To the Bozar this evening to listen to Leonidas Kavakos’s sublime rendering of Sibelius’s violin concerto in D minor. I have blogged about Kavakos before. His is a natural talent that makes everything seem, well, easy. He was accompanied this evening by the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest under the familiar command of Valery Gergiev. The Sibelius was preceded by Henri Dutilleux’s Métaboles and succeded by Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. I am sure I was not alone in finding the Prokofiev a rather heavy digestif to follow on from Kavakos and Sibelius and I mean no disrespect to the performers nor to the composer in saying that I could have left happily after the violin concerto.

Phew! It’s over. As Peter Jackson put it on the tournament’s official website, ‘After a grand total of 4,387 passes, 2,965 tackles, 582 penalties, 336 lines-out, 128 scrums, 46 tries and 12 yellow cards, the six-week extravaganza boiled down to one undisputed fact. Wales swept the board – Triple Crown, RBS Six Nations title and the Grand Slam.’ Italy meanwhile won in Rome, leaving Scotland to pick up the wooden spoon. And England beat Ireland 30-9 with a lot of new young talent on display. Whilst Wales’s grand slam – their third since 2005 – provides some consolation for their World Cup quarter final defeat against France – the narrow (8-9) losers in the World Cup final, the same France, finished fourth in the table. Indeed, last autumn’s New Zealand World Cup seems an age away already. England host the next World Cup in 2015 and this new young team could peak nicely to profit from home advantage…. Well, it’s a nice dream.

I found myself at the lunch table with a Latvian, a Slovenian and a Swedish colleague. Somehow, the conversation got onto the former Yugoslavia and I found myself reminiscing aloud about two great Yugoslavian professors who had taught me at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) in 1980. One, the late Branko Pribicevic, studied with G.D.H. Cole and was a noted expert on workers’ participation, syndicalism and guild socialism (and supervised the MA thesis I blogged about here). The other, Bogdan Denitch (picture), took American nationality but retained his Yugoslavian passport and frequently went back there. Still very much alive, Bogdan, always a larger-than-life character, was that rarest of birds, an American socialist, and he taught a course (I forget its exact title) on comparative socialism (all credit to SAIS for offering such courses but, then, Johns Hopkins set up its Bologna Center precisely because until around that time it was, together with Turin and Milan, one of the tips of a ‘red triangle’). In those days, Yugoslavia was the champion of the Non-Aligned Movement, Sweden was a founder member of the European Free Trade Association, Latvia was under the yoke of the Soviet Union and Eurocommunism was a major debating topic in Italy and Spain.  And, I reminisced, I distinctly recalled Denitch comparing Yugoslavian and Swedish socialisms, among others (for, until the 1976 and 1979 elections, the Swedish Social Democratic Party enjoyed a sort of historical hegemony). It is extraordinary to recall how much the EU has changed in the meantime. In 1980 the EESC – as it then was – had just nine Member States; Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom had joined the founding six in 1973. Greece would join in 1981. The former Yugoslavia started to disintegrate in 1991 (when Slovenia declared its independence) before collapsing into ghastly wars. After the ‘singing revolution’ and the Baltic Chain, Latvia regained its independence in August of the same year and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved in December 1991. Sweden would become an EU member state in 1995. Latvia and Slovenia (the latter a former part of Yugoslavia) joined in 2004. So much history crammed into such a small period of time! Oh, and yes; nowadays Pribicevic and Denitch would be, respectively, great Croatian and Serbian academics.

I spent most of today in an EESC management board seminar devoted entirely to the issue of resources, particularly in the light of the current period of crisis and austerity. Where resources are finite and may be shrinking we must note the priorities of our political masters and plan accordingly. There was a remarkable spirit of collegiality and understanding around the table. This was heartening and displays, I believe, the maturity of the Committee’s administration. Yes, there are challenges, but we’ll face up to them together and in a consensual and rational way. We have a weather eye on technology – which has a habit of catching up and overtaking established working practices. If we could do away with paper in meetings, for example, or if machine translation were to reach an appropriate level of excellence, how the institutions’ administrative world might look different! In the meantime… And, yes, we honoured a minute’s silence, together with the whole of Belgium, at eleven o’clock this morning. Such a ghastly affair!

I just made it this evening to the tail end of the prize-giving ceremony for the Committee’s annual video challenge, which has been a huge success this year. I was additionally happy because my personal choice (Zinnekes – If Europe was a word) won first prize. The young makers explained to me that it had cost them precisely 35 euros to make their video! The second prize winners (Ana Zamorano and Mixtel De Sousa’s Barre Barreras) were impressive also for their decision to hand their prize money to the Gugaz Lankidetzan programme (Nicaragua). The third prize-winners (Budapest team – It’s our European life) were equally deserving. What was impressive about these and many other of the entries was that they were literally the work of a group of young people with ideas and a camera. I liked ‘If Europe was a word’ in particular because the makers didn’t shy a away from the negative connations of Europe but they juxtaposed them with many positive connations also and the basic message was one of optimism and hope. The lovely picture shows our Vice-President, Anna Maria Darmanin, with all of the prize winners and jury members. Please go and see their videos here – it won’t take you long and they’re all good fun.

