There are many compelling arguments for Britain to reject further integration into Europe. But there is one that I find immensely suspect: that we would be “ruled from Brussels”. Don’t get me wrong. I have no great desire for Britain to be ruled from anywhere else except Britain. But I suspect that many who object to Brussels do so not because of legitimate concerns over loss of national sovereignty, but because of a particularly nasty strand of prejudice. When they talk about “rule from Brussels”, they often spit out the last word, giving the game away that they are Belgophobes, and that being ruled by Washington or somewhere else would be acceptable.
My own opposition to the EU is based predominantly on the view that, as an agent of both globalisation and standardisation, it threatens the cultural diversity of the most fascinatingly heterogenous 9.7 million square kilometres on the planet. Much of British Euroscepticism is not based on such internationalist considerations. It betrays instead some of the least attractive aspects of our national character: insularity, insecurity and xenophobia. Belgium in general and Brussels in particular seem to bring them out.
Belgium-baiting may be as old as the hills, but the sport recently seems to have gained a new lease of life. In the US, Belgium is second only to France on the neo-con blacklist because the prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, opposed the war on Iraq, and because Belgian lawyers had the temerity to file a lawsuit at a Belgian court for a war crimes trial against General Tommy Franks. The standard agitprop Belgophobe line is that it is a hopelessly corrupt country – “the Italy of the north”, awash with petty regulations and child abuse scandals – and one that, given its record of atrocities in the Congo, should for ever hold its peace in foreign affairs. “What famous people has Belgium ever produced,” goes the tiresome Belgophobe joke, “except Hercule Poirot and Tintin, both of whom were fictitious?” Well, how about Adolphe Sax, Georges Simenon, Bruegel the Elder and the legendary chansonnier Jacques Brel? A world without the saxophone, Maigret novels, Flemish landscapes and Brel’s exquisite, bitter-sweet ballads would scarcely be worth living in. Any country that can claim at least partial responsibility for Audrey Hepburn and Peregrine Worsthorne is surely within the pale of civilisation.
One of the many attractive aspects of Belgian national life is the country’s complete absence of hype and boastfulness, personified by Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne, the charming tennis players who have met each other twice in the finals of Grand Slam events this year. While London launches its bid to stage the 2012 Olympics and markets itself as the coolest, most happening city on the planet, the Belgian capital makes no such effort. Many dismiss Brussels as a dull, provincial place. But spend any time there and you will see why those who know it well regard it as the most underrated city in Europe. Leaving aside the lace, the chocolate and more than 400 types of beer, it has the most beautiful main square anywhere in the world, several great museums, a genuinely bohemian nightlife, un- failingly pleasant and polite people and, to top it all, the lowest number of McDonald’s per capita of population of any capital city in western Europe. If , like me, your idea of heaven is sitting in a smoke-filled bar at three in the morning, sipping a Leffe Bruin and listening to Gilbert Becaud singing “L’important c’est la Rose” on the jukebox for the fifth time in two hours, then Brussels is the place for you.
In a recent Guardian article, Andrew Osborn wrote of a less appealing side to the Belgian capital, a city where municipal bureaucrats impose fines on those who put their rubbish out a day early, or who place a “For sale” advert in their car window. A trifle excessive these rules may be, but generally Brussels, like the rest of Belgium, works. Whether because of the draconian rubbish regulations, or the comparative lack of US fast-food chains, the streets and public places in Belgium’s major cities are, aside from the inevitable poodle shit, invariably clean. The health service and public education are good, while the Belgian state railway, the Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Belge (SNCB), is simply beyond comparison. In a piece of research exclusive to NS readers, my wife and I spent 20 minutes at the Gare Centrale in Brussels observing the arrival of trains on several different platforms. Out of a total of more than 30 trains, some international, all bar one were on time, and that one was just 90 seconds late.
And there is probably nowhere in Europe where idiotic laws based on European Commission directives are more routinely flouted than in Brussels. The law by which all bars and cafes are obliged to have a non-smoking area is, in Brussels, almost universally and splendidly ignored. Whereas the British seem to take every missive from the Commission as cast in stone, the Belgians have a far more grown- up attitude. Wallowing night after night in the smoke-filled atmosphere of Brussels cafes, one builds up hope that it will be in Belgium that the tobaccophobes finally and appropriately meet their Waterloo. A country that has ashtrays liberally dispersed at its Palais de Justice, in shoe shops and in the greenhouses of its botanical gardens, and in which waiters, railway cashiers and bar staff routinely smoke on the job, must have a great chance of saving what is left of the civilised world from the creeping death of Californianisation.
Not that Belgium doesn’t have its problems: the child abuse scandals of the 1990s and an unemployment rate of 8 per cent. But unlike Britain, Belgium has managed to maintain some kind of industrial base. As for the Congo gibes, Belgium has, albeit belatedly, come to terms with its colonial past, as anyone who visits the Musee Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren will see. It ill behoves any US neo-con to berate Belgians for their previous excesses – at least they acknowledge that their country was imperialist, something many Americans still fail to do.
In short, if Britain really does have to be ruled from elsewhere, then – much as I dislike the idea – it is difficult to think of a better place than Brussels. Auberon Waugh once wrote of his yearning to be governed by a junta of Belgian ticket inspectors. In his experience, UK politicians were “not only the wettest and most unpleasant, but the most incompetent politicians in Europe”; the more power that was taken away from Westminster and given to Brussels, “the better we shall all be”, he thought.
Waugh was by and large right. Buy a rail pass and meet the invariably polite, immaculately turned out and ultra-efficient ticket inspectors of the SNCB. Then spend some time with British MPs. No sane individual would have any hesitation in deciding by whom he’d prefer to be governed. If “being run by Brussels” really did mean being run by the ticket inspectors – or, indeed, the managers of the SNCB – then a strong case for surrendering at least some sovereignty could be made. But the trouble is that it doesn’t. Being “run by Brussels” means being governed by the usual gang of pompous, interfering politicos we are used to back home. Quel grand dommage.
Content from our partners
Related
