Why I’m still bullish

IF London is Europe’s New York, Brussels is our Washington, D.C., a small city made globally important by the political institutions centred here, and at the same time, and perhaps for that reason, often unloved by the people who pass through it. In the eyes of jaded Western travellers it is boring, so clogged with international bureaucracy that it has no soul.

They’re wrong. True, Brussels is not dominated by a single, long standing and widely appealing national culture, like Rome, Paris or Berlin. But that absence has been filled with a vibrant international cosmopolitanism that allows all cultures to feel at home in its diverse array of ethnic restaurants, neighbourhoods and assorted entertainments.