Back from Prague, in the evening I went out with my fellows pedants, John and Stephen. We meet occasionally to be excessively and exaggeratedly pedantic about everything and anything.  That’s the excuse, anyway, and normally we weave and wander happily home after a long and refreshing evening. But this time I wandered home more than a little discouraged and with not so much of the weaving. We started off at Fat Boys in the Place du Luxembourg and finished with a curry at Mumtaz in the Chaussée de Wavre.  There’s a drop of the Irish blood in all three of us. At Fat Boys they were on the dark stuff, the Guinness, straightaway, but all I could manage was lager. Moreover, they were sticking them away and I just couldn’t keep up. Worse, I kept wondering when we would move on and eat (perish the thought) and, when we did, I had to leave behind undrunk beer (sacrilege!).  William Hague, a former leader of the Conservative Party, was mercilessly teased by the press when he once reminisced about drinking many pints of beer on a Friday and Saturday night, but I think he was simply telling the truth. The standard model for Friday and Saturday nights was the pub (and many beers) until closing time, followed by a curry (and Indian restaurants had licences, so you could continue on the Kingfishers). And that’s what made me sad. I just couldn’t hack it anymore. I have lost the habit. (Having said that, I noticed that John and Stephen shifted to wine in the restaurant.)

At the (Prague) Group III extraordinary Bureau meeting I was scheduled to say a few words of welcome for the guest of honour and keynote speaker, Michael Kocab. In my speech, which you can read below, I explained how I and my wife had managed to get to Prague in the middle of the Velvet Revolution back in December 1989. The day after we arrived, Alexander Dubcek was appointed speaker of the Federal Parliament and Vaclav Havel became President of the Republic. The minister’s eyes flashed with enthusiasm for, in those heady days, he had been standing alongside Vaclav Havel (and, indeed, Havel remains one of his closest friends). There’s more than a hint of the Tim Smits about Kocab. He started life making films and still now plays in a rock band (you can hear some of his music on his website at the link above). But what all of that generation have is a priceless experience, of having lived through the birth of democracy. Already today, young Czechs have little idea of what the previous regime meant. In that context, the Czech Government has produced a special information film for the young precisely in order to explain to them why what happened was so important and how ‘Europe’ made such a difference to them. It is one of the ironies of the integration process that its advantages rapidly become invisible. (Other Kocab web pages are available here and here.)
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In the evening took the flight to Prague. Tomorrow we have an extraordinary meeting of the Bureau of Group III (various interests). We are staying up near the castle. The city, and that spot, mean a lot to me. In tomorrow’s post I’ll explain why. After dinner, offered by the Czech Chamber of Agriculture, I met up with my younger brother, who lives and works in Prague. I simply love this aspect of Europe, that you can feel at home in so many different places, different countries, different cities.

I invited all seventeen women colleagues in managerial positions in the EESC to lunch to discuss an article entitled ‘Women and the Vision Thing’ that had been published in the Harvard Business Review. This was great fun; a good atmosphere and an excellent discussion from which I learnt a lot. I have nailed my colours to the mast when it comes to getting more women into managerial positions in the Committee. As I told them, whether or not they agree with the article’s argument that women managers are perceived as scoring lower on ‘envisioning’, they should have one vision; that one day one of the women at that lunch will be Secretary General.

In the afternoon our President, Mario Sepi, presided over a meeting of what we call ‘the enlarged Presidency’. This consists of the President, the two Vice-Presidents, the three Group Presidents, and the SG. The one subject on the agenda was the Committee’s forthcoming ‘Programme for Europe’, which is designed to provide a sort of civil society manifesto in the run-up to the European Parliament elections. The enlarged Presidency seminar had met to fine tune preparations and procedures, since what the Committee is seeking to do is, by its own standards, a novelty and, in procedural terms, quite revolutionary. Like all the institutions, the EESC is finding ways to act or react swiftly, but such rapidity requires big doses of discipline and collegiality. Both were on display this afternoon.

A working lunch with the Swedish Permanent Representative, Christian Danielsson, and the EESC’s Group III President, Staffan Nilsson, about the forthcoming Swedish Presidency. Danielsson and I recognised each other from the days when he was working in Anita Gradin’s cabinet and I was in the Commission’s Secretariat General. Like the French and the Czechs before them, the Swedes will have a large number of challenging dossiers to deal with but their thinking is already impressively clear.

I spent most of this Tuesday in preparatory meetings (with my counterpart in the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, and with our members in the delegation) and then in a meeting of the Political Monitoring Group, a meeting that lasted most of the afternoon. This must be a rare body in interinstitutional terms. It is composed of members from both the CoR and the EESC and its remit is to oversee the workings of the cooperation agreement between the two Committees, particularly with regard to the so-called Joint Services (notably translation and logistics), where the two Committees have decided to realise considerable economies of scale by pooling their resources in a joint structure. The meeting went very well and this is in itself a tribute to all the officials in both Committees who are determined to make the Agreement work. I never tire of pointing out that this revolutionary arrangement is the way of the future.

In the afternoon, at the kind invitation of its President, Colin Lustenhouwer, I was invited before a meeting of the Association of Former EESC Members. The basic spirit of the Association is, I would say, once an EESC member, always an EESC member. Our former members are ambassadors for the Committee and remain committed to the ’cause’ of civil dialogue, so I welcomed the chance to spell out my vision for the Committee and future relations between the members and their administration.

At lunchtime I was asked to say a few welcoming words for the ‘Papas no Mamas’, a (I quote) ‘swinging male choir from Finland’.
They were actually very good, with a repertoire ranging from classical gospel and negro spirituals through to Finnish pop songs, serenades, hyms and children’s songs.

They had been brought to the Committee by our Vice-President, Seppo Kallio.

Their website is here.
 
 

A graphic illustration of providing translation into and out of twenty two languages was provided by my colleagues in the Translation Directorate the other day. It speaks for itself, really.