What role for residents in Brussels’s development?

Holding to account those who make decisions on the future of the EU.

One of the themes running through the conference was the difficulty in holding to account those who make decisions on the future of the EU in Brussels.

The debate on possible development at Delta brought into the open the disjunctures in thinking between the local communes and the regional government – gaps which the European Commission is happy to exploit. The current difficulties of the federal government, which has been in limbo since elections last June, have made things worse for the region, particularly because of uncertainty about future financing.

Complex system

Isabelle Durant, a Belgian MEP who was previously a federal minister for transport, admitted that the Belgian system was very complex and Tim King, the editor of European Voice, said that both Belgium and the EU were systems that had made a virtue of complexity and set very little value on transparency. He argued that greater democracy and transparency made, in the long term, for better urban development.

But François Tulkens, a partner in the law firm NautaDutilh, set out some of the difficulties in achieving greater democracy. He argued that EU citizens who were not Belgian nationals should be given the vote in regional government elections, in addition to having (since 2000) the right to vote in communal elections. But he admitted that such an innovation would take an EU treaty change or a change to Belgium’s constitution.

Building local relations

Daniel Jacob, a deputy director-general in the European Commission, argued that such a change was most unlikely to happen soon, given that the Belgian government had other preoccupations. Delphine Bourgeois, a local councillor, or échevin, in the Ixelles commune, who has responsibility for relations with the EU institutions, extolled the virtue of building greater co-operations between the local communities and EU bodies.

That theme was taken up by Alain Deneef, the president of the European Quarter Fund, who argued specifically for co-operation between European civil servants and Brussels residents on continuing education projects and on developing civic spaces in and around the European quarter to hold meetings and joint activities. Without shared civic life, he argued, many in the EU community would continue to live apart from their fellow Brussels residents.

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