This diploma thesis strives to examine the relation between language politics and the process of federalization in Belgium with an emphasis on the Flemish-Walloon conflict. The main thesis here is that language laws drove the process of federlazation in Belgium from a once unitary state. It is thus the goal here to show whether this is true or whether there have been additional factors that have come into play in Belgium's evolution towards a federal state.

The term globalization arouses different feelings. Some people regard it with fear; others consider it the incarnation of a new time - a time when the relations between different cultures and parts of the world intensify increasingly. Consequently, the term is not only used to explain highly diverse phenomena but also to shed light on the alleged darkness of a world in change. In this collective volume, scientists from different academic disciplines and regions of the world wanted to make available their perceptions of this ample term to a broader audience. Twenty contributions comprising nine academic disciplines depict the process of the growing together of the world via different approaches. Apart from the contributions from historians, the reader will find articles from the fields of philosophy, architecture, economics, sociology, political science, journalism, anthropology, and law. This is to offer the reader a small insight into the variety of research about globalization and may contribute to a better understanding of this phenomenon that is treated differently in diverse academic disciplines and different parts of the world.