Can Northern Ireland learn anything from Belgium?

I have to admit, I know very little about Belgium. When I lived in London, I used to ask friends if they could name the Prime Minister of Belgium, but only if they were complaining about how parochial and uninformed many Americans are about their closest neighbours and allies. In fairness, most Belgians couldn’t have named their PM either a few years ago, when it took 541 days to form a post-election government, and the highly decentralised federal constitutional monarchy seemed to get along just fine without them.

I became much more aware of cultural differences when my firm was asked to advise a Belgian semi-state corporation on creating online ventures. We were told not to call between 11 and 3 because that was the window for their two-hour lunch breaks. Food mattered. A lot. A workshop we hosted in London had gone well, or so we thought, except for one thing: the sandwiches. We had gone to the trouble of ordering in, but apparently curried chicken on soggy white bread wasn’t good enough. I had to call the client to apologise. When I travelled to Brussels for a follow-up meeting, a local partner suggested we work on some slides over dinner the night before. He ordered a kilo of sushi and a litre of saki. We barely wrote one slide. The next day we had been talking with the client for an hour when they suggested breaking for a working lunch – a four-course meal with several different types of wine. After an hour they switched to French as I started sliding under the table, before they bundled me onto the train back home.

Formed out of Catholic territories of the Habsburg monarchy, unlike Northern Ireland, Belgium is divided more by language than religion, with Dutch-speaking Flemish to the north in Flanders and French-speaking Walloons to the south. Stuck between France, Germany and the Netherlands, it was ravaged in both World War One and World War Two. Internal tensions led the post-war Belgian government to devolve as much power as possible to regional authorities. The bitter experience of conflict led them to integrate as much as possible with their neighbours, pooling sovereignty in the  Benelux Customs Union, the ECSC, the EEC and finally the European Union.

Belgium works. Kind of. It was the last country to nominate an EU Commissioner a few days ago because of machinations in the formation of yet another dysfunctional multi-party coalition government following federal elections in June. Yet for those who aspire to making the status quo as palatable as possible for all the citizens of Northern Ireland, it offers an important example of how to minimise conflict in a divided society. Deepening collaboration and cross-border links with all of their neighbours has increased peace, prosperity and stability.

In Ireland, partition cut economic ties between border towns and their natural hinterlands, as well as restricting access to all-island capital. For those who want to make Northern Ireland work, links with the booming southern economy should be a top priority. Collaborating on infrastructure, on enterprise policy, on healthcare centres of excellence, and on world-class technical education should boost productivity and incomes. Learning from the successes and failures of the southern government should help to reduce appalling school dropout rates. Enabling secondary students from north and south to attend third level colleges on the island more easily will reduce the brain drain to Great Britain. Provided the outworking of the Windsor Framework leads to relatively seamless trade East-West as well as Noth-South, no-one should see economic growth fueled by increasing cross-border integration as anything other than an opportunity.

Éamonn Toland read Modern History and Economics at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Pursuit of Kindness, From Collaboration to Cruelty and Back Again: An Evolutionary History of Human Nature. He can be reached on Twitter @eamonntoland.