Belgium at the heart of Europe

The Kingdom of Belgium enjoys a unique geographical location. Ten million people live and work in a land bounded on one side by the gray sandy beaches and dunes of the North Sea and on the other side by the richly forested hills of the Ardennes.

Almost 9 percent of the Belgian population have non-Belgian nationality. A small country with open borders, committed to the free movement of people, goods and services, whose intensive economic activity is developing both within Western Europe and globally, clearly experiences and facilitates many migratory flows.

Belgium has had a commercial tradition for a very long time. Its small size has forced it to be open to the world, to the extent that it is among the countries with the highest amount of exports and imports per inhabitant in the world.

The industrial sector now represents just over one-quarter of all jobs and about 30 percent of added value. Its structure and its location reflect the legacy of the past and also recent changes, which have been particularly significant since the end of the 1950s.

Belgium is situated at the heart of Europe. This is an obvious statement, but it is impossible to avoid stressing the importance of its central geographical position among the most important countries of Western Europe. At the risk of sounding paradoxical, one might say that Belgium was already fulfilling a kind of "European" function, before it even became "Belgian".

Belgians are deeply aware of their history. It is more than a mere visual awareness of the charming countryside of their land with its historical cities, cathedrals, belfries and narrow medieval streets. Nothing of what Belgium is today -- a little corner of Europe which is one of the 10 most prosperous countries in the world, where an incredible variety of people and ideas pass through -- can be explained without understanding the past, the roots of the people and the development of the three languages, cultures and social and political temperaments which grew up on Belgian soil.

The recent federalist development in Belgium did not happen by chance. This lead to a search for the roots and traditions within which each Community will find its own reference system. As frontiers become blurred, looking back through the generations to the past enables us to grasp a tradition which guarantees the future.