The first thing to greet visitors to the EU capital is the smell of piss. Stepping off the train at Gare du Midi, Brussels’ international train station, you’ll be watched by overweight security guards in stab vests as you make your way to the metro or taxi rank, past a permanent homeless encampment under a bridge and a rotating cast of lunatics in desperate need of care.
Longer-term residents soon learn that it doesn’t get much better. Spiralling crime rates, failing public services and eye-watering tax rates are no way to attract the continent’s best and brightest.
Maybe it’s the Tokyo talking, but I think a wealthy economic bloc governing half a billion people ought to have a better capital. And yet fixing Brussels is beyond the jurisdiction of the EU and the capabilities of the Belgian state. If the EU is to be a serious power in this century, it seems the only solution is to move its headquarters elsewhere.
Brussels, Europe and the world have all changed since the city was chosen as the EU capital1 in 1958 – a provisional decision that solidified over time without ever being fully formalised. Now as then, inertia is a powerful force: The main argument for Brussels today is that everything is already here.
Among the criteria for Brussels initially being chosen were its vibrant metropolis, its abundance of high-quality housing, its uncongested city centre, its good transport links and its open economy. To a modern-day resident, the joke is in poor taste.
The other criteria were that it should be in a small country to avoid upsetting the Franco-German balance of power, which is still met; and that it should be located close to the EU’s geographical centre, which is not. Subsequent waves of EU expansion, along with the UK’s departure in 2020, have moved the centre of gravity much further east.
If the EU were created today in its current form, Brussels would not be chosen as its capital even if the city were well governed. The historical anomaly might be tolerable if Brussels had used the elite influx to become the best city in Europe. But on many measures it’s a long way down the charts, and getting worse.
Urban decay
I am fortunate to live in one of the nicer parts of central Brussels. I buy my groceries at a delightful weekend market, and if I wish to dine out there’s a street nearby with a tantalising selection of high-quality restaurants. And yet a man was stabbed on that very street a few weeks ago, leaving a large and very visible bloodstain on the pavement that the city took three days to clean up.
One commune over in Etterbeek, also regarded as a ‘nice area’, the local shopkeepers have been lobbing bombs at each other’s premises. In less fortunate parts of the city, where an EU intern without family money might live, drug gangs have been going at each other with automatic rifles. Two further shootings occurred near Gare du Midi in the course of drafting this essay; there have been more than 60 this year.
At a more mundane level, civic order and decency have broken down. The police don’t have enough resources to investigate things like bike theft, to the extent that most victims don’t even bother to report it. Every bench is tagged with graffiti and surrounded by litter. It’s no wonder that most people retreat to the suburbs as soon as they have children, or even before.
Some long-term Brussels residents reach for euphemisms like ‘grit’ or ‘character’ to describe the chaos, saying they wouldn’t want to live in a sanitised Dubai or Singapore. A better comparison would be Copenhagen or Prague, which show that a mid-sized European city can be safe and clean without losing its charm.
The dysfunction is particularly galling given the high rate of income tax, often more than 50% when all is said and done – comparable to Helsinki or Vienna, where the trains run on time, the trash is collected and the police solve most crimes. Brussels has socialist taxes and capitalist public services.
People working for the EU institutions are exempt from normal taxes2 and can live comfortably enough if they survive their first years in the intern-industrial complex. But they only make up about half of the EU bubble. The journalists, lobbyists, consultants, lawyers and so forth all get clobbered at full rate.
Brussels has charms that other European cities lack, but mostly this is down to the presence of the EU institutions, and would be replicated anywhere the EU chose as its seat. The cosmopolitan crowd that sits around my dinner table belongs to the EU capital, not to Brussels. So do our favourite bars and restaurants. If the circus moves, so do the clowns.
Most of us continue to live in Brussels despite the city, not because of it. We moved here for work, and ended up building careers in the EU bubble or otherwise putting down roots of friendship and family. But everyone has a gripe, things are measurably getting worse, and I worry about whether talented members of the next generation will accept these trade-offs to pursue an EU career.
State failure
The idea of Belgium being a failed state is at least a decade old, and the Brussels bubble has ridden it out so far. The city’s elite residents have long joked warmly about living in “the world’s most successful failed state”.
But after eight years here, it feels to me like a turning point is being reached. Gen Z is famously less career-driven than my generation, less willing to sacrifice their quality of life in service of their careers. The observation is generally made in relation to work-life balance, but must surely also apply to the broader lived environment. If the EU can’t attract top talent from the next generation, it will fail to meet this century’s challenges.
