That the Paris terrorist attacks had strong links to a suburb of Brussels didn't shock many of us who live in the Belgian capital. Radio stations here in both French and Dutch are full of discussions about Molenbeek that elicit indignation, sorrow, anger, guilt, despair, defiance. But not surprise.

Friday’s attacks in Paris were but the latest in a litany of jihadist incidents over the last two years involving people with ties to Molenbeek, including the 2014 shooting at the Jewish museum in Brussels, the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January and the failed attack in August on a Thalys train.

The absence of surprise also makes sense because long before the emergence of jihadism, Molenbeek had acquired a reputation for lawlessness. Most people in Brussels have very little understanding of what such jihadism is and how it comes to link Brussels with Paris, Iraq and Syria, but they were already aware that Molenbeek had high levels of petty crime: muggings, drug dealing and burglaries.

It would suit some parts of the Belgian political establishment to keep the current agonizing at the level of Molenbeek — to blame, for example, the reign of Philippe Moureaux, the socialist mayor of Molenbeek from 1993-2012, an interior minister and justice minister in federal governments of the early 1980s. Or to fault certain mosques, as Prime Minister Charles Michel recently did.

But the more painful question that should be asked is: What do Molenbeek’s failures reveal about the deep dysfunction in the Belgian state? That Molenbeek has been allowed to become a breeding-ground for jihadism says some damning things about formal and informal structures in Belgium, and in particular Brussels.

Decades of failed reforms

What is remarkable about Molenbeek is the proximity of the poverty and lawlessness to the center of a European capital city, including the political and cultural institutions of the Brussels, Flemish and national governments. The sociologists tell us that the distribution of wealth in Brussels follows a pattern that is more commonly found in American cities — wealthy suburbs surrounding a hollowed-out center of poverty and blight. The European norm, exemplified by London and Paris, would have the most expensive and chic areas in the center.

Molenbeek fits the American pattern in that it is an area blighted by derelict industrial buildings and is on “the wrong side of the tracks,” which in this case means the wrong side of the canal that splits Brussels into east and west. But those on the other side of the world hearing about Molenbeek for the first time should dismiss all images of the South Bronx of the 1980s.

Molenbeek is, by comparison, tiny. It is one of the most densely populated parts of Brussels, but its population is only 95,000. And it is not that the entire borough is a no-go zone. The lawlessness problems are concentrated in much smaller areas.

All of which raises the question of why Molenbeek’s problems have been allowed to persist for so long. This is not a task on the same scale as reviving the South Bronx or redressing the industrial blight of Glasgow. The nearest parallel I can think of is Brixton, a London suburb, three miles south of Westminster. Blighted by wartime bomb damage, then home to large contingents of West Indian immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, it suffered race riots in the 1980s. But much of Brixton has been turned round, so why not Molenbeek?

The answers are an indictment of the Belgian political establishment and of successive reforms over the past 40 years.

Those failures are perhaps one part politics and government; one part police and justice; one part fiscal and economic. In combination they created the vacuum that is being exploited by jihadi terrorists.

Belgium has the trappings of western political structures, but in practice those structures are flawed and have long been so. The academics Kris Deschouwer and Lieven De Winter gave a succinct, authoritative account of the development of political corruption and clientelism in an essay published back in 1998 as part of the piquantly titled book “Où va la Belgique?” (Whither Belgium?)

Patronage and parochialism

Almost from the beginning, they explain, the state suffered problems of political legitimacy.

Belgium came late, by western European standards, to statehood. As in Italy, another latecomer, there were already existing allegiances to the locality, and although Belgium’s liberal elite threw off Dutch rule in 1830, it could neither uproot nor supplant these attachments to the local community, often intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church. So the formal structure of a Belgian state was erected but framing within it the cultural, social and welfare structures of the Church’s state within a state. That was followed in due course by the development of a socialist/labor movement with its rival structures for mutual assurance, cultural associations, newspapers. Ranged against the Christian Democrats and the socialists were the anti-clerical and middle-class liberals, who constituted the third corner in Belgium’s political triangle. They did not have the same popular support, nor the equivalent social structures.

Administrations were divided by their political allegiances. Politicians were masters of patronage.

In due course, the formal state developed its own services in, for example, education, health care and other expressions of a welfare state, but it was obliged to do so respecting (and indeed using) the structures of the political parties. Deschouwer and De Winter delineate how the political parties asserted control over jobs and funds in the public services, extending across a vast range of semi-public and quasi-autonomous organizations. (Political appointments ranged, they point out, from the caretaker of a publicly owned kindergarten to the chairman-CEO of Sabena, the now-defunct national airline.)

