Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union

In connection with Belgium’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Belgian State Archives will be organising an exhibition about the establishment of the European Institutions in Brussels. The Belgian State Archives (including the Archive of the Royal Palace) itself has various rich archive stocks that illustrate this subject and is also undertaking complementary research in other archive bodies and documentation centres.

Brussels has become a world city in politics. Though there is no European constitution specifying Brussels as Europe’s capital, since the Treaties of Rome (1957), the city has, over the years, grown to occupy this role in practice. Today, Brussels is Europe’s most important decision-making centre, and its international position is further strengthened by the presence of a number of European and international organisations and bodies that revolve around this European power centre like satellites.

In the list of political world cities, Brussels belongs in the global top three, alongside Washington and Geneva. This position is the result of a long process of international political centre-building and metropolitanisation. The efforts to put Brussels on the map as an international centre actually go much further back than the European integration process post-1945.

During the 19th century, the city publicised itself as the ‘crossroads of cultures’ in Europe, and its function as an international centre was actively promoted by Belgian intellectuals, opinion-formers, publicists and politicians. Many Belgians played a part in the internationalist movement. These international ambitions were thus clearly not purely derived from the Belgian Government or Brussels City Council. And, in the years before World War I, the city’s ambitions were not just European, they were global and worldwide. 

These actors, though, left their traces in archives and other historic sources. The aim of the exhibition is to provide an overview of the growth of Brussels as an international centre, European capital and political world city based on archives and sources that have been kept in the State Archives or elsewhere. Who today remembers that, even before 1914, there were those who were campaigning for Brussels to actually be made a federal world district? Or how astonished Belgian public opinion and politicians were when Geneva, rather than Brussels, was selected to be the seat of the League of Nations in 1919?

The story of Brussels becoming the European capital will be represented via four major themes: 

1. The campaigns for Brussels as a world centre (1899-1914)
2. Brussels angles for the seat of the League of Nations and re-launches the federal world district (1918-1920)
3. Between surrealism and pragmatism: the laborious growth of Brussels as the European capital (1944-1992)
4. The European Union in Brussels today