal study on ungulate species, this study's specificity is that carnivore (hyaena) dental cementum was tested on 19 teeth from three anthropogenic and hyaena-accumulated assemblages. Despite a low proportion of interpretable data, this attempt shows that cave hyaena can yield seasonal information and can successfully be analyzed to explore top predators' differential spatial strategies.

On May 16 2002, the Belgian parliament approved the original law permitting euthanasia. The law was voted in after three years of debate in parliament and within the Federal Advisory Committee on Bioethics. The focus of this chapter is an issue which has been of particular interest in recent public debates internationally: the extension of the law in 2014 to permit minors with ‘capacity of discernment’ to have access to euthanasia. Although the law now theoretically applies to Belgians of all ages, in reality, euthanasia for minors will be limited to older adolescents. This chapter considers how the issue of children’s access to euthanasia came to be considered and the process of reform including the positions and arguments of different entities. Also considered is parliament’s rationale for this change in the law. Of particular significance in the reform process was the view that the age barrier for euthanasia was perceived as arbitrary. The prime qualifier for a valid, well-considered and competent request should not be chronological age but mental age and maturity.

This chapter provides historical and contemporary perspectives on two long-standing systems of trial by jury in France and in Belgium. It begins with a brief history of the French criminal jury and describes its recent reforms, including a significant pilot program that extended lay participation. This chapter then turns to the history of the Belgian criminal jury, recent reforms which almost abolished it, and countervailing forces to resurrect and strengthen the jury. It explores how political and economic struggles in both countries have influenced the ebb and flow of lay citizen participation, combined with underlying tension between professional judges and lay citizen judges. The chapter concludes with observations about the future for lay participation in these two countries.