Wait for the bang...

The week got off to a bang – literally – this evening with the opening of the EESC’s ‘Chemistry and Culture Week’ – a week of activities designed to educate and inform about the important role of chemistry in European culture. You can see Vice-President Anna Maria Darmanin interviewing the prime organising force behind the week, British member David Sears, (Employers’ Group) here. This evening we heard from Alexis Boruhns, General Manager Europe of Solvay, about the international year of chemistry, Mrs Ambassador Tombinski, who gave a simultaneously lively and learned account of the life of Maria Sklodowska-Curie (the Committee is hosting an exhibition about Curie’s life all this week), Nineta Majcen, General Secretary of the European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences, about the particular qualities of water, and we were treated to a chemistry show by Technopolis (which is where the bang came in). We were also given a lecture by Professor Doctor Gerd Wolf (Germany, Various Interests Group), one of our most learned and respected members, and he has agreed that I can post it here (see below). Written entirely by the Professor himself, it is a lyrical exposition of the theme and an excellent example of the expertise of our members.

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I am going to make myself seem slightly daft in this post. They’ve started building work behind the Residence Palace at last. It’s a good thing. The plan is gradually to turn the Chaussée de Maelbeek back into a properly inhabited space, with mixes of commercial and residential space instead of the current wasteland and carparks. In the initial plans I saw there will even be a tram line running between the Place St Josse and the Place Jourdan. Over the years a sycamore tree had grown to quite a size on the wasteland where the building has now started. It had to go. But I found the way it went well, sort of undignified for a tree of that size. Instead of sawing its branches off, they snapped them off with some piece of heavy machinery. Is there such a thing as cruelty to trees? (That reminds me of a Roald Dahl short story.)

They certainly don’t do horror films like they used to. The Hammer horror series of my youth were stereotypical vehicles with typecasted actors (most notably, Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein, Christopher Lee as Dracula). If you went often enough you could spot the recycled sets and the gore was unintentionally comic. Nowadays, it seems, actors enrich their palettes by playing in sophisticated, frequently witty, horror movies with clever scripts and intentionally comic gore. That just about sums up Zombieland (2009), which for reasons I won’t go into we watched this evening. One of the principal protagonists, Columbus, is played by Jesse Eisenberg, whose next film was The Social Network and the star of the film, though supposedly in a support role, is played by Woody Harrelson. The running gag throughout the film (which has a post-apocalyptic scenario not unlike 28 Days Later and Omega Man) is Columbus’s list of thirty-three rules (‘Beware of bathrooms,’ ‘Check the back seat,’ ‘Don’t be a hero,’ ‘When in doubt, know your way out,’ etc). Great fun. I wish they’d had this degree of sophistication back when I were a lad.

This morning I witnessed an excellent example of the phenomenon that had been debated in Group III’s Warsaw conference; namely, volunteering. Of a Saturday morning no ° 2 sprog does indoor climbing with a friend out at Brain l’Alleud. The respective parents have a roster for ferrying the boys back and forth and this morning it was my turn to pick them up. The climbing walls are in a school gym. On a Saturday morning the whole school premises are given over to sporting activities of one sort or another for children. And the whole show is run by – volunteers. At a rough estimate each works for three or four hours and there are scores of them. You don’t need to be a mathematician to see Professor Salamon’s point that this is a major, if unquantified, form of activity, oiling the wheels of our societies – or, as EESC President Staffan Nilsson put it in Warsaw, a sort of societal glue.

It is difficult to believe but today marks the beginning of my fourth year as Secretary General of the European Economic and Social Committee. Just this past week a friend asked me if I was still enjoying the job and my reply was very much in the affirmative. It’s the people – the Committee’s members and its staff - that make the job enjoyable. Of course, some aspects of the work are necessarily routine: the organic cycle of Section meetings, Enlarged Presidency Meetings, Bureau meetings and plenary sessions being the most obvious example. There are longer cycles: the two-and-a-half years of each Presidency, for example, and the five years of each full mandate. But even within these cyclical, rhythmic structures there are always challenges and surprises to keep the SG on his toes. My first years have been characterised by budgetary reform, getting the establishment plan sorted and directors recruited, welcoming new members at the beginning of the 2010 mandate, making sure that the Committee was equipped to deal with the now implemented Lisbon Treaty and accompanying successive Presidents Mario Sepi and Staffan Nilsson in realising their ambitions and implementing their work programmes. In a sense the Committee has been in a (successful) quest to gain (modest) increases in resources so that it could do the more that was expected of it by the Lisbon Treaty. The next period promises to be challenging in a different way. If the Commission’s reform package goes through, there will be reductions in the work force. Priorities will have to be identified and choices will have to be made. At the same time, we’ll be welcoming the twenty-eighth member state (and twenty-third language) of the Union.