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While a great deal of attention is devoted to the Pacific region as the new chessboard of international politics, Pakistan remains a key actor in terms of both threat and potential. Two observations back this argument: first, Pakistan's fundamental roles as a state are challenged by its ongoing conflict with India and internal insurgencies. Second, due to a power-status gap, Pakistan experiences difficulties in holding specific self-conceived roles. In addition to hampering its socio-economic potential, these developments prevent Pakistan's quest for normalization in the system. As a consequence, we argue that engaging with Islamabad should be a priority for Washington so as to prevent the country from further aligning with Beijing, thus reinforcing China's regional leadership and status as peer-competitor to the United States. Indeed, as the potential for deviance in the international system arises from its normative dimension, the US, as the global leader, counts among its roles that of norm-setter and primary socializer for most states. Our research proposes to look at an old puzzle with new theoretical insights. By addressing the question of Washington's engagement towards non-conforming states, we aim to document a set of socialization processes as intervening variables linking American global role as leader and primary socializer to Pakistan's process of social integration (normalization/deviance). Drawing from sociology and social psychology, the paper seeks to explore the ability of the leader to act as a primary source of role location and status recognition towards non-conforming states so as to integrate them (back) into the US-led system.

Because of its very conception, the G1000 in Belgium cannot be categorized as a form of constitutional deliberative democracy per se. Its grassroots origin never indeed entailed to change the constitution. Yet this chapter contends that there are some constitutional deliberative democracy features in the G1000, which paradoxically were not thought of by its citizen organizers who sought in the first phases of the G1000 to avoid any political and institutional ties. In fact, their focus was much more on a high input and throughput legitimacy, rather than a high output legitimacy. Their goal was to demonstrate that ordinary citizens, randomly selected, had a say about major social and political issues and that they were wiling and able to deliberate about them, should a design conducive to deliberation be put in place. While the G1000 scored highly on the input dimensions – the quality of representation was good and the agenda could not have been more open – and fairly highly on throughput legitimacy – with a clear script and trained moderators, but with processes of aggregation insufficiently transparent –, the outputs were in the short term very limited, which was a major source of criticism as media had fostered a climate of great expectations about the outputs. The absence of formal links to the main political actors meant that the organizers could not guarantee any formal implementation of the results. So the design characteristics that increase input legitimacy also undermine output legitimacy. But on the longer term the political uptake and the social uptake of the G1000 are increasing as, on the one hand, most of the political parties are now advocating some forms of participatory and deliberative democracy and, on the other hand, several experiences inspired by the G1000 have sparked around in Belgium and in neighboring countries. This twofold output consequence of the G1000 seems to indicate that this experience has fostered some sort of constitutional deliberative democracy broadly defined.

Today few people deny the existence of regional substate diplomacy (Criekemans 2010). But there is still no common agreement on a region's right to do so and, above all, on their scope of action. This question goes against what used to be the dominant approach in international relations, the state-centric approach that leads to the logic of speaking with one voice. Increasingly, a multilevel-governance approach has contested this state-centric view and proposes an alternative logic of multiple actors speaking with their voice, nuancing strongly the seminal distinction between "sovereignty-bound" and "sovereignty-free" actors (Rosenau 1990). From the 1970s, the world has seen the growing presence of sovereignty-free actors in international relations. Among these actors, non-central or, better, substate, governments of federal states have developed intensive foreign relations. These governments are using a range of techniques: from shaping the federal government's foreign policy to establishing themselves directly in the international arena (Blatter et al. 2008). For minority nation governments this is particularly a challenge, as they have to act internally – where they have developed full-fledged legislative powers within a multinational federation – and externally – where international and national laws are often still reluctant to recognise their right of action (Lejeune 2003). Yet some minority nations have thrived in developing their own international relations. Bavaria, Catalonia, Flanders, Quebec, Scotland and Wallonia are often seen as successful international players even if they are not fully sovereignty bound (Michelmann 2009; Criekemans 2010). The international actions of these minority nations have been characterised under the umbrella of "identity paradiplomacy" (Paquin 2003); that is, a willingness to use international relations to foster a nation-building process within a multinational state. This observation was particularly prevalent for minority nations strongly in competition with a federal government about their nationbuilding process, albeit for different reasons, namely Flanders, Quebec and Scotland (Paquin 2004). The case of Wallonia seems to fits less well into the identity paradiplomacy framework, which therefore raises the question of alternative roads to international relations. This is the core question of this chapter: is identity paradiplomacy the only way to go for minority nations? Quebec and Wallonia are both well known for their active foreign relations.

What are the outputs and effects of deliberative mini-publics? This is probably one of the most critical questions for any deliberative endeavor. In the realm of large-scale deliberative experiments, the G1000 in Belgium holds a special place: it happened in the wake of the longest government formation ever, it sought to gather 1000 randomly selected citizens in Brussels to discuss key social and political issues, and, above all, it was a fully citizen-led initiative. Its organizers explicitly sought to avoid any political and institutional ties and their focus was much more on guaranteeing a high representativeness and a qualitative process, rather than generating strong political outcomes. While the G1000 did well in terms of representativeness and open agenda setting, the political uptake was very limited in the short term. In the longer term, however, it seems that the effects of the G1000 were larger than initially expected. A rich set of empirical data is used to analyze the interaction between the G1000 with the entire political system by looking at the relation with the media, public opinion, political parties and MPs, and other experiments in deliberative democracy. Such endeavor sheds light on the "so what" question which is key to the development of real-world deliberative democracy.

What are the outputs and effects of deliberative mini-publics? This is probably one of the most critical questions for any deliberative endeavor. In the realm of large-scale deliberative experiments, the G1000 in Belgium holds a special place: it happened in the wake of the longest government formation ever, it sought to gather 1000 randomly selected citizens in Brussels to discuss key social and political issues, and, above all, it was a fully citizen-led initiative. Its organizers explicitly sought to avoid any political and institutional ties and their focus was much more on guaranteeing a high representativeness and a qualitative process, rather than generating strong political outcomes. While the G1000 did well in terms of representativeness and open agenda setting, the political uptake was very limited in the short term. In the longer term, however, it seems that the effects of the G1000 were larger than initially expected. A rich set of empirical data is used to analyze the interaction between the G1000 with the entire political system by looking at the relation with the media, public opinion, political parties and MPs, and other experiments in deliberative democracy. Such endeavor sheds light on the "so what" question which is key to the development of real-world deliberative democracy.