Each community insists on being governed in its own way and Brussels, historically a French-speaking city in the midst of a Dutch-speaking countryside, has been a particularly thorny issue in Belgian politics. One compromise has been to divide power down to tiny districts and communities; as this NYT piece notes, 19 municipal zones are divided into six police ‘zones’ cover a city of one million people. The result is that many parts of the capital are hardly policed at all. Meanwhile, despite the famously high social aspirations and exalted rhetoric about integration and opportunity that one hears from Europeans lavishly praising their social model, somehow generation after generation of immigrants stagnates in a toxic atmosphere of exclusion, unemployment, and crime.

Source: The City of the Whited Sepulchres – The American Interest