Today has been a typically heavy Monday on a plenary session week. It started with an early coordination meeting with the President, Staffan Nilsson, an early management board meeting, the ‘pre-session’ preparatory meeting for the Bureau and the plenary session, a meeting with the sub-group of three members from the Budget Group tasked with preparing the 2013 draft budget, meetings with my two Vice-Presidents, Jacek Krawczyk and Anna Maria Darmanin and, in the evening, the enlarged Presidency (the President, Vice-Presidents, three Group Presidents and me). I am now several months into the fourth year of my mandate as Secretary General and my team have worked out that already I have served 30 plenary sessions and 37 Bureau meetings. Of course, there are always problems to be solved and occasional technical and logistical hitches to be overcome but, in general terms, the Committee works, and it works well. In some considerable part that is down to the Rolls Royce of the administration; truly, a well-oiled machine.

He's got to go...

We finished watching the first season of The Wire this evening. It is an excellently written and gripping drama. It is also depressing in its basic message. An insistent detective is driven by his desire to assauge guilt rather than to combat evil. His unorthodox insistence forces the system into following his lead. But police department politics and incompetence lead to clumsy raids and blown opportunities and unnecessary murders and an attempt to boot everything up to the FBI level results in political hits but the dealers’ business continues. The apparent message is that if, as an individual, you want to change a system, you have to have the power to change the system. Otherwise, all you will do is change the individuals within the system…

Where would it land?

Europe’s first major refugee crisis was the mass exodus of panicking Belgians in August/September 1914. My wife’s late grandmother, then a teenager, was among the human tide. She washed up in Brighton, on the other side of the Channel, and she recounted to me how, when she first heard the big guns on the Western Front, she thought it was distant thunder. Later, a Zeppelin flew low overhead on its way to London and she was afraid of the bombs. My late parents both lived through the London blitz. My father’s tenement building was destroyed by a landmine and he lost many of his friends. My mother’s family sheltered in dark, dank tunnels leading down to the Grand Union Canal and she suffered for the rest of her life from claustrophobia. Both recounted being transfixed with fear when the motors of V1 ‘doodlebugs’ cut out overhead; where would the bomb land? Tonight at a friend’s dinner table a fellow guest recounted how, whilst on a road holiday in Israel, she had lost her way somewhere in the north and overnighted in a hospitable kibbutz in the mountains. She was awoken during the night by what she thought was distant thunder. The next day the penny finally dropped when she was forcefully dragged into an air raid shelter. She went on to describe graphically the psychological effects of living in constant fear of bombardment. The process of European integration and of international cooperation more generally came into being to stop people having to suffer that sort of fear and worse. I understand that ‘the avoidance of war’ doesn’t seem particularly relevant to young Europeans who, in large part because of European integration, have never known conflict between European nations. But surely we shouldn’t abandon the explanation entirely. If young Europeans heard the lady telling her terrifying tale tonight, or my parents’ account of their experiences, or my wife’s grandmother’s, they would surely understand.

Excuse me, could you please tell me the way to...

At a dinner party this evening we got onto the subject, for a while, of fateful errors and opportunistic assassinations. Perhaps the most fateful was Leopold Loyka’s 28 June 1914 error in taking a wrong turning in Sarajevo. He was Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur and had already saved the Archduke’s life that day by swerving to avoid an assassin’s bomb. Commendably, the Archduke insisted on visiting some soldiers injured in the ensuing explosion. In Wiki’s words, the hospital  ’was off the planned route and Lojka had not been informed of the change in plans and was not familiar with the new route. Consequently, as he was driving away from the hospital to head out of Sarajevo, Lojka took a wrong turn down a backstreet. Realising his mistake, Lojka began to reverse out. However, it so happened that Black Hand assassin Gavrilo Princip was sitting in a café on the street just as Ferdinand’s car began to pull into it. Princip seized his chance and ran out of the café with his pistol. Spotting him, Lojka attempted to reverse faster, but his foot missed the accelerator pedal. As a consequence, Princip shot and killed the Archduke and his wife.’  The rest, as we know, was ghastly history. Of course, you have already to be of murderous intent to benefit from such coincidences. We started to cite other such potential ’accidents’. I recalled a personal experience where I was once mistakenly invited to meet the Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street in the cabinet room in the mistaken assumption that I was an ‘angry farmer’ (this was during the BSE crisis). I still remember the surprised expression on John Major’s face and the crestfallen expression on some poor secretary’s face as she realised that I was not, in fact, the leader of the ‘angry farmers’. In 1985 an American friend, seeing a scrum around one of the entrances to the European Commission’s Berlaymont building, got closer to see what was going on. He was grabbed and shoved into a lift by security guards. Pushed out of the lift, he was given a glass of champagne and, backing away, bumped into somebody. He turned around to excuse himself to find himself facing Pope Giovanni Paolo II…

An enlarged President...

