Like many students abroad, I would imagine, I did some translation work to help make ends meet when I was in Italy as a post-graduate student many moons ago. Almost half of the EESC’s staff are in the translation directorate or related functions and I suddenly realised that I had very little idea about what they were really doing – apart, that is, from what I knew from those far-off amateur experiences. So I asked the Director, Gonzalo, and the Deputy Director, Ineta, to organize a half-day visit for me and the scales fell from my eyes. Translation, when you have 22 languages, two Committees and two administrations, and a requirement for the greatest terminological exactitude, has to be done with all the precision, speed and efficiency of a watch factory. Imagine a series of rivulets flowing into streams that then become mighty rivers; that is a way of thinking of the translation requests that come from the EESC and its sister Committee. The rivers join at a confluence called, prosaically, ‘planning’, where a team of gifted and enthusiastic colleagues manage the workflow in such a way that everybody gets what they want when they need it, but they do more than that. Another set of colleagues explained to me about the Translators’ Work Bench and the contribution made by the ‘superusers’ (translators and assistants with excellent IT skills who act as localised helpdesks). And other colleagues explained about the Formatting Group. Then it was on to the Coordination Unit, where I spent far too much time because there were so many interesting things to discuss, and from there to a young and very able assistant in the Slovenian Unit, Robert, who showed me how the assistants deal with the workflow, and from there to an official in the Italian Unit, Giancarlo, who has himself developed (in his free time) an extraordinary piece of software to extract original documentation and references in all languages. By now, it felt more like a visit to a scientific laboratory! We’d run out of time and my return visit is already scheduled. In the meantime, thank you to everybody for a fascinating learning experience!

Speaking of Clint (see 28 February post), we went to see Gran Torino this evening. It’s an excellent film, though Eastwood seems to be getting just a little bit more sugary as he gets older (he’s 78 now). However, I don’t agree with those critics who say that it provides an all-round happy ending. There can be no happy ending for the street gang depicted in the film. Its members are virtually condemned to a viscious spiral of violence, crime and imprisonment. Most Eastwood films have a nuggety one-liner that sticks in the memory. The one this time is, talking about the horrors of war, that ‘the thing that haunts a man most is what he isn’t ordered to do.’ Good stuff.

The EESC’s Budget Group all afternoon. In seeking a new level of transparency and a new, far more strategic, overview for the members, we are all, members and administration, learning by doing, but at the same time we are constrained by the simple fact that our preliminary draft budget for 2010 has to be transmitted to the European Commission by 23 March at the latest, which is hellishly early. It is not easy to introduce a wholesale revolution, including the construction of a new Directorate, in the space of a few months. (The Bureau’s mandate to my Vice-President, Seppo Kallio, was adopted in November, the new Establishment Plan only in December.) Fortunately, the Budget Group members have well understood that we won’t reach true ‘cruising speed’ until we start looking at the 2011 budget. That said, huge progress has already been made and I am sure that our new approach of decentralising budgetary envelopes and hence responsibility to the Committee’s spending actors themselves (linked to regular monitoring and reporting) is what helped convince the budgetary authority to free up the € 1 m that had been placed in the ‘reserve’ so early in this budgetary year.

The usual coordination meeting with my directors all morning. These meetings seem to come around so fast. By a rough calculation I have chaired over twenty of them already since I took up the cudgels on 1st October last year (and, by the way, today marks the beginning of my six month as SG already!).  On this morning’s agenda there were two more substantive and out-of-the-ordinary points. One concerned part-time working conditions, and the other the ‘securitisation’ (I know, the word doesn’t exist) of electronic documents. Both may seem humdrum and mundane but are actually very important to the way this adminstration is able to do its work.

The European Council is meeting in Brussels today to discuss the deepening economic and financial crisis. The painful consequences are becoming ever-more apparent (in Italy recently we were served one evening by a lady who tearfully told us how her husband, a skilled metalworker, simply couldn’t find work), but maybe not everywhere. On 19 February Eurostat issued statistics for GDP per capita income in 271 regions of the 27 EU member states. In 2006 the four regions at the top of the per capita GDP list were inner London (336% of the EU 27 average!), Luxembourg (267%), Brussels (233%) and Hamburg (200%). The lowest per capita GDP was in the north-east of Romania and Severozapadan in Bulgaria (both at 25%!). Every year there is a big exhibition and fair in Brussels, at the Heysel exhibition centre, for the construction industry, Batibouw. I had so far successfully managed to avoid this particular shrine of consumerism but this morning was convinced to go. And what did we find? Massive crowds and not the slightest hint of economies, let alone a recession. Much used to be made of Europe’s ‘hot banana’ of prosperity (London, Brussels, Luxembourg and Hamburg were firmly in its northern tip) and it seems it may now have become an island amid the recession. Timothy Garton Ash recently wrote in the Guardian about Europe being torn between ‘essential solidarity and national egoism’ but if the hot banana is still flourishing (and it certainly looked like that at Batibouw this morning) then the egoism could be regional as much as anything else.