Administrations were divided by their political allegiances. Politicians were masters of patronage, with jobs and money at their disposal, and, as a consequence, public service suffered.

Although attempts at reforms were made, in many cases those reforms were not deep-rooted, but involved formalizing the division of spoils, for instance, to allocate control of certain jobs between different political parties.

Belgium’s linguistic differences — between Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north, and Wallonia, the French-speaking south, with a small German-speaking enclave in the southeast — added extra layers of complexity to public service, particularly in and around Brussels, which was eventually designated as a bilingual region. Parallel structures were created to cater for the different language groups.

Casualty of industrialization

Those linguistic tensions were exacerbated by an inversion in the distribution of Belgium’s economic strength. Belgium was the second European country (after Britain) to undergo a classic 19th century industrial revolution, founded on its coal, steel and railway industries and helped by the mineral riches of the Congo. But a post-war economic downturn for the coal and steel industries hit Wallonia hard.

It was those heavy industries that spurred the first waves of economic migration to Belgium. Belgium companies went to the Mediterranean basin — North Africa as well as Italy — to entice migrants to the coal mines and steelworks. The large Muslim population, including that in Molenbeek, has its origins in migration from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

However, the de-industrialization left areas of poverty and urban blight in what had been the country’s economic engine — the coal belt from Mons to Liège via Charleroi.

Those three cities can each provide its own examples of the tradition of political corruption. Abel Dubois became mayor of Mons in 1974. The previous year he had resigned from the national government in order, it later emerged, to prevent revelations of his involvement in a scandal over contracts with the national telephone operator, RTT. His wife and son ran a company with a monopoly contract with RTT and he was director of a company with contracts with RTT. He remained mayor until 1989.

Liège was another socialist stronghold. In the early 1990s, Belgium was rocked by the assassination of a Liégeois socialist politician, André Cools, who had been budget minister (1968-1971), a deputy prime minister (1969-1972), president of the Belgian socialists, Walloon minister of public works, and president of the Walloon parliament. Those convicted in 1994 of his assassination were Tunisians with links to the Italian mafia, but it was not until 2004 that convictions were secured of political rivals said to have ordered the killing. The investigation into the Cools assassination in turn brought to light corruption in the purchase by the Belgian state of helicopters from the Italian firm Agusta. A casualty of the Agusta-Dassault scandal was Willy Claes who was forced to resign as secretary-general of NATO.

In Charleroi, the socialists ruled unchallenged for more than 20 years until revelations in 2005 involving, inter alia, contracts for garbage collection and diversion of funds to sports clubs. Jean-Claude Van Cauwenberghe, who had long been head of the Charleroi socialists (like his father before him), was forced to step down as head of the Walloon regional government.

Fragmented law enforcement

It is important to understand that the politicization of appointments outlined by Deschouwer and De Winter extended to the police, the magistracy and the courts.

Until the latest wave of jihadism, the low point for Belgium’s international reputation was the affair of Marc Dutroux, a serial abductor and murderer of young girls. After his eventual arrest in 1996, the various revelations of police and judicial mistakes gave rise to allegations of political interference to protect him. Those allegations were never substantiated, but they are symptomatic of the distrust created by the politicization of the police and judiciary. Suspicions were reignited when in 1998 Dutroux escaped from a courtroom and briefly went on the run. The then-interior minister and justice minister resigned.

The Dutroux affair highlighted the fragmentation of police and court work in Belgium. Although reforms were made, the consolidation has been limited.

In a country where all politics is local, politicians are reluctant to give up their patronage by merging resources. For instance, Brussels has 19 communes, or boroughs, which range in population from 20,000 to 150,000. Each commune had its own police force. Although they have been now consolidated into six, that is still a logistical nonsense in a city of only 1.4 million. It still means that the commune police are perceived as a local provider of jobs for the low-skilled. Occasional brushes with such police do not inspire confidence.

Two years ago, a joyrider smashed a “borrowed” car outside my home, wedging it between my parked car and another on the other side of the street. He ran off, having struck a neighbor. When the owner of the joyrider’s car arrived, a policeman seriously suggested to me that I could fill out a mutually agreed insurance claim form with this owner, so saving the police the trouble of the paperwork.

Thankfully, not all police officers are of such poor quality. There are highly skilled police in specialist teams further up the food chain, but effective policing relies on a solid local foundation, which would need better resources and training.

But what is also apparently missing is a commitment to enforce.

