Today is the Queen’s official birthday, and all sorts of festivities are going on. As I write this, we have just had a surreal experience. Our hotel is just off Trafalgar Square, behind Whitehall. From our window we can see the Union Jacks flying. Our TV-starved son turned on the box to watch a military parade, the soldiers clad in their tall bearskins. I asked him to turn down the sound but… could still hear the sound. In fact, the music was carrying loud and clear over Whitehall and the rooftops from Horseguards, so we watched what we couldn’t see but listened to the real thing! Afterwards, we heard the 21-gun salute from the Park and then, being almost directly in line with the Mall and Buckingham Palace, watched the flypast. It began with a Lancaster bomber, flanked by a Spitfire and a Hurricane, and I immediately had a lump in my throat; a reaction I cannot describe in any rational way. But it does give me the chance to tell a story about a similar and equally irrational reaction. It was 1968 and, as an eleven year-old boy, I was on a nature field trip with my teacher and class. We were walking down a country lane when we saw a Heinkel He-111 flying low towards us, straight along the road. To a boy and girl, we leapt off the road and into the ditches, followed a few moments later by our teacher – so strong were the images and expectations of the Second World War still in us, a war we had never known and only lived through films and books. Of course, we later discovered that they were making a film, The Battle of Britain, but we hadn’t known at that moment. Did we think the plane had flown through a portkey?

Like portkeys in the Harry Potter stories, there are places in London that immediately transport me back to my childhood. Hamleys the toyshop, in Regent Street, central London, is one of them. Whilst my ladies went shopping in Oxford Street my son and I set off to Hamleys in search of a megatron that couldn’t be found in Brussels. When I was a young boy my parents took me and my older brother up to Oxford Street and Regent Street to see the Christmas illuminations. Piped music was played in the streets (to this day, the strings in the opening bars of Prokofiev’s Troika transport me back immediately to Oxford Circus, with us emerging, blinking with the crowds, out of the mouth of the London Underground) and, just like today, the press of the crowds pushed people off the pavements and into the roads. Hamleys is still in exactly the same place and is still exactly the same size. Nobody has re-done the façade nor added on floors nor sought to build out at the back. And it still has magicians and young sales people demonstrating card tricks and boomerangs and railway tracks whizzing around above the shoppers’ heads and toy cars you can drive and… I don’t know about my son, but I definitely had a lot of fun!

London here we come

Then it was a dash to the Gare du Midi to catch the evening Eurostar to London with the family. Rapid rail transport is one of those areas where Europe’s startling technological development and the beneficial consequences of this are most tangible. When I started out in the EU institutions, Paris was a three-hour trek away by rail and London – well, a trundle to Ostend then the hydrofoil and then a trundle from Dover to London took all day (though veterans will remember that in the beginning you could take the hydrofoil all the way up to the Tower of London). Now, Paris is barely an hour away and London just two.  Indeed, I don’t want to sound a sourpuss but there’s hardly time to read your newspaper now. Anyway, it was the start of the sort of eventful weekend only a London, or a Paris, or a Berlin can provide…

As described in the previous post, I spent the whole day (literally) in interviewing candidates for a director’s post within the Committee’s secretariat. It’s a key position and we’re determined to get it right, and so I was accompanied in the advisory selection panel by a Director, two Heads of Unit and three of the Committee’s members (one for each Group). The fact that we are currently recruiting several directors makes all of this a little bit heavy for me and my current directors, since we have spent quite a lot of time sat in job interviews over the past month or so. But the real heroes of the day were our three members, who gave up a day out of their working lives to be with us. As Secretary General, I get paid a salary whether I am sitting in a selection panel or in my office. But our three members get paid their travel costs and a per diem and have to pay the opportunity cost of not being back in their own organisations or businesses. That they should have been present from 08.30 till 18.30 on a Friday to help the Secretary General in making a key strategic choice is yet another illustration of their commitment.

