185 years of Belgian security service

摘要

One of the oldest domestic intelligence agencies in continuous existence is Belgium's civil security service, the Veiligheid van de Staat or Surete de I'Etat (vsse). On the occasion of its 185th anniversary, this article will investigate how Belgium's history has shaped the development of this agency (and vice versa) and explore the issues it had to deal with when the country's capital, Brussels, became the seat of the European Union and headquarters of nato. It will be argued that because of disruptive events in the 1980s, both internal and external for the domestic intelligence service, Belgium started becoming a 'protective state' since the early nineties and is still working on its improvement.