Newcomers to Brussels are often struck by how widely the traffic rules are flouted. (I recall sitting on a late-night bus and counting the number of cars with a missing tail light, but readily concede that the general disregard for one-way signs is probably more dangerous.) This culture of disregard for the law is much more pronounced than in neighboring France, the Netherlands and Germany. In a society where some people consider themselves to have political protection (formal or informal) from the law, disrespect for that law spreads.

This is not to deny that there have been some improvements. Belgian passports have long been prized by criminals because they give easy access not just to the Schengen zone, but to the many countries with which Belgium had visa-waiver agreements. In 1998, Belgium belatedly decided to centralize the production of passports, which had previously been a responsibility for each of the then 520 town halls. Before that, those wishing to forge passports needed only to break into some local town hall to steal blank passports.

There have been attempts too at judicial reform. Although these have probably made the judiciary more independent, it is hard to see a significant improvement in the pace of legal process. It was eight years from the arrest of Dutroux to his conviction in 2004. Those who ordered the murder of André Cools were not convicted until 2012. The Charleroi corruption cases that broke in 2005 entered another phase in the courts this week.

There have also been improvements in the collection and administration of taxes, with the finance ministry making a massive investment for tax returns to be filed online. But that masks deeper structural problems with Belgium’s taxation. The taxes (including social security) on labor have been so high that they encouraged evasion and the development of a sizeable black economy. This black economy is in some ways attractive to those excluded from the formal economy — newly arrived illegal immigrants, for example — but they remain on the margins and are not integrated.

By contrast, the Belgian fiscal set-up taxes lightly those who already have wealth (hence the enclaves in wealthy parts of Brussels of fiscal migrants from Paris), so that the gap between rich and poor is accentuated. Belgium is, per capita, a wealthy country, but has contrived to achieve a situation in which the employed population feels heavily taxed and doubts the quality of public services that it receives in return. Having too narrow a tax base, the Belgian state is poorly equipped to address the few pockets of desperate poverty, such as Molenbeek.

Brussels-Flanders divide

Even if it had the means, the federal state would struggle to find the instruments to distribute and spend the money effectively. Transfers of money across the regions and linguistic boundaries are hard to achieve. The contrast between the dirty and pot-holed streets of Brussels on the one hand and the cleanliness and order of most small Flemish towns is stark. While Brussels provides the services and infrastructure for thousands of people who work in Brussels but commute from Flanders, it must do so with taxes levied in Brussels. And while the city has become the de facto capital of Europe, home of the EU institutions, NATO, and various other international organizations, Brussels airport is across the regional border in Flanders.

So while Interior Minister Jan Jambon has vowed to clean up Molenbeek, the state structures are aligned against him. He needs the cooperation of the Brussels region and of the French-speaking community to address, for instance, employment agencies and schools. But Jambon is from the Flemish nationalist party N-VA, which has hardly any political capital in Brussels. Brussels is the capital of Flanders, but its population is by and large majority French-speaking. So Jambon’s declaration is viewed with suspicion and in some cases hostility by the Francophone establishment in Brussels.

Almost every general election and subsequent negotiation of a coalition federal government brings another round of devolving powers to its regions.

In virtually every other European country, the fight against terrorism involves greater centralization of power, people and money. Combating terrorism, particularly in the Internet age, involves specialist teams of individuals, whether military, police, secret service, or civilian. It involves specialist equipment, particularly for surveillance and intelligence-gathering, and it involves sharing information across national borders. Actually, that trend to greater centralization and specialization is not peculiar to the fight against terrorism. It is also frequently found, for instance, in healthcare, education and research.

But Belgium, in thrall to its linguistic politics, is moving in the opposite direction. Almost every general election and subsequent negotiation of a coalition federal government brings another round of devolving powers to its regions, ranging now to the most banal of subjects — such as, to cite a recent example, the recognition of foreigners’ professional qualifications.

It was revealed after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January that the Belgian secret service had a shortfall of 150 intelligence officers on a desired complement of 750 (so few!). This week it was disclosed that 42 people had been recruited, but their training would take another two years. The consequences of that understaffing are dribbling out, with further disclosures about information on the Paris attackers that was not passed on or pulled together.

This failure to connect is a feature of the Belgian state. The machinery that elsewhere would link local, regional and national is not joined up. To a large extent, the political class has come to terms with these dysfunctionalities, accepting them as a price that has to be paid for various linguistic and factional divisions.

For outsiders, it should be admitted, this is part of what makes Belgium an easy place in which to live. The state, by and large, is unassertive. People can get by, perhaps relying on informal support structures. For the most part, they do not need the law.

But as events last Friday night in Paris showed, the rest of Europe must pay a price for Belgium’s failures.

Tim King writes POLITICO's Brussels Sketch.