When 150 Belgian companies descend on Atlanta next month, they’ll be seeing a part of the country that doesn’t come up on the radar for most.
But what they may not realize is what Belgian diplomats have noticed over time — that the South, and especially Georgia, has become a hotbed for Belgian investors in flooring, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, digital displays and many more sectors.
That critical mass helped Atlanta make the cut as one of three cities (along with better-known hubs Boston and New York) targeted by an economic mission led by Princess Astrid next month, bringing more a diverse coalition of 300 Belgians including C-level executives, university deans, regional ministers and startup innovators.
“It’s time that we have a second major wave of companies establishing themselves here,” Belgian Consul General Michel Gerebtzoff told Global Atlanta in a Consular Conversation interview in March. “I’m convinced, and my predecessor was as well, that here is a really good place for Belgian companies to be.”
The problem, if it can be called that, is that many of the more than 50 Belgian companies in Georgia arrived decades ago, often setting up factories in far-flung parts of the state. While the Belgian success story here has taken root among those in the know, it still has yet to be broadly circulated to those now eyeing a U.S. presence.
Mr. Gerebtzoff said that many firms look at New York or California, places that might be too expensive to break into or far away from their end customers. He credited former Belgian Ambassador Dirk Wouters, a frequent visitor to the Southeast U.S., for encouraging Belgians to “go have a look at Atlanta or Charlotte (N.C.) or Greenville (S.C.), those kinds of cities where we do have actually a very active relationship as well.” Former Consul General William De Baets also played a key role in raising the region’s profile in Belgium.
What’s different in this age is that while the South remains a growing manufacturing hub, Atlanta particularly is carving out a niche at the intersection of many future-oriented sectors, from tech to film and music.
“The fact that Atlanta is so strong in tech, but also so strong in cultural industries, broadly speaking, is similar to what we also have in in Belgium. And when you look at the composition of the delegation, a really, really high number of the companies coming are actually in this creative sector,” Mr. Gerebtzoff said.
The group will also include companies in biopharmaceuticals, fintech, agriculture, artificial intelligence, advanced logistics and other sectors where key “common points” exist with Georgia’s strengths, Mr. Gerebtzoff said. One unsung example of Belgian innovation at work in the South, is the Van Gogh Experience, an immersive digital exhibition of the Dutch painter’s work — all made possible with the projectors and 3D mapping tech from Belgian firms. Companies joining the delegation will include composers for video-game music, software for utilities and many others.
As a former forestry and water engineer who got his start in the private sector, Mr. Gerebtzoff sees an analogy in the way both Belgium and Georgia embrace diverse industrial ecosystems.
“I’m a bio engineer, and we know that the maximum level of diversity, richness is always at the border between two different environments,” he said. “I’m always looking at the borders of these things.”
The delegation’s itinerary is now trickling out, including visits to the local operations of Belgian companies UCB and Solvay, discussions on diversity with Atlanta business leaders and a dinner at the law firm of King & Spalding. A public supply-chain event with Flanders Minister-President Jan Jambon has just been released, one of the limited opportunities for engagement for those firms that have not yet been included in matchmaking meetings.
Engineers and Diplomats
Mr. Gerebtzoff is perhaps more fascinated than most diplomats about the inner workings of corporate innovators, given his unconventional path to the foreign service, one of his three “dream professions” as a young person.
He graduated from the Faculty of Agronomic Sciences in Gembloux, Belgium, reasoning that he could work backward from engineering into his other desired fields of diplomacy and education.
“So that’s what I did, and I’m quite happy because, indeed, being an engineer doesn’t close too many doors,” he told Global Atlanta.
At 30, Mr. Gerebtzoff achieved a second goal, passing the foreign service exam and getting past a panel of interviewers to become one of 15 newly minted diplomats selected out of a pool of 5,000 applicants.
“At the end, they said, ‘You know, you don’t have really the typical profile.’ At the same time, we in Belgium, we have a lot of atypical people for many reasons,” he said.
His background in highly technical fields that came up in the interview, from cybersecurity to energy policy, helped him outshine others who had a better command of politics or law, well-trodden pathways into diplomacy.
