In June, the European Commission received a request from Brussels. The costs for the renovation of the central area that houses the European Union’s most important institutions, including the commission, were running over. With debt levels already dangerously high, the city was in desperate need of funds. To many readers, this might sound as if the European Union dispatched a request to itself.

Yet for inhabitants of the city — including me — the equation between the bloc and Brussels is anything but self-evident. Brussels, Belgium’s bilingual capital, is not just home to E.U. institutions, which employ around 50,000 people, usually in the same expat bubble. With a population of over 1.2 million, it also possesses its own large city government and has been, since 1989, one of the country’s three semiautonomous regions. For one of the most diverse cities in the world, around 45 percent of whose citizens are foreign born, this amounts to a decades-long experiment in self-rule.

That effort is now under serious strain. For over a year, Brussels has been without a working government. Signs of dysfunction — from rising homelessness to crumbling infrastructure — are accumulating, and a fiscal crisis not unlike New York City’s in the 1970s is on the horizon. Escalating drug violence has even led some to liken the city to crime-ridden Marseilles in France. Brussels, it seems, is nearing the end of its experiment in urban autonomy.

The significance of this eclipse goes beyond Belgium. As Western countries lurch further rightward, many liberals and progressives have cast their eyes on cities as potential fortresses against reaction. In Hungary the mayor of Budapest is a leading figure in the opposition to Viktor Orban’s regime, just as Warsaw’s mayor was the liberal standard-bearer in the recent presidential election in Poland.