The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions have engaged in a unique form of interinstitutional cooperation, pooling significant quantities of their human and other resources in a series of joint services (translation, IT, logistics) in order to achieve synergies and economies of scale. By so doing, they not only save the taxpayer a considerable amount of money but through careful planning enhance the overall efficiency of their resources. Such a unique exercise between two autonomous institutions requires a set of joint governance mechanisms and this afternoon the political-level mechanism, the Political Monitoring Group, met. The PMG is jointly chaired but the Committees take it in turns to host the meetings, so the Chair today was the EESC’s Waltraud Klasnic (Employers’ Group, Austria). On the agenda were such items as activity and performance indicators, priorities and work programmes and the 2013 budget. Though the meeting was long and detailed, all went well.

I went along to La Monnaie this evening in some trepidation, warned that Stefan Herheim’s interpretation of Dvorjak’s classic opera, Rusalka, was somehow provocative. It would certainly not be to the liking of traditionalists but I found it to be a rich and intriguing evening’s entertainment. Sung, acted and played to a very high level – as always at La Monnaie – the production seemed somehow never to stop challenging its audience. Herheim’s alternative reading of the libretto is not about water elves and spirits or, rather, not only. He turns the certainties of a simple story accompanied by beautiful music into the complexities of an audience’s motivations and desires. And he cleverly turns the spotlight away from the water nymph, Rusalka, to the water gnome and spirit of the lake, acted and sung brilliantly by Willard White. As White’s tortured character watches the equally tortured Rusalka’s antics in puzzlement, so we might ask ourselves why we want to watch her suffer. If that makes it sound clinical, it’s anything but. Much of the production is a sort of street circus, with frequent James Ensor-like carnivals and grotesques and a neon-lit witty set reproducing some anonymous European city street rather than a pastoral idyll. (Rusalka’s famous aria to the moon is delivered from atop a kiosk and addressed to illuminated satellite television aerials!) Indeed, this is one of those productions that would repay several viewings.

Belgium awoke this morning to the shocking news of a ghastly coach crash in a Swiss road tunnel in which 28 people, including 22 children, had died. Such school ski trips, mostly by coach, are a Belgian tradition (replicated by the Brussels-based European schools). The whole of the country has gone into understandable shock and mourning. This morning the EESC’s President, Staffan Nilsson, and I sent our condolences and a message of human solidarity to the Belgian government and this afternoon the staff of both the EESC and the Committee of the Regions observed a minute’s silence, gathered together in one of our meeting halls. We can only guess at the immense grief and suffering of the families and friends of the victims. We are with you; that is all we can say.

A quick pedal to the Musical Instrument Museum this lunchtime for a concert, Les Nations,  given by a group of students from the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles, among them the daughter of a good friend. A mezzo-soprano, she sung some glorious Vivaldi (Motet Longe mala, umbrae, terrores – here’s another interpretation) in the second half of the concert. The first half was given over to Couperin, punctuated by readings from the letters of Montesquieu. It was all well done and a wonderfully refreshing break. (It reminded me that my parents, as penniless young lovebirds in London, had been enthusiastic lunchtime concert goers. Mental note to self – an experience to be repeated.) It is a special feeling when somebody you have known since they were a baby starts to become very good at something. Watch this space.

An interesting letter in this morning’s Observer newspaper reminded me of the MA thesis I wrote many moons ago. Barber’s letter, under the sub-title ‘Germany’s an inspiration’, reported that ‘The TUC has been urging policy-makers to look to Germany to learn from its industrial policies.’ Part of the reason for Germany’s success, Barber argues, ‘is the belief in a fair economic model, which challenges the assumption that the main motor of capitalism is greed. Employees sit on company supervisory boards, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for trade unions. Ministers in the UK would do well to consider these lessons.’ My thesis was essentially about an irony, for worker participation in management boards (Mitbestimmung, or co-determination) was introduced into the German coal and steel industry in occupied Germany by… the British, as a way of preventing a repeat of any complicity by industrialists in unsavoury political developments. The model was a big success and was gradually generalised to all larger companies. Fast forward from the 1950s to the 1970s and the European Commission, seeking to harmonise company law, tabled the Fifth Company Law Directive, which (inevitably) proposed German-style worker representation on two-tier management boards. This led the then British Labour government to establish the Bullock Committee of Inquiry into Industrial Democracy. The recommendations of the 1977 Bullock report, like the so-called ‘Vredling Directive’, faced opposition from British trades unionists and industralists alike and were never implemented. The UK slid into the ‘winter of discontent’ and in 1979 a Conservative Government was elected that was to develop very different views about the role and the place of trades unions…