During the "Call Brussels" campaign, 12,688 phone calls were placed from 154 countries. | EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images Belgium’s charm defensive The embattled nation launches an international effort to undo the damage from the Paris terrorist attacks.

Brussels wants the world to know it is not a terror capital.

Belgium has launched an international effort to undo damage done by revelations about its citizens’ links to terror attacks in Europe and criticism of successive governments’ seeming inability to do anything about the problem.

Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo will make the case for Belgium as a good place to live and do business with a speech Thursday to global opinion leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. His presentation is part of a lobbying campaign by top politicians, tourism officials, business leaders and even the royal family to try to dispel the notion that Brussels — the self-styled “capital of the European Union” — is a haven for terrorists.

“We are here to emphasize what we’re good at, we’re not here to point the finger at others,” De Croo told POLITICO by phone from the Swiss ski resort. “Out of my speech it will be quite clear that there’s no doubt that Belgium is an important economic location and we’re unleashing our economic potential.”

The November 13 attacks in Paris attracted worldwide negative publicity to Belgium after it emerged several Belgian nationals were involved in carrying them out, as well as to Brussels, where some of the perpetrators were part of a terrorist cell. Belgium even came under fire from France, whose President François Hollande hinted that the plan for the attacks, in which 130 people were killed, was hatched from outside his own country's borders.

More damage was done by a four-day lockdown of the Belgian capital, which had been placed at the country’s highest terror threat level for several days in late November. The decision to close schools and public transport and cancel public events was a blow to local businesses but perhaps more importantly to the city’s image. News reports showed empty streets being patrolled by soldiers and armored vehicles.

The security situation in Belgium is actually good — Alexander De Croo

As soon as the terror threat was lowered and business returned to normal, Brussels set out to repair the damage with a public-relations blitz aimed at tourists and investors.

Following an advertising campaign by the Brussels tourism board last week — an interactive online campaign that allowed potential visitors to ask locals about safety in the city — De Croo will reframe the lockdown as a success rather than an overreaction by the government to a threat that severely hurt businesses and the capital’s reputation.

In the coming weeks, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel will follow De Croo’s Davos sales pitch with an international tour on which he plans to fight back against the caricature that Brussels is the jihadi capital of Europe.

France’s ‘scapegoat’

The Davos presentation is seen as an important moment for Belgium’s new PR push. It was originally supposed to have been given by Michel, who had to cancel at the last minute because his partner was due to give birth.

Restoring faith in the city is crucial, officials say: According to statistics released by a leading business association earlier this month, the lockdown cost Belgium €350 million — 0.1 percent of gross domestic product in the fourth quarter — with the capital suffering more than half of the losses.

De Croo will use the annual “Belgian power breakfast” in Davos to make the case that it’s easy to do business in Belgium, and to calm fears about the country’s security climate.

“We have taken the necessary security measures and they’ve been very effective up to now. The security situation in Belgium is actually good,” De Croo said. “There’s no doubt about Belgium as a prime place to invest.”

“It’s not a question of apologizing for what happened. It’s a question of reframing, of putting the caricature in the right perspective — Cabinet official

According to a cabinet official, the deputy prime minister is ready to respond to criticism about how Belgian authorities handled the lockdown in November.

De Croo’s “line of defense,” as the official described it, will play up the number of house searches authorities conducted during that period and counter the perception that the government overreacted by deploying the army, saying it addressed a real and imminent threat.

“It’s not a question of apologizing for what happened,” said the cabinet official. “It’s a question of reframing, of putting the caricature in the right perspective.”

De Croo will also try to counter the narrative that Belgium didn’t do enough to prevent terrorist activity in the nation’s capital before the attacks in Paris.

“After the attacks in Paris, Belgium became the scapegoat, but for example with the attack at the Jewish museum [in Brussels in 2014], the man was from Paris and four people were killed, but we didn’t point the finger at France,” the cabinet official said. “There was sort of a game after the François Hollande speech that Belgium was the problem.”

Reassuring investors that Belgium has a plan for dealing with terrorism is a top priority. Since the Paris attacks, the country has adopted 18 new security measures and invested €400 million in intelligence services. This includes increasing the detention time for terror suspects from 24 hours to 72, withdrawing passports and identity cards for jihadists, fighting radicalization in prison, beefing up security along the border, and increasing use of intelligence tools such as voice recognition and wire-tapping.

The Belgian PR effort got underway earlier this month in a series of speeches and interviews by Michel in the Anglophone media, and will continue after Davos with international tours and interviews, the official said.

Flemish Minister-President Geert Bourgeois will also speak at the breakfast, which will be attended by Belgian King Philippe and Queen Mathilde. The royal couple will also hold private meetings with potential investors in Davos.

Enlisting citizens

Following a sharp decline in tourism in Brussels after the terror threats, the regional tourism board Visit Brussels approved a €500,000 ad campaign to boost the local economy.

“They said they wanted to show that they’re doing something,” said Eric Hollander, founder of Air, the Brussels-based ad agency that won the government’s bid to create the campaign. “The message was clear: ‘You have to help us very quickly, the numbers are not good.’”

International callers who dialed in from their computers could watch the activity at the phone booths via cameras at the scene.

With little strategic direction from the government, the agency pitched a “Call Brussels" campaign that would encourage locals to defend Brussels as a safe city to potential tourists by answering phone calls in booths planted around the city.

There was a rush to complete the project in time to counter the tourism slump over the holiday period, but the highest terror alert level held back the launch. The annual New Years' fireworks celebration was canceled because law enforcement authorities said they had information about a plot to attack the city.

The telephones were installed for five days in three neighborhoods in Brussels — including Molenbeek, the now-infamous neighborhood where several of the Paris attackers lived. International callers who dialed in from their computers could watch the activity at the phone booths via cameras at the scene.

While there’s no assessment yet of the campaign’s impact on tourism, it was seen as a success in terms of reach, with 12,688 calls made to the booths from 154 countries, and nearly 10 million social media impressions.

“It’s an honest campaign, we’re showing nothing but the truth,” said campaign creative director Dieter De Ridder, referring to the uncontrolled campaign in which unscripted Brussels residents would hopefully carry their message. “It shows that they’re defending their own city.”

More than 30,000 people have viewed a documentary on the activity at the booths, which was meant to show Brussels as a bustling city.

The campaign to improve Belgium’s image even filtered to the hyper-local level, with Molenbeek encouraging residents to nominate a “Citizen of the Year.”