There are moments when a nation seems to drift, slowly and imperceptibly, into breakdown. Like Mike Campbell in Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, Belgium has done it “gradually, then suddenly.” The country, once the heart of Europe’s industrial miracle and the quiet administrative seat of the EU, is in big trouble. If Brussels once wished to become the Eurocrats’ Rome, an imperial capital of the new, boring, technocratic imperium that is the Union, the country has, instead, faced a storm of genuinely Gibbonian decay. In Belgium, one senses a fatigue that is deeper than political scandal or economic stagnation. It is the fatigue of a state that no longer quite believes it can govern itself.
