For most of its history the ministry lived on the Rue Quatre Bras in central Brussels. In 1997, it moved a few blocks south to the Rue des Petits Carmes, into the building that still houses it today, just south of the Place du Petit Sablon. The move came with a reorganization. Cold War-era priorities like trade and bilateral relations were no longer enough. The new structure made room for thematic directorates: human rights, arms control, scientific affairs, environmental policy. Three years later, in 2000, the Copernicus Reform changed every Belgian ministry's name. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs became the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation. The secretary-general became a chairman of the executive committee. The change was mostly cosmetic, but it reflected something genuine: in a federal Belgium where the regions and communities now had their own foreign policy competencies, the federal foreign ministry had become a coordinator as much as an actor.

Twice in the twentieth century the entire ministry packed up and moved abroad. During the First World War, when Germany occupied most of Belgium, the foreign ministry operated out of Sainte-Adresse — a coastal suburb of Le Havre in Normandy — from 1914 to 1918. During the Second World War, the ministry relocated to London from 1940 to 1945, joining the other governments-in-exile that filled Allied capitals. Each time it came home to a Brussels that had been changed by the war, and each time it returned to a country whose place in the world had shifted. After 1945, that shift accelerated. European integration became a Belgian priority because a small, trade-dependent country between France and Germany had every interest in turning the continent into a cooperative project. Multilateralism became a calling card. Belgian diplomats helped negotiate the Ottawa Treaty banning landmines in 1997 and the Oslo Convention on cluster munitions in 2008.

Down the road from the Rue des Petits Carmes sits the Egmont Palace, a mid-nineteenth-century building that began life as a private aristocratic residence. The FPS Foreign Affairs uses it for the part of diplomacy that requires high ceilings and chandeliers: state dinners, treaty signings, visits by foreign dignitaries. The Protocol Directorate, which manages the ceremonial choreography of Belgian diplomacy, organizes events here and decides who gets which honor and which seat at which table. This matters more than it sounds. Brussels hosts the largest number of diplomatic missions in the world. Every embassy in Brussels operates not only as a bilateral envoy to Belgium but as the country's permanent representation to the EU, often to NATO, and sometimes to additional international organizations. The Protocol Directorate is the body that keeps track of the privileges, immunities, and pecking order for all of them.

Inside the ministry, the work is divided into directorates general, each with its own remit. Bilateral Affairs handles country-to-country relations. Consular Affairs supports Belgians abroad and processes visas for foreigners coming in. Development Cooperation, under its own minister, manages Belgian aid through Enabel, the development agency. European Affairs coordinates Belgium's position in Brussels meetings, which is harder than it sounds because Belgian positions must first be coordinated across the federal government, the regions of Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels, and the three language communities. Legal Affairs defends Belgium in international courts. Multilateral Affairs handles the UN, the Council of Europe, and the global multilateral system. Strategy and Communication tells the story. From 2019 to 2020, Belgium served as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, having been elected with 181 votes out of 193, far above the two-thirds threshold.

Walk through the Place du Petit Sablon on a weekday and you may pass civil servants on their way back to the ministry from a working lunch. They are likely to be discussing a partnership agreement with a Central African country, or the negotiating position for a council of ministers meeting that afternoon at the Justus Lipsius building twenty minutes east. Belgium's foreign service, with its 2,909 employees as of June 2020, runs 84 embassies, 17 consulates-general, three consulates, three diplomatic offices, the Belgian Office in Taipei, and eight permanent representations to international organizations. More than three hundred honorary consulates supplement the network. For a country of eleven million people sandwiched between France, Germany, and the Netherlands, this is a remarkably extended global reach, justified by the conviction, embedded in Belgian foreign policy since 1831, that a small state survives by being indispensable to the multilateral system.