Someone once said that America is the only country in the world where everyone is homesick – obviously they had never been to Brussels. John Redwood and his ilk may like to imagine it teeming with federalist drones who have abandoned their nationalities for the European ideal, but Brussels is one of the most nationalistic places that I have ever been to.
This is because more than a quarter of its residents are expats. And, if you leave your place of birth suddenly, your mind seals it off neatly and preserves it in formaldehyde. Ted Hughes once said that his childhood memories of the Yorkshire he was forced to abandon were so complete that they felt like a second brain. I know what he means.
I left for Brussels when I was six, and my first few years in Camden still feel like half my life. I remember them with a brightness and intensity that I cannot muster for any other period. The minutest details are etched on my brain. Living in Camden now – 19 years later – I still see the contours of the old council houses through the facades of yuppie conversions; I mentally remove the neon signs from the front of what used to be our hardware store; I crown the crew-cut scalps of today’s chemical generation with the red and green punk mohicans of my infancy; and, when the sun comes out, I wait impatiently for the Albert Street carnival that hasn’t taken place since 1981.
Though most of the people who lived in my street when I was a child have moved on, and the architecture of the place has been transformed, 18 years of gentrification, social change and Thatcherism have not even managed to scratch the surface of my mental Camden.
And the expat’s burden of carrying his home in his head means that there is no risk of going native. Even if you speak the language perfectly, know your way around and draw your friends from the local community, you will always be a foreigner. The locals may not be able to tell the difference, but you can. You can’t locate yourself in the country’s history, you speak a different language at home, you need a passport to visit your relatives and you don’t know the basic cultural references that others take for granted (memories of children’s books, TV programmes, school trips and so on).
The striking thing about Brussels is that few even try to fit in. Many cling to their roots by recreating a little England. They go to English schools, have English friends and don’t bother learning French. Despite living in one of the culinary capitals of Europe, they fill their cupboards and fridges with pre-packaged, ready-made parcels of home: Bird’s custard powder, Walkers crisps, Heinz baked beans, Wall’s sausages and Battenburg cakes.
Uncles and aunts send the Beano by post, and bookcases are stuffed with Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome. And this is nothing compared with the patriotic fervour of the Greeks, who kit themselves out in fancy dress and dance through the streets on their national holiday. Or the Irish, whose legendary St Patrick’s Day celebrations spill out of the dozens of Irish pubs that are scattered around the city. Only the Belgians are relaxed enough about their identity to let it go largely uncelebrated.
The paradox is that by clinging so inflexibly to a pastiche identity, expats become foreigners in their own countries as well. On their eventual return, they find their beloved homeland has moved on without them. It is not just that fettucine in mushroom sauce has replaced sausages and beans as convenience food, that Enid Blyton has been banned from the school curriculum or that comics of their childhood, such as the Eagle, have gone bust. The values, lifestyles and politics of the British people have been transformed as well. Almost everybody has been on holiday to another European country. Half of British teenagers speak a second language well enough to have a conversation in it. Every supermarket in Britain is an advertisement for European cuisine. In their everyday lives people have chosen, and chosen again, to be European.
The Britain I live in today is unquestionably more Continental in its ways than the one I left in 1980. Not because a group of rabid expats in Brussels have rammed Europe down people’s throats, but because they have chosen to import the good life they savoured across the Channel into their daily lives. Europe is not an ideology, it is a lived experience – and we never want to do without it again.
This has been possible precisely because the homesick expats in Brussels are so attached to their national identities that they have done nothing to threaten them. In many ways Brussels itself is a microcosm of the European Union we are trying to create. It is an unobtrusive vessel that allows powerful national identities to flourish – the living embodiment of Redwood’s sound-bite of being “in Europe, not run by it”. The paradox is that while the mongrel Brits are being Europeans in deed, their counterparts in Brussels all too often express their Europeanism only in words. But both camps show us that you can be a good European only if you have a sense of your own identity.
Mark Leonard is director of the Foreign Policy Centre. He lived in Brussels from 1980 to 1992
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