Goodbye Brussels

By Charlemagne

IT has been 17 years since I first set foot in Brussels, arriving for a half-year internship at the European Commission. Back then, there was a faintly provisional feel to the European project. The European Parliament had rather few powers and worked out of a borrowed building in Strasbourg normally used by the Council of Europe. The Berlaymont building, headquarters of the European Commission, was an asbestos-ridden ghost, closed off and hidden within a shroud of plastic sheeting and scaffolding. The single currency was still years away. There was a theoretical European Currency Unit (a basket of real currencies) and it seemed like a quaint joke that bar prices at the Nouvelle Rotonde, a commission coffee shop, were listed in ECUs as well as Belgian francs. If memory serves me, the only thing that cost exactly one ECU was a draft Belgian beer. Brussels itself was shabby, grey and somehow provincial and exotic all at the same time. From its clanking yellow trams to its ramshackle clubs and semi-legal bars, I liked it very much.