In Europe

panelling of the passengers’ waiting room, the friendly, one-toothed woman at the sweet shop, all will be steamrollered away for good.
    Brussels is the capital of Europe, the city is officially bilingual, but anyone who thinks this creates a cosmopolitan climate is sadly mistaken. At my hotel, the only person who speaks a word of English is the African chambermaid. More than three decades after the end of the Belgian language struggle, the lingua franca in the great majority of shops is French, and most of the city's inhabitants – with the arrogance of provincial dignitaries – will speak nothing else.
    An experiment for the visitor: try, in this officially bilingual city, to speak your own language. You will be looked at like a madman. During my travels I had carried out some fieldwork-by-the-square-inch into theextent to which Europeans understand each other, a not unimportant factor for those who hope one day to form a single continental community. How many passers-by did I have to approach before finding someone who spoke a language other than their own? Lisbon, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Helsinki received excellent scores: one or two at most. Rome and Berlin: three. Paris: four (an increasing number of young French people like to speak English). Madrid and St Petersburg: six to eight. London: the same (although German is on the rise in business circles).
    The bilingual capital of Europe had an interestingly low score: three to four. And between Brussels and the rest there was another essential difference: everywhere else, despite the difficulties, there is a strong will to understand each other. But not in Brussels. This city is still dominated by a considerable reticence with regard to the phenomenon of language.
    Belgium is a special country. In the 1950s it survived a language dispute that would have plunged almost any other European country into civil war. Afterwards, Belgium was divided
de jure
. For the outside world the country has remained unified, a tiny nation that manoeuvres skilfully around the great fault lines between Northern and Southern Europe. And, as far as that goes, Brussels resembles Odessa: precisely because of their problematic position, the Belgians have thought harder and longer about the national and cultural borders that still separate Europeans. But this has done nothing to heal old wounds; on the contrary, they have, if anything, become deeper. Despite outward appearances, Belgium is caught up in a never-ending process of disintegration.
    In
Poor Brussels
, his wonderful book about the city, urban chronicler Geert van Istendael describes the true tolerance of Brussels on the basis of the daily greeting he receives from his neighbour: ‘He raises his hand, smiles politely and says: “Hello! How are you?” But in fact that's not quite how he says it. It sounds more like: “Allo! Awa you?”, because my neighbour is not only polite, he is also French-speaking. The Dutch-speaking van Istendael always returns his greeting with equal politeness: “
Bonjour! Ça va?
”’
    That is how Europeans from different cultural regions everywhere should deal with each other, but that is not how it goes. I take a little side trip to Sint-Joris-Weert, a red-brick village close to Leuven with adrowsy café, an agency for
Het Nieuws
and a set of railway tracks running right down the main street. ‘If you want to see the real language border, go and look there,’ van Istendael had said. Or, as the local baker's wife explained: here it's Flemish, on the other side of the railway bridge, in Nethen, it's French. Communication in her own shop, at least for the Walloons, is by means of mumbling and sign language. On Roodsestraat, the border actually runs down the middle of the street. I go to take a look: that means the red villa on the left speaks Flemish, the white cottage across the street speaks French, the curly kale in the garden on the right is Flemish, the willows across the way weep in French.
    There is, to the naked eye, nothing remarkable about Roodsestraat. Yet it is part of the most important line of demarcation between NorthWestern and Southern Europe. ‘The language border here is centuries old, razor sharp and absolute,’ van Istendael said. On the Flemish side there are Dutch books on the shelves, the people watch the Dutch comedians Van Kooten en De Bie on television and the Flemish and Dutch news, films and political discussions. Their neighbours, eleven paces across the way,