What distinguishes Brussels, as a target and a base for terrorists, has more to do with the limits of Belgium as a functioning state, a problem exacerbated by the limits of the EU as a cohesive political body.

Belgium is a federation of three regions—Brussels-Capital, Flanders, and Wallonia—that are nearly as disparate as the Balkans without the ethnic hatred. Yet they are still imbued with secessionist sentiments, bolstered by differences in language: in Belgium’s case, French, Dutch, and German.

The country has three separate parliaments and two distinct intelligence services—the civilian State Security Service and the military General Intelligence and Security Service—which meddle in each other’s affairs as little as possible. The federal police force, which also has intelligence functions (though is not considered an intelligence agency), reports to the interior minister, a Flemish nationalist named Jan Jambon, who, as the New York Times reported late last year, “has doubts about whether Belgium … should even exist as a single state.”

More than this, the State Security Service is unable to collect its own foreign intelligence, “except,” as one analyst of Belgian security politics notes, “where acquired through partner organizations.” One such partner organization could have been French intelligence, which pledged cooperation in the wake of the Paris attacks, but the project crawled much too sluggishly into being, and even then only in the form of lip service.