State failure also affects the workings of the EU in more direct ways. The Schuman roundabout, at the epicentre of the EU institutions, has been stuck at the most disruptive stage of renovation works for more than a year after the city government ran out of money. To one journalist newly arrived from the US, such a basic failure looks like “a joke, an embodiment of the perceived dysfunction in Brussels and the EU writ large”.
The lack of security also risks chilling political expression, with many incidents in recent months of people on the right being violently harassed.3 Last month Polish MEP Waldemar Buda, from the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, reported that his car had been shot several times with an air rifle, in what he perceived as a targeted act of intimidation.
In June, several Jewish organisations were advised to take private security measures after posters featuring the faces of their staff were plastered around Brussels, accusing them of “lobbying for genocide” over their links to Israel. While the Gaza war has stoked antisemitism across Europe, Euractiv reports that Belgium is unusual in not having begun work on a strategy to combat it.
In May an event held by MCC, a right-wing think tank linked to Hungary’s ruling party, was disrupted by nearly a hundred antifa thugs who hurled eggs at attendees and attempted to drown out the conference, which was about women in conservative politics. Despite previous intimidation by the same group and clear advance warning, only half a dozen police were present, and were forced to huddle inside for more than an hour until reinforcements arrived to disperse the mob.
MCC has a right to take part in the EU discourse: There’s no evidence of it receiving funding from hostile foreign powers and its events do not feature hate speech or incitement to violence. The group that disrupted the event, by contrast, was a group of local ‘antifascists’ who decided to use violence to keep MCC out of their city – with no respect for its status as the EU capital.
Similarly, another MCC-led event was disrupted last year after the mayor of Brussels’ smallest commune, for no good reason, ordered police to shut it down. The decision was overturned by a court but the damage was done: Belgian state failure allowed the mayor of 27,000 people – a man also linked to Turkish nationalist politics – to interrupt a conversation about the future of half a billion Europeans.
If anybody on the left is tempted to welcome these developments, remember that the wheel turns. Tactics used in your favour today will be turned against you tomorrow; if a right-wing conference can be illegally disrupted, so can a Pride parade.
For European democracy to function, its institutions and the people that serve them need security both from political intimidation and from random acts of violence. In both senses, Brussels is no longer able to provide it.
Let us dispense with the fiction that the European Parliament is based in Strasbourg. The travelling circus goes there for four days a month, in an extraordinary waste of taxpayer money; the great majority of the Parliament’s work is done in Brussels.
They pay only a special European tax, which funds perks including special European schools for their special European children. But never let it be said that they’re out of touch.
I’m not aware of any incidents targeting people on the left, but please get in touch if I’ve missed any. I aim to give a balanced account, but I won’t say that something is ‘both sides’ unless I have evidence of it.
Although you're right in most of what you're saying, to say that most of Brussels' charm comes down to the presence of the EU institutions I find a bit ignorant to be honest. Of course the presence of EU expats (of which I am a part) has added to the city's liveliness and wealth, but the city has an identity outside of that clearly.
Then I do sincerely think some parts of the city that I frequent are actually improving in a sense, with more green spaces, pedestrian areas, and new cafés and bars. Parvis de St Gilles used to be full of cars, for chrissake.
As a long time resident of Brussels I completely agree with your article, but as somebody working entirely outside the EU Bubble, I feel like the EU Institutions share a big part of the blame in that story.
They've been completely disconnected from the city and the local habitants. And they invested very little in making the city improve. The EU quarter and their buildings look like shit, are run down, and uninspired from their conception. That's EU's fault, not Brussel's. You can blame the city for the failure of the Schuman roundabout, but I find it crazy that the EU commission contribute so little to make a central square of its institutions stand out. It should have been an international competition of well known architects, and be fully paid by the EU. We got a toilet lid that won't even be completed for lack of money.
If you look at how much the EU institutions cost to run compared to the size of the Economy they oversee, you'll see they cost very little, indeed they pride themselves of being very efficient. I think on the flip side they spend way too little. They should shower the city with money to make it stand out, as all the other world's power capitals do.
Yes the city has a lot of other big problems that have nothing to do with the EU. It is ill loved by its country, stuck between two communities that stopped caring about it, and extremely badly managed. But the EU could and should take this matter in its own hands. It would be a good symbol of what the EU could do right, currently it's correctly reflecting what the EU actually is, an out of touch ivory tower of an institution, incapable of solving the practical problems of its citizens and inspiring for greatness.