In his book The Sorrows of Belgium Martin Conway uses the Belgian case to look at the restoration of liberal parliamentary states in Europe between 1945 and 1947. Nico Wouters’ contribution focuses on three elements brought to the fore by Conway: 1) the essential yet ambivalent role played by local government (cities and municipalities), 2) the inability to institutionalise Belgian patriotism as binder for the nation-state and finally, 3) the rift between shifts in class relations and political institutional renewal. His contribution comments on each of these elements, by means of superficial comparisons with the Netherlands.As Conway shows, Belgium’s larger cities were laboratories for new political currents that in the end strengthened centrifugal, regionalist tendencies. On the other hand, the local level as an institutional part of state organisation had a reverse effect in the shorter term. The restoration after the liberation can only be understood when one takes into account how ‘local states’ imposed a compelling framework that limited the opportunities for political renewal. As such, Wouters hypothesises that these local states help to explain in part the institutional conservatism of Belgian elites, a core-element in Conway’s book. On this point Wouters sees mostly similarities with the Netherlands. A Belgian-Dutch difference on the other hand, is that the Dutch did succeed in seamlessly combining an equally conservative post-war restoration with restarting a revitalised collective national identity. Belgium’s failure in this regard was quite evident. Although it is obvious that by 1950 such a renewal had become impossible because of the Royal Question, it is still a question of the extent to which the Belgian state still had some leeway in 1945. The third and most important point is connected to the shifts in social class relations. This concerns mutual power relations, group identities, attitudes and political strategies. The genesis of post-war social reform is merely the tip of the iceberg in this ...