Teamwork

This morning my schedule said I had a meeting with my team. Secretaries General do not question appointments in their schedule. If appointments are there, then they have been vetted by the team and they should be attended. So I went to the meeting and found that my team had laid on a surprise breakfast to celebrate the completion (dare I say the successful completion?) of one year of my mandate. They are a great team and I am a very lucky SG to have them.

A few weeks ago, in our regular Directors’ meeting, the Deputy Director of our translation service gave us a wonderful example of the limitations of machine translation.  The European Economic and Social Committee’s motto is that it is a ‘bridge between the European Union and organised civil society.’ She showed us a Dutch version of one of our brochures where this motto had been translated, by the machine, as ‘A short circuit between the European Union and organised civil society.’ I like it!

Gerhard Stahl

I had a working lunch today with my counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl. We each bring along the head of our secretariat (Reinhold Gnan and Eleonora di Nicolantonio respectively), they having acted as ‘sherpas’ (if that’s not too pompous a term) in preparing the meeting. We discussed all manner of things but so well had our sherpas done their work that the only thing we had to chew on was the food (an apology to the caterers for this metaphor). The two of us, as I have explained in previous posts, must jointly manage our so-called ‘joint services’, including translation, logistics and IT, for example. We are proud of our revolutionary arrangement and determined to make it work. We can only do that by keeping in close touch on joint challenges and seeking always to find consensual solutions. Fortunately, since we have known each other since I was a young thing in the Commission’s Secretariat General and Gerhard was a young thing in the Parliament’s secretariat, this isn’t difficult!

Jacques Dermagne

I had a long chat today with Jacques Dermagne, the President of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council. The French Council is currently undergoing a reform process. There’ll be equal representation of men and women, the age limit for membership will be reduced from 25 to 18, thirty-three members will be drawn from ecological and environmental organisations, citizens’ initiatives (500,000 signatures) will automatically be referred to the Council for its opinion and relations with the national parliament will be strengthened through a referral system. All of this is of great interest to the European Economic and Social Committee. Should the Lisbon Treaty be ratified and implemented, a new Treaty article will provide for the Council, on the basis of a proposal from the Commission, to take decisions concerning ‘the nature of the composition’ of the Committee at regular intervals ‘to take account of economic, social and demographic developments within the Union.’ In a sense, therefore, the Sarkozy reforms to the French Council have anticipated the sort of reforms in composition that the EESC might, in due course, reflect upon.

When we were in Joensuu the Finnish Forest Research Institute (METLA) gave the EESC a present of a chairman’s gavel, carved from local birch wood. This afternoon, Vice-President Seppo Kallio chaired the plenary and out came the gavel on its first outing. I couldn’t resist taking a picture and sharing it with you. It’s actually very useful and the ‘thump!’ it makes can be heard very clearly throughout the meeting room. Of course, it brought back fond memories of my Joensuu jaunt, which already seems so long ago…

The President’s recent trip to China and the Autonomous Region of Tibet (see previous posts) has understandably provoked a large press, some of it positive, some of it critical, but all of it interested in this development. Today’s edition of the European Voice carried a full-page analysis of what it described in its headline as a ‘whispered dialogue’. I have felt for my President, Mario Sepi, over the past few weeks, as he was sometimes apparently wilfully misquoted in critical pieces. For example, drawing on his knowledge of his own country, he warned that excessive dependence on central state funding could leave Tibet (and other areas of China for that matter) like the Italian mezzogiorno, unable to achieve economic autonomy. Some reports claimed that Sepi had spoken about the mafia, but this was completely false. I was at the press conference and followed what he said in Italian and also what the interpreter said in English. But today’s European Voice article was, to my mind, an excellent example of responsible and well-researched journalism, its criticisms nuanced and its author, Andrew Gardner, having understood that when institutions and their presidents engage in ‘soft diplomacy’ they evidently say more in private than they can do in public.

The plenary’s guest speaker this morning was former Czech Prime Minister and current Commissioner with responsibility for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities, Vladimir Spidla. He is also a fellow, if only occasional, blogger (here). This was a poignant occasion, with Spidla’s future uncertain and many questions from the floor about legacy. To his credit, Spidla took them on the chin. He cited Bismark: politicians are judged not by their intentions but by what they achieve. Nevertheless, achievements there have been. His own take on the situation (I paraphrase) was that the bottle was half-full. Indeed, whatever the composition of the next European Commission, Barroso had already made it clear that social policy would be much more heavily emphasised.

Precisely one year ago today I took up my new duties as Secretary General. It was also one year ago that I started this blog. My first observation is that I am still happily doing both. My second is that the year has gone by alarmingly fast. My third is that many of the things I wanted to do (on personnel policy, for example) are taking much longer than I had thought they would. But I’m getting there, I’m getting there…