“People perceive us as being mostly communicators, but I do the job, and from 20 years of experience I’ve had as a diplomat, we’re actually really tech people also,” he said, noting the importance of attention to detail in tasks like crafting multilateral policy communiques and helping think through the logistical challenges of getting Belgian military materiel from the Port of Antwerp to Ukraine — a real-life scenario Mr. Gerebtzoff worked on long before Russia invaded the country in February.
Ukraine’s predicament has spilled over to Belgium in multiple ways, from the role of Brussels as a the host of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and as a venue for discussions on European Union action. As the headquarters for both, Belgium sits at the crossroads of multilateralism, a country of 10 million that Mr. Gerebtzoff argues has an outsized influence because of its role as convener.
“Belgium, being a country that’s not usually suspected of having a very strong personal or own agenda, we have always played this role of the place where people where countries people could come together,” he said.
Ironically, that has helped Belgium get a seat at many tables where it would not normally have been invited. “We are very well represented everywhere we need to be,” Mr. Gerebtzoff said.
Ukraine, Pandemic and Geopolitics
On the day of the Consular Conversation at Miller & Martin’s law offices in Atlanta, an extraordinary NATO summit was held to determine a course of action to respond to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. About a thousand new journalists were accredited to cover it, showing how the eyes of the world were trained on Brussels. While a unique occurrence, it was also business as usual for the city: the G7 summit was slated for later that week, where President Biden and other heads of state would make pronouncements affecting the future of many of the world’s largest economies.
“Really, I’m impressed by what has been accomplished since the beginning of the war, in terms of trans-Atlantic solidarity,” Mr. Gerebtzoff said, noting that the EU and NATO have awakened to the need for further funding of their militaries. “I do believe that one of the bets that Putin made was that the West would be too divided to really be able to put up a front to his offensive, and it hasn’t been the case.”
Europe has made gestures that have gone largely unseen but have been hugely impactful for fleeing Ukrainians seeking refuge — a huge burden for frontline border countries like Poland. At an EU level, fees for train tickets have been waived, and access has been provided to social security and citizen-like benefits.
Within Belgium, many private citizens have opened their doors to Ukrainian refugees, emboldened by government policies aimed at helping those among the 5 million fleeing Ukrainians that have settled there. The state has provided an insurance policy to those hosting refugees in an effort to encourage their generosity, while the education ministry has used lessons from pandemic-era remote learning to keep Ukrainian kids learning in their native language.
Mr. Gerebtzoff, a Russian speaker born in Switzerland to father who served as an official for the World Health Organization, tries to avoid getting sucked into the information “black hole” around the war, but he said it provides even more evidence, coming on top of a pandemic, that the world is more interconnected than ever — and should act that way, even amid a period of retrenchment in globalization.
Before coming to Atlanta, the consul general worked as deputy chief of staff in the Belgian foreign minister’s office, where he was on a body in charge of managing the international aspects of the country’s pandemic response. Very quickly, it became evident that Belgium — a multilateral hub and one of the world’s largest makers of vaccines — had to keep a mindset of engagement, despite the fact that its density and openness may have contributed to an early death rate from COVID-19 that was among the highest in the world.
“In the very first few days of the crisis, countries had the tendency to really close the borders and take all kinds of restrictive measures. It took not even a week before we reopened everything and we decided, ‘We’re not going to rush and let most powerful or the richest country get all jabs of the vaccine and the rest stay on the side. We’re going to have a system that allocates the the vaccinated the different countries’ — and we played this European card fully.”
Belgium never restricted exports of vaccines, a politically tough but economically necessary decision, and the result was that millions of doses ended up in the hands of the United States and later, in developing countries. Vaccines, biologics and other drugs make up about half of Belgium’s nearly $25 billion in exports to the U.S. in a given year.
Mr. Gerebtzoff enjoyed the challenge of pandemic management, but it was an all-consuming job, so he was excited to reach Atlanta and the South, where he expected to find natural beauty, personal hospitality and economic dynamism, but was a bit taken a back by the degree of racial separation the lack of public infrastructure for cycling and transportation.
Even in less than two years since his arrival in August 2020, the posting has reiterated that “we cannot just tend to our gardens” and that global issues have local impacts. For Belgium, with a population mirroring that of Georgia, the issue is always top of mind.
“It’s part of what we are; it’s really our DNA.”