We watched the 1962 original version, based on Richard Condon’s novel, this evening. You know; the one that launched Clint Eastwood‘s career as ‘Dirty Harry’ (I’ll come back to that). The Cold War, with its obsessive paranoia,  seems so far away already that the underlying politics of the plot seem as old as the massive television cameras and the wispy helicopters that appear in the film. Of course, few, if any, regret the end of the Cold War’s absurdities but I imagine more than a few authors and filmakers have regretted the disappearance of a whole locker room of plotting devices: double agents; triple agents; ‘sleepers’; brainwashing; ‘letterboxes’; and so on. Condon skilfully mixed all of these in with a basic plot about betrayal and counter-betrayal but also a daring dash of incest to set off an Oedipus complex.  And what about Clint Eastwood (who doesn’t appear in the film)? Well, it was strongly rumoured in the late 1960s that Frank Sinatra (who does, playing Bennett Marco) had been lined up for the role of Harry Callahan in the first Dirty Harry movie but turned it down because he had difficulty in carrying the .44 Magnum gun that became Dirty Harry’s trademark.  And why did he have difficulty? Because he broke his wrist karate chopping a table in a scene in The Manchurian Candidate - (allegedly the first-ever karate fight in a film, by the way). If the story is true, it was Eastwood’s second big stroke of luck. The first was Sergio Leone’s failure to convince a major Hollywood star to play in A Fistful of Dollars. Eastwood was very much a last choice.

On 19th February I delivered the closing speech at one of the Committee’s regular ‘newcomers’ seminars’. We organise these twice a year to welcome all of the new staff who have arrived and to explain to them about the Committee and its administration. These seminars are good fun and provide the President and the Secretary General with an excellent opportunity to make a good first impression. Afterwards, in the Q & A session, somebody asked me where, out of all of the EU institutions, I would rather be. I unhesitatingly replied that the EESC had by far the best atmosphere and working conditions and obviously I was happy to be SG but… First, I would have given my eyeteeth to have been in the European Parliament back in its revolutionary days after the first direct elections.  Second, I will always be proud of the work I was privileged to undertake in DG Education and Culture at the European Commission. I was reminded of this today because this week’s edition of the Commission’s inhouse newsletter, Commission en direct, carries a full page article about ‘my baby’, Erasmus Mundus. Of course, I wasn’t alone in bringing Erasmus Mundus into the world. The roll call of honour must include above all the Commissioner, Vivianne Reding and the Parliament’s rapporteur, Marielle De Sarnez, but also the (as always) unsung heroes in the Danish and Italian Presidencies who helped push ‘from the other side’, Sandro Gozi in then President Prodi’s cabinet (now an Italian MP), Greg Paulger (then the Head of Reding’s Private Office), the Director General, Klaus van der Pas, the Director, David Coyne, and my deputy Head of Unit at the time, Augusto Gonzalez, who more than anybody else held the plume and jiggled with the Excel sheets.  Just listing those names shows what a genuinely European process it was. And now the second generation of Erasmus Mundus is getting under way. We had always known it would prosper and I am sure we all look upon it as a proud parent would when a child grows into handsome maturity. Through Erasmus Mundus over 6,000 students and over 1000 professors from third countries have so far come to EU universities, thus encouraging mutual understanding and academic excellence. Of one thing I am sure; when I am on my deathbed Erasmus Mundus, like the Fulbright Programme, will still be flourishing and still growing. We did that!

One of our members sent me this. Oh dear. I don’t think Sir Humphrey approves, but it is funny.

“Govermentium” discovered
A major research institution (MRI) has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest chemical element yet known to science. The new element has been tentatively named “Govermentium.”

Govermentium has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 225 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 313. These 313 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Govermentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Govermentium causes one action to take over 4 days to complete when it would normally take less than a second.

Govermentium has a normal half-life of 2 years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Govermentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause some morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Govermentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as “Critical Morass.”

At midday today we said farewell to a longstanding colleague, Joao, who is heading off into well-deserved retirement. Shortly after I became a director, Joao started to call me ‘Sir Humphrey’ and before long I was calling him ‘Bernard’, and these names stuck. In my little speech, I took a risk in reading out some choice quotes from ‘Yes, Minister’ and ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ - a risk, because members, including our President, were present in the room and, well, Sir Humphrey doesn’t want them to start getting ideas, does he? And now Sir Humphrey is lsoing his Bernard and I know I’ll miss him. To cheer me up, here’s one of my favourites:

Sir Desmond Glazebrook: ‘Surely once a Minister has made his decision, that’s it, isn’t it?’

Sir Humphrey: ‘What on earth gave you that idea?’

Sir Desmond: ‘Surely a decision is a decision.’

Sir Humphrey: ‘Only if it’s the decision you want. If not it is just a temporary setback.’

We have our plenary session today and tomorrow. This afternoon Jacques Barrot came to participate in a debate about European asylum and immigration policy. As Barrot pointed out, this is literally a life-and-death matter for many people, and this understanding coloured the debate.  The logical answer in this field, as the draftsmen and women of the Lisbon Treaty understood, is more ‘Europe’  and this is one area where the new Treaty would make a clear difference, since it would bring virtually all Justice and Home Affair matters under the so-called ‘Community method’. For me, a very touching moment came in the debate when it was pointed out that Georgios Dassis, now a Committee member and President of the Employees’ Group, had once been a refugee and, indeed, had been granted political asylum. He truly knew what he was talking about in the debate!