Abstract
This paper presents the main political Information Highways initiatives undertaken in Belgium, a small but centrally located European member state. Belgium is a federal state with regions and communities whose competences concerning multimedia and Information Highways are not clearly defined. This paper shows that this fuzzy situation slows down Information Highways' development in Belgium and reveals the weakness of a federal pattern for the definition and management of a coherent Information Highways strategy.
Belgium has two main cultures which express themselves in the initiatives taken at the northern and southern parts of the country. These examples reveal that the use of Information Highways to express national cultures and identities, and the cohesive effect of Information Highways on European member states, underlined by the Bangemann report, may be contradictory.
| Original language | French |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Actes des 18èmes journées de l'IDATE " Cybermonde: l'avantage européen? " |
| Place of Publication | Montpellier |
| Publisher | Idate |
| Pages | 389-404 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Publication status | Published - 1996 |