This morning the Committee’s plenary session held a thematic debate on air transport in the presence of the Czech Deputy Transport Minister, Roman Kramarik. The Committee’s rapporteur, Jacek Krawczyk, is, as you’ll know from previous posts, a former commercial airline pilot and he clearly knows what he’s talking about. Two themes were stressed in the debate. First, air travel is one of the safest forms of transport and getting safer. Second, paradoxically, accidents will still happen. At the end of the debate our President called for a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of the Air Bus disaster. There, but for the grace…

copyright Laresche

This evening the Committee hosted a magnificent photo exhibition about Europe’s Rroma people by Yves Leresche by organising a fascinating debate about the Rroma and the challenges they, and Europe, face. A first extraordinary fact. The debate began after the plenary session had ended for the day, at seven, and continued until well after nine; that is, during the two hours when most people usually eat their evening meal. And yet, the meeting room was choc-a-bloc full. Among our spontaneous guests was Dani Klein, lead singer with Vaya con Dios and a strong supporter of the Rroma cause. The speakers on the podium, in addition to our President, Mario Sepi, included two of our members who have been most active in this field, Anne-Marie Sigmund and Madi Sharma, Jan Jarab from Vladimir Spidla’s Private Office and Alekos Tsolakis (a Commission official who has done a huge amount of good work on this cause), but also Santino Spinelli, a Rroma musician and artist and Nicolae Gheorghe, also a Rroma and a very learned one at that. Among our guests also was ‘Payou’, President of the Gitane and Tzigane Association in Languedoc Roussilon. I cannot summarise the debate easily, so what I’ll do is just jot down some of the views and observations I noted. (Click on ‘read the rest of this entry’) (more…)

Meanwhile, outside our plenary session, an exhibition was staged of ‘the vote that broke the wall’. On 4th June 1989 the first free elections behind the Iron Curtain took place in Poland. The elections brought an overwhelming victory for ‘Solidarnosc’, led by Lech Walesa at the time, and it was this first democratic eruption that paved the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the unification of Europe as we know it today. Looking at the posters and photographs, it all seemed so far away. Could it already be twenty years? In any case, when history has a mind to, it can move very, very fast.

The EESC held a special commorative plenary session debate this afternoon to mark the twentieth anniversary year of the fall of the Iron Curtain and the fifth anniversary (already!) of the 2004 wave of enlargements. The guest speakers included: Catherine Lalumière, a former Secretary General of the Council of Europe, a former MEP and currently a vice-president of the European Movement; Olli Rehn, the Commissioner for enlargement; and Jaroslaw Pietras, a former Polish Secretary of State for European Affairs who worked closely on Polish accession to the EU. All of the speeches and the debate more generally were rich and thoughtful. If I had to take out three observations, though, I would turn to Lalumière’s analysis. In a sense, she argued, Europe’s division was for a very long time the EU’s raison d’être. Once that division no longer existed, a new raison d’être had to be generated and the EU hadn’t yet entirely managed to do that. Her second argument was that the death of communism, both as a political system and as an ideology, had led to a triumphalist illusion that the western model (however one defined it) had somehow ‘won’, and that there was no alternative. Yet the current economic and financial crisis demonstrated graphically that the western model required considerable adjusting. Her third observation was that we ‘in the West’ didn’t really measure the true scale of the changes that were occurring, both to ‘us’ and to ‘them’, and so we hadn’t yet fully measured the consequences.  For my part, I still remember solemnly lecturing a German friend, whose family had come from Chemnitz (renamed Karl Marx Stadt during the communist years), that he would just have to get used to the fact that German unification was unlikely to take place during his lifetime. That was in – er – about 1987… By the way, the EESC has produced a really neat little (three minutes) DVD about what enlargement means to its new members. You can watch it here. Please go and have a look.

Yes, I enjoyed writing that title (just call me Tom Wolfe). Two extraordinary facts caught my eye as I scanned my morning newspapers this week so far.  According to an article in yesterday’s Financial Times, the late Gabon ruler, Omar Bongo, had over seventy bank accounts. Over seventy! How the hell do you manage over seventy bank accounts? Of course, you’ll say ‘well, he must have had managers who managed the accounts.’ But who managed the managers? And where do you put all the cheque books? One thing is certain; he must have had a massive wallet to carry all of those bank cards. The second article came from the Guardian. ‘World spending on arms rises to record $1.46 tn’ was the headline. Apparently, worldwide spending on weapons has risen by 45% over the past decade.  I shall refrain from further comment other than to observe that there is an interesting coincidence: the country which accounts for over half of that total increase also houses most of the top arms-producing companies.