The Role of Internal and External Collaborations in Understanding the Political Weight of Ethnic Minority Organisations in the Brussels Capital Region

We focus in this paper on the understanding of the political role of Belgian Moroccan, Belgian Turkish and Belgian Congolese organisations in the Brussels Capital Region anno 2010. We look into the involvement of these organisations in both institutional and non-institutional forms of political participation. The first type of activities are understood to be intrinsically embedded within the accepted boundaries of institutional politics (Lamprianou 2013). The second type of activities are on the other hand situated outside institutional politics, examples concern activities such as participating to a protest march, signing a petition or boycotting products. The study of Fennema and Tillie (1999; 2001) highlighted the importance of the level of internal collaboration occurring in ethnic minority associative life for understanding differences in political participation across various ethnic minority groups. Since then, scholars have increasingly studied different forms of collaboration in which ethnic minority organisations are involved, in order to understand their political weight. However, as compared to the Fennema and Tillie study, we can remark various variations on the original research design. Firstly, some scholars have accentuated the importance of looking not only at the collaboration among ethnic minority organisations, but also at those collaborations maintained with mainstream associative life, as well as with political actors (Fennema and Tillie 2008; Pilati 2011; Morales and Ramiro 2011). Secondly, we equally find studies emphasizing the importance of the possible interactions which can occur between the various forms of collaboration on the one hand, and the particular political setting in which these collaborations are formed on the other (Berger 2010; Pilati 2011). Finally, we note that while Fennema and Tillie focus on quite formal collaborations occurring in administrative boards, other scholars have discussed the importance of more informal, everyday collaborations (Peters 2010). In understanding the political role of Belgian Moroccan, Belgian Turkish and Belgian Congolese organisations in Brussels, we strongly focus on the influence of both the internal (within the respective associative fields) and external collaborations (with Belgian pro-migrant organisations, trade-unions and political parties), in which these organisations are involved. The innovative part of this paper concerns the distinctive association we discuss between the different forms of collaboration on the one hand, and either institutional or non-institutional political activities on the other. We observe that while external collaborations are more resourceful for institutional forms of political activity as compared to internal collaborations, this is not the case for non-institutional political participation. We argue for a multi-dimensional relationship between the multi-faceted concepts of social capital and political participation. We interpret this result in relation to particular characteristics of the Brussels political context, in which these organisations are functioning.