In search of a Brussels identity

There aren’t too many Brussels-based writers, or at least ones that I know, which is good for those of us who are in that category, every writer wants to be working a less-travelled beat.

One of those who is, and who is doing it well, is Eoghan Walsh, who writes the Brussels Notes Substack – a newsletter where he samples the delights of the city and also outlines its prevarications.

Being resident here for nearly three years now, I’d found myself increasingly asking and indeed writing, ‘What’s good about Brussels?’ And I wanted to talk about it with Eoghan. Put another way, I was looking for reasons to find to justify my presence in a city which seemed to attract such little love from its residents and to a certain extent wider Europe.

It feels, Eoghan told me, meeting me on a Bank Holiday Monday at one of the city-centre Brussels bars which form one of the city’s great assets, that nobody really knows what a Brussels identity is. For London, or Paris, or even Madrid, it’s clear, but for Brussels it's much harder to define. Institutional sclerosis? The underdog? Opening your tax bill at the frituur? It just wasn’t clear what Brussels stood for. And that was in part logical given the capital’s hyper-regionalisation, with 19 distinct communes trying to run the show. This is a city which took 600 days to form a government and where after just 100 days that government was already on the brink of collapse.

It always came to as a surprise to me, this, because I think Brussels always makes quite a good impression of itself on just those passing through it; it seems quite a cool city, laidback and hip, to those just using it to transit on elsewhere. The kind of place which appears to those moving through it to be an insider tip, where they'd like to spend more time, which makes it all the weirder that the people who live here are after so down on it.

Nobody cares about Brussels, Eoghan said. Nobody cares about it.

Anyway, Eoghan had already been in Brussels for a good long time and knew of what he spoke. He’d come here in 2012, working an NGO job hard, before transferring into a role at the institutions. He had a family, a Belgian spouse, and lived in Koekelberg. I didn’t know exactly where Koekelberg was but I thought I had run through it on the Brussels half-marathon.

In that time, and this gave Eoghan hope, he’d already seen Brussels improve. The previous Mayor, Yvan Mayeur, as part of a left-liberal (and Francophone-Dutch-speaking) coalition had driven the pedestrianisation of Boulevard Anspach, one of the city’s major thoroughfares. Cycling had also improved since Eoghan arrived, tho that was less down to Mayeur. From where I was sitting the idea of something actually improving in Brussels seemed a strange one.

However, since the 2024 municipal elections, and the loss of the Greens as his coalition partner, current Mayor Phillipe Close had kicked back against policies aimed at reducing car dependence. The main thing was parking, Eoghan said; Belgians were born with a very defined perspective on what a good life (‘the Belgian dream’) entailed and both owning a motor vehicle, and parking it where you wanted, was an integral part of that.

To the extent that it pays attention to it at all, the wider European press finds the Wallonian-Flanders/French-Dutch split in Belgium amusing, reporting on bizarre stories like the conductor who got docked for saying ‘Bonjour’ in Flanders. But actually living in it, living in a culture where people can’t agree on what language to speak and keep subdividing an already small space into endless disputes, is actually pretty tiresome. Why can’t the answer to ‘Do you speak Dutch or French?’ be ‘Yes.’ And that is the Brussels I dreamt of before I moved here, of becoming a truly sophisticated European person.

It should be an opportunity, right, to have multiple languages in a country and in a city. Brussels is after all Belgium's only officially bilingual province, and perhaps any identity would have to be a hybrid one – those 12.6% of Brussel residents who claim to be fluent in French, Dutch and English.

But that’s in part the problem; a hybrid identity, the Goededagbonjour identity, necessarily takes a bit more work and a bit more comfort with pluralism, needs people who see the other as an opportunity rather than a threat. That takes time, and it’s no wonder so much of Brussels Eurobubble life defaults to deracinated international English, or even form part of the one in ten Brussels residents who speak neither French, English or Dutch. It’s fun when RWDM Molenbeek, my Brussels football team, make all their stadium announcements in Dutch and French, but it’s a bit more work than most people are prepared to extend on the day-to-day.

To an extent, both Eoghan and I had to find a way to like Brussels; his kids were going to a Flemish speaking-school, and my job was keeping me here. He knew Brussels could get better as he had already seen it get better. The picture of the city had changed in his time too; people of North African descent would start out in the inner city and then move out to the leafy suburbs; now new waves of immigration, e.g. from the Balkans, were coming. Yet other things were changing too, and crime which had once only been a feature of districts where poor people lived was becoming everybody’s problem.

Eoghan proposed that Belgium attracted a certain kind of person, one attracted to what they call in governance ‘hard problems’. Someone who almost felt sorry for the frightful constitutional mess of Belgian politics. Brussels was certainly, he said, and certainly when compared to somewhere like the confident and prosperous Antwerp, an underdog. Was it simply not very Brussels to be a Brussels booster? It wasn’t very Belgian to love Belgium after all, let alone be actively passionate about it.

All that was needed, Eoghan said, preparing to leave me, was that enough people cared about the city to take a stand about making it better. Well, I thought, as he pressed a cute little beer zine into my hand before he went, no-one could accuse Eoghan of not caring about his adopted hometown. Brussels could certainly use a few more like him for the city had an acute shortage of optimists. Not that I was exactly helping of late.