1. 

Brussels has frequently had a bad press. Already in the 1860s, Baudelaire, who fled there from the French censors, called the Belgian capital “a ghost town, a mummy of a town, it smells of death, the Middle Ages, and tombs.” To a growing number of Europeans, “Brussels” is a byword for bureaucratic bullying by the so-called Eurocrats.

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2.

Five years ago, Belgium established a peculiar record in being the only democracy to go without an elected government for more than a year (589 days, to be exact). The Francophone parties couldn’t come to an agreement with the Flemish to form a national government. But this was, as it were, in character. For the Belgian identity always was rather shaky. People felt an allegiance to their language community, to their region, to their church, or to political patrons—socialists in industrial and now rusting postindustrial Wallonia, and liberals, Christian Democrats, or Flemish nationalists in the north. Even imperial conquest was not always a strictly national enterprise: in the nineteenth century, the Congo belonged to King Leopold II alone.

Brussels, that magnificent repository of history, with its Renaissance guild houses and nineteenth-century palaces built on fortunes made in the Congo, is the capital of Belgium, but few Belgians take much pride in it, in the way the French are proud of Paris, or the British of London. Flemish politicians and businessmen prefer to live in Antwerp or Ghent. To many Belgians, Brussels is a strange city of immigrants, refugees, and foreign grandees. It is still a capital in search of a nation. And if you include the EU, it is also a capital in search of an empire, or a federal state, or whatever it is that Europe is destined to become.

This peculiarly open-ended status can be disconcerting. 

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3.

Cosmopolitanism, however laudable, is not the direction in which most European voters are moving, and neither is constitutional patriotism. Van Middelaar has a more multidimensional view of European politics. Direct political participation in democratic elections is what he calls the Greek model, which in his view is not sufficient. Citizens also need the Roman model: the state as a source of material benefits. And the German model: the imaginary community of shared historical and cultural values. The process of these models together creating a European polity will be hard and long, but van Middelaar still believes that it is possible. He thinks that muddling through, without a clear blueprint, but taking all three models into account, remains the best option for the European experiment.

Common enemies can help to forge political cohesion: that is how Belgians became Belgians, after all—their common opposition to Dutch rule. But so, perhaps, does the challenge of common crises. European leaders disagree fiercely about the ways to respond to financial disasters in Greece, or the arrival of refugees and migrants, or indeed the prospect of Britain leaving the EU. To some observers, these conflicts are harbingers of a European implosion.

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4.

Since October 7, 2014, Belgium has had a new federal government. It is a center-right coalition, led by the New Flemish Alliance (N–VA). The Francophones are represented by the conservative Mouvement Réformateur (MR). So far, the government has continued to hold power. But it is a fragile construction. Francophone and Dutch-speaking Belgians are drifting ever further apart; they don’t read one another’s press or watch the same TV. More and more well-educated Flemish cannot or will not speak French. Nationalists in the N–VA openly support the ideal of Flemish independence. Each region, including the small German-speaking area around Liège, as well as Brussels, has its own government, and cooperation between them is often faulty.

All that Belgians have in common—and this may be more than it sounds—is a monarchy and a national soccer team, the Red Devils. As in the case of the EU, Belgium seems constantly to be on the brink of falling apart. And yet it has not. One of the reasons is Brussels. No one, certainly not the Francophone population, but not even the Flemish nationalists, wants to give it up. They may not love their capital city, but Brussels still represents something more than the nation’s increasingly separate parts. Brussels makes all Belgians feel bigger, less provincial, more able to face the wider world, than they would otherwise.

A similar view of Brussels is still held by most Europeans, even a large number of British subjects, who just might vote to keep Britain in the EU.

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