Brussels
Accidental capital of Europe—Brussels hosts 120 international institutions and 2,500 diplomats, generating €14 billion in political output while its own residents earn less than the commuters who flood in daily.
Nobody planned for Brussels to become the capital of Europe—it happened by default, which is the most European thing imaginable. When six nations formed the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, they chose Luxembourg as a neutral, inoffensive base. But Luxembourg proved too small as integration deepened, and Brussels won the consolation prize: big enough to host institutions, small enough to threaten no one, positioned exactly between France, Germany, and Britain—the three countries whose rivalry had started two world wars.
The city's earlier history follows a familiar pattern of commercial advantage. Brussels grew wealthy in the medieval cloth trade, became the capital of the Spanish and then Austrian Netherlands, and was the site where Belgium's independence from the Netherlands was declared in 1830. The Société Générale de Belgique, established in 1822, made it a financial center before 'financial center' was a category. But the real transformation came after 1958, when the European Communities established headquarters in the Léopold Quarter. NATO relocated from Paris to Brussels in 1967, and the city accumulated institutions the way a reef accumulates coral.
Brussels now hosts 120 international organizations, 181 embassies, and over 2,500 diplomats—second only to New York in diplomatic density. The EU quarter alone contributes €14 billion annually, roughly 20% of the city's output, employing 162,000 people. More journalists work here than in Washington, D.C. The city has the highest GDP per capita in Belgium, yet paradoxically the lowest household income—because over half its workers commute in from Flanders and Wallonia, earning Brussels wages but spending them elsewhere.
This commuter paradox reveals Brussels's structural condition: it produces political output consumed by an entire continent, but its own residents often struggle with the costs of hosting that machinery. The EU has seized over half the city's office space, creating what critics call a 'bureaucratic monoculture'—a single institutional species dominating the ecosystem until the host city's own identity becomes secondary to its tenant's needs.