When Policies Speak: How language becomes an ideological cue in the Brussels-Capital region

Public policies are rich in symbolic work (Boussaguet & Faucher, 2024). The symbols they convey can have a crucial effect on citizens, and more specifically on citizens’ sense of belonging to the polity (Simonsen 2020). Belonging, here, means a feeling of adherence to a “symbolic space of familiarity”, a feeling at home, that citizens construct around available social categories (Antonsich, 2010, 646). As these categories are forged through public policies, citizens' policy experiences become key sites in which stories of group boundaries come to matter (Schneider and Ingram, 1993) and within which citizens learn about their ‘place’ in the polity (Mettler, 2005). Policy feedback literature has extensively shown that the construction of target groups in, for example, police conduct, welfare services, and immigration policy conveys powerful cues about who is valued, suspected, or expendable in the polity, shaping how individuals and collectives understand their own inclusion or marginalization (Lerman & Weaver, 2014; Rosenthal, 2021). As existing research mostly examines the effects of specific symbolic policies on belonging, it tends to isolate single measures or arenas. The political construction of one of the most relevant social identities, a citizens’ adherence to the nation, is, for example, typically studied focusing on single policy areas such as immigration (Rumbauts, 2005; Simonsen, 2020), citizenship (Kim and Smets, 2022) or education (Brown, 2008). Yet, throughout their process of making sense of their national identity, citizens are exposed to a large variety of such symbolic policies (Bussi et al., 2022). What we lack is an understanding of which sites and narratives are perceived as meaningful by citizens and through which cues these narratives operate. The paper examines how citizens interpret the symbolic meaning of policies and how this shapes their national identity in a context of extreme categorization: the multi-nation Brussels-Capital Region, focusing on experiences with policies of the Flemish Community. The region is constructed as a space of cohabitation between two national (ethno-linguistic) communities. Membership to either French-speaking (‘Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles’) or Dutch-speaking (‘Flemish Community’) institutions structures much of the public landscape, as schools, hospital and media landscape are organized separately. While self-identification remains open to citizens, the symbolic struggle over each group’s self-understanding has seeped into bureaucratic criteria, eligibility rules, policy programmes and discourse. Building on the interpretive analysis of 68 interviews with Brussels residents, the paper shows how policies can serve as symbolic cues even when unintended. Identifying a variation of implicit boundary drawing strategies, it shows how policy experience have led to a growing sense of identarian alienation among a young and diverse bilingual population who conceive ‘Flemishness’ as a growingly exclusionary and xenophobic project. The underlying mechanism is that state agents’ language use has become a symbolic marker of political ideology, even in domains governed by rules beyond the Flemish Community’s reach. The paper thus contributes to the literature of symbolic policies by showing that the impact of policies expands beyond their immediate effect by trickling down into the wider conceptions of community and group boundaries of citizens.