“It is nearly impossible to explain to an outsider, but Belgium is a country of six governments, Brussels a city with 19 mayors. These many administrative posts are not filled with competent people. “ “The lack of a strong, central authority ...”
“But the most important factor is Belgium’s culture of denial. The country’s political debate has been dominated by a complacent progressive elite who firmly believes society can be designed and planned. Observers who point to unpleasant truths such as the high incidence of crime among Moroccan youth and violent tendencies in radical Islam are accused of being propagandists of the extreme-right, and are subsequently ignored and ostracized.”
“The former Socialist mayor Philippe Moureax, who governed Molenbeek from 1992 to 2012 as his private fiefdom, perfected this culture of denial and is to a large extent responsible for the current state of affairs in the neighborhood.”
The decades-long uneasy standoff between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French speaking Walloons has made Belgium and, especially Brussels, a mess. Each community insists on being governed in its own way and Brussels, historically a French-speaking city in the midst of a Dutch-speaking countryside, has been a particularly thorny issue in Belgian politics. One compromise has been to divide power down to tiny districts and communities; as this NYT piece notes, 19 municipal zones are divided into six police “zones” cover a city of one million people. The result is that many parts of the capital are hardly policed at all. Meanwhile, despite the famously high social aspirations and exalted rhetoric about integration and opportunity that one hears from Europeans lavishly praising their social model, somehow generation after generation of immigrants stagnates in a toxic atmosphere of exclusion, unemployment, and crime.
Brussels’ failures are emblematic of Europe’s failings. The city that hopes to govern a post-national Europe has been made impotent by the petty jealousies and nasty rivalries of two ethnic groups barely large enough to qualify as tribes in much of the world. Brussels is in some ways a satire of the European project: committed to transnational goals, hobbled by unresolved ethnic spats. A city dedicated to universal secular human values is now threatened by fanatical death cults that have grown up in its miserable, insecure slums.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/11/22/the-city-of-the-whited-sepulchres/