Once again, today the EESC’s enlarged Presidency – the President, the two Vice-Presidents, the three Group Presidents, together with the SG – met to discuss a series of political and budgetary issues. In the morning the enlarged Presidency alone met but at the working lunch and in the afternoon it was joined by the Presidents of the Sections and the Consultative Committee on Industrial Change, together forming what the house likes to call the ‘enlarged enlarged Presidency’. Until now I have used the image of Howard Taft to illustrate posts about the enlarged Presidency, but how on earth do I illustrate the enlarged enlarged Presidency? Anyway, for the record, the day’s meetings went very well.

Ines Ayala Sender, MEP

The annual discharge procedure for the European institutions is getting under way. Today I enjoyed an amicable working lunch at the European Parliament with Spanish S&D MEP Ines Ayala Sender, who is rapporteur for the discharge procedure for the Committee’s 2010 budget (the procedure is always delayed by two years). The EESC seeks to run a tight ship. In addition to our internal audit function and strict financial verification we are subject, like all of the institutions, to external audits and random checks by the European Court of Auditors. We practice complete openness and transparency with the EU’s budgetary control mechanisms and we seek always to be a ‘learning organisation’. We always follow up on recommendations from the European Parliament in the discharge context and we draft our annual financial report in such a way that the Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee can see exactly what we have done. In regard to the 2009 discharge procedure, the Parliament made two recommendations and the Committee has followed both of them up. The lunch went well and I hope that, as in previous years, the Parliament will vote the Committee discharge.

Jens Nymand Christensen

Today I had a working lunch with an old friend and colleague, Jens Nymand Christensen, who is a director in the European Commission’s Secretariat General with responsibility for relations with the European Economic and Social Committee. In addition to the Treaty’s provisions, relations between the two institutions have been governed by a Protocol of Cooperation, first signed in 2001, and updated in 2005 and 2007. With the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions on participatory democracy now being more fully implemented (particularly regarding the European Citizens Initiative), and with the Committee eager to play to the full its role as an institutional intermediary between civil society organisations and the EU’s institutions in the more general context of participatory democracy, it is high time that the Protocol were updated and so negotiations have been under way between the two administrations (a similar negotiation process is taking place with the Committee of the Regions). The negotiations are far advanced and lunch today provided a possibility to address the few outstanding points. It was also an opportunity to catch up with a good friend and on Commission gossip!

That air of innocence...

I have just read sadly of the death of the artist and illustrator, Ronald Searle. The obituaries testify to a long, rich and prolific life that also included the horrors of war and the Burmese death railway (I have a book of his sketches, secretly done at the time, of that ghastly experience). Forget St Trinians; my older brother and I were weaned on a series of essential books for schoolboys in the early 1960s – the wonderful 1066 and All That, and Down With Skool!: A Guide to School Life for Tiny Pupils and Their Parents; How to be Topp: A Guide to Sukcess for Tiny Pupils, Including All There is to Kno About Space; Whizz for Atomms: A Guide to Survival in the 20th Century for Fellow Pupils, their Doting Maters, Pompous Paters and Any Others who are Interested; and Back in the Jug Agane, the last four all written by Geoffrey Willans and all brilliantly illustrated by Searle. They described a world that was still, just, relevant to us. There were still china inkpots in the schooldesks, though I only remember filling them once. When they and quill pens and blotters went, so did the warfare of inkblots (rolled-up bits of blotting paper, soaked in ink) launched with wooden rulers (another disappeared species). Gaze at Searle’s noble Nigel Molesworth in the illustration, ‘the curse of St Custard’s’ and the ‘gorila of 3b’  and reflect solemnly on his observation that, ‘as any fule kno’; ‘History started badly and hav been geting steadily worse.’

‘The progress of humanity seems to have come to a halt, and you with your superior intelligence will know why. The reason is that the world lacks a nation which possesses true leadership. Such leadership, of course, is required not to dominate other peoples, but to lead them along the path of duty, to lead them toward the brotherhood of nations where all the barriers erected by egoism will be destroyed. We need the kind of leadership which, in the true tradition of medieval chivalry, would devote itself to redressing wrongs, supporting the weak, sacrificing momentary gains and material advantage for the much finer and more satisfying achievement of relieving the suffering of our fellow men. We need a nation courageous enough to give us a lead in this direction. It would rally to its cause all those who are suffering wrong or who aspire to a better life, and all those who are now enduring foreign oppression.

‘This role of world leadership, left vacant as things are today, might well be occupied by the German nation. You Germans, with your grave and philosophic character, might well be the ones who could win the confidence of others and guarantee the future stability of the international community. Let us hope, then, that you can use your energy to overcome your moth-eaten thirty tyrants of the various German states. Let us hope that in the center of Europe you can then make a unified nation out of your fifty millions. All the rest of us would eagerly and joyfully follow you.’