Fifteen years of Belgitude

On 1 March I celebrated 15 years in Brussels. Well, celebrated is perhaps the wrong word. You usually celebrate anniversaries of things you yearned for or dreamed of. Unlike Norway or the Czech Republic, the two countries I lived in before coming here, I never dreamed about spending a large chunk of my life in Belgium. It just happened. Like many people, I came here for six months and stayed for much longer – more by accident than design.

This is not to deny Brussels’ charms. It has great parks, restaurants, bars and museums. Its schools and hospitals put Britain’s to shame. It is the cheapest capital to rent or buy property in the EU. And with over half its population foreign or foreign-born, it is more cosmopolitan than Paris or London.

It is a slightly chaotic and dishevelled city but also quirky, unpretentious and bristling with nervous energy – as befits a town lying on the tectonic plates between Wallonia and Flanders and north and south Europe. Brussels is also the laboratory for one of the most unique experiments in world history – the EU. With the exception of Berlin it is difficult to think of a major European city that has been at the centre of more political change than Brussels over the last decade or so.

So if the Belgian capital is so liveable and so interesting, why do so many expats – like this one - spend so much of their time moaning about it, wishing they were somewhere else and plotting their escape route out of here? Lousy weather, barmy bureaucracy, poor urban planning and a service culture that assumes the customer is always wrong provide part of the answer. Many officials, diplomats, lobbyists and journalists also resent the fact that they are forced to reside in Belgium because the EU and NATO happen to be situated here. They live here in spite of Brussels, not because of it.

But there is a deeper reason for the itchiness felt be so many long-term expats. They have abandoned their home countries but feel little attachment to their adopted land – unless they have married a local or live outside the EU bubble. So they become foreigners at home and abroad, condemned to a life of rootlessness, overpriced Guardian newspapers, tacky Irish pubs, leaving parties and political disenfranchisement.

I know all too well about the final point. On 1 March, I lost my right to vote in Britain because I have been outside the country for 15 years. That means I cannot vote in national elections in Britain or Belgium – despite being a citizen of the former country and paying my taxes in the latter. My most fundamental democratic right has been taken away from me – not because I committed a heinous crime or rejected the country of my birth – but because I opted to settle in another EU state.

This raises some pretty profound questions about belonging and identity. If I clearly no longer ‘belong’ in Britain, shouldn’t I accept Belgium as my foster country?

When I tell Belgian friends I have been living in their country for 15 years they often say: “Alors, tu es presque belge?” I laugh and chirp “How can I be something that doesn’t exist?” But deep in my heart I know that even after 15 years here I am not even one percent Belgian. Welsh? Definitely. British? Reluctantly. European? Probably. But Belgian? Impossible.

Marmite, marmalade, prawn cocktail flavour crisps, cricket, snooker and darts, patient queuing, embarrassed silences, sodden moors, slow trains, windswept beaches, drunken girls in mini-skirts, terraced houses, pasty faces, Wimbledon, Bruce Forsyth and the theme tune to Ski Sunday. That is Britain. That I can relate to. That made me who I am.

Ostend beach, snails and eels, King Albert, La Brabanconne, lace curtains, the Vlaams Belang, madame pipi, waffles, kissing men’s cheeks, carnaval, FC Brugge, Zwarte Piet, priority to the right and gingerbread biscuits. That I can’t relate to.

Luckily, Belgium is a country – unlike proud France or Britain - that wears its national traits lightly. This is, after all, a country where the prime minister-in-waiting, Yves Leterme, confused the French national anthem with the Belgian one and where a love of football, chocolates and the royal family are virtually the only things Flemings and Walloons have in common.

With the state reduced to little more than a shell by decades of decentralisation, individuals are left greater room to forge their own identity. This is even more true of Brussels, where even the natives are in a minority. When the majority are outsiders it is hard for one group to lord it over another. Welcome to the world’s first post-modern country and Europe’s truly international city.

With time, globalisation and closer EU integration, the whole issue of national identity becomes less and less important. If my neighbours are Swedish and Scottish, my friends are Dutch and Slovak, my girlfriend is French, my kids speak a jumbled mix of English and French and I can get the BBC on my TV and Marmite in my local supermarket, is it any wonder I feel detached from the country I live in? And if eat Italian food, drink Belgian beer, read Czech novels and holiday in Spain, can’t vote in my homeland and have difficulties driving on the left, converting miles into kilometres and drinking five pints of warm beer in one sitting, is it any wonder I feel detached from the country I come from?