Miracle workers

This evening I attended a ceremony to celebrate the opening of the Northern Ireland Executive’s Brussels Office. It was yet further proof that miracles can and do happen. I grew up in London in the 1970s, a time when IRA bombs and bomb scares were a frequent occurrence. I remember with particular vividness the 31 October 1971 Post Office Tower bomb. My brother was in Great Ormond Street Hospital and I walked from Euston to the hospital the day before and on the day itself and remember gazing up at the damaged tower (which has remained closed to the public ever since). I remember too the claustrophobia of bomb scares and emergency evacuations in the London Underground. The bombs felt very close in those days. At this evening’s event there were three speakers: Peter Robinson, First Minister of Northern Ireland and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and a Sinn Féin member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission. The latter’s presence was not purely symbolic. As one of our members, Jane Morrice, strongly argued in a December 2007 EESC initiative opinion (The role of the EU in the Northern Ireland peace process), the EU played a key role. In his speech, McGuinness (allegedly a former active IRA member) confirmed this, adding with passion how he had been inspired by the genesis of the EU and, in particular, the way France and Germany had found a way to co-exist peacefully.

One of the important items on this morning’s agenda was an own-initiative opinion (rapporteur: Ivan Voles, Czech, Employer’s Group) on EU-Russia relations. The Russian ambassador to the European Union, Mr Vladimir Chizhov, was invited to address the plenary and attend the debate, which followed hard on the heels of the 7 December EU-Russia summit and was therefore particularly timely. As a courtesy to our guest, we laid on Russian interpretation, and so we had the ‘novelty’ of hearing Russian spoken in the plenary session. Of course, it was not so much of a novelty to those of our members who, in the old Cold War Europe, learnt Russian at school. As to the debate, it is clear that in the EU’s bilateral relations with Russia, as with its relations with so many different parts of the world, dialogue between representatives of civil society organisations will become a specific and structured aspect.

This morning the plenary session heard from the European Commissioner with responsibility for agriculture, Dacian Ciolos, on his vision for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. Now, it just so happens that the new President of the EESC, Staffan Nilsson, is a farmer, and farming and farmers, as an important part of organised civil society, are well represented in the Committee’s membership, so the Commissioner had an informed debate on his hands. And, quite clearly, he appreciated this. The Commission’s three-pillared vision for the post-2013 CAP puts the emphasis variously on a safe and sufficient food supply, sustainability and profitability and the maintenance of a living countryside. EESC members speaking in the ensuing debate insisted that there should be a new pact between farmers and society, and that there should be a more targeted relationship between what farmers receive and their function (rather than a readjustment of their historic entitlement, that is). There were echoes in Ciolos’s analysis of what the 9 November EESC Bureau had heard from the Commissioner with responsibility for the Budget, Janusz Lewandowski (link to post here): revolutions are impossible, and thus the direction of change (and hence the setting of future trends) is as important as the substance.

After a heavy but productive Bureau meeting yesterday, it was on to the plenary session today, the last of the year. The highlight of this afternoon was the visit of Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Joëlle Milquet to present the balance sheet of the Belgian Presidency of the Council on employment, social policy and equal opportunities issues. Milquet quipped at the beginning that the key to a successful Presidency is the absence of a government at home but, as her detailed exposé then went on to prove, the true key to a successful Presidency is commitment and an understanding of the European Union’s decision-making processes – and Belgium has always had much of both. Two aspects of Milquet’s analysis interested me particularly. The first was her positive evaluation of the ‘trio’ mechanism for rotating presidencies. The importance of the traditional rotating presidency was supposed to have been diminished by the Lisbon Treaty’s innovations but, paradoxically, the reverse appears to have happened. The second was her insistence on a positive attitude towards immigration. Sensitive though the issue may be in a time of crisis, demography alone argues for such a positive case. A little ‘human’ observation of my own. As the Deputy Prime Minister spoke, her hands occasionally fluttered up, revealing a streak of white paint on the underside of her little finger – you know, the one place you miss when you are scrubbing your hands after a bit of home decorating….

At a recent writers’ workship meeting I was enthusing about Leonardo Di Caprio’s acting skills and LG recommended I should watch 1993 film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, so we did, this evening, and were not disappointed. A young Di Caprio (19) plays a boy with developmental disabilities and his performance is surely up there close to Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman. Johnny Depp is excellent as his older brother. This is a film (from the 1991 novel of the same name by Peter Hedges) about the profound ennui of middle America, set in an imaginary town, the aptly-named Endora, where men and fathers commit suicide and mothers seek release in over-eating or having affairs. Salvation comes for Depp’s Gilbert Grape in the form of Becky (Juliette Lewis), who arrives with her grandmother in a trailer, but not before Di Caprio’s Arnie leads his brother a merry dance. Whilst we empathise with Gilbert Grape’s predicament, we never lose sympathy for Arnie. Two fine performances from two fine actors before Titanic and Pirates of the Caribbean imprisoned them in the sticky amber of major stardom.

This evening I propped myself in an armchair and, at the suggestion of N° 1 sprog, we watched a Belgian film, La Régate (2008), directed by Bernard Bellefroid. It was a gem of a film (and one which, I suppose, would not have been made without support from the Media programme). It is an all-too-plausible portrait of a drunken, single, wastrel father’s physical and psychological abuse of a son who, throughout all of the violence and the broken dreams, remains loyal and loving until the scars cannot be hidden anymore. It is set by the Meuse and the son’s passion and skill, skulling, provides for original scenes and scenery. It is excellently acted. Joffrey Verbruggen, as the abused son, and Thierry Hancisse, as the abusive father, turn in excellent performances. I would warmly recommend the film only don’t watch it if you are feeling dark about the human condition…

I have slept most of today and I suppose that could be called an advantage for a start, but there are others. Gazing out occasionally on the beauty of Brussels’ rooftops under the snow is another, listening non-stop to classical music on BBC Radio Three a third. Gradually catching up on newspaper reading is a fourth, reading all those Wiki-leaks in detail a fifth. I was sad to learn that Britain would not be hosting the World Cup again, mainly for my children, but who could begrudge Russia a crack at the whip? Gradually, too, as I have cleared away all the ‘pending’ stuff I have had a chance to start writing up some of my speaking notes. Last but not least, it feels pleasantly illicit to be at home and to see my family at times when normally I would not. I definitely do not recommend sinusitis and I am still feeling very sorry for myself, but I have to admit that being sick is not all dark.

I-sinusitis. Note realistic colouring

Over the past two years I have worked my through lumbago and sciatica and any number of colds and infections but over the past six weeks I have come up against a tougher opponent – sinusitis. I had had something lingering for over a month but yesterday things took a turn for the worse, so I went to the doctor’s and was diagnosed, as I had suspected, with sinusitis. She gave me antibiotics and the usual blasting about taking it seriously. The problem was that today I was supposed to be leaving for Tunis, for an administrative board meeting of AICESIS (the international association of economic and social councils and similar institutions). I had a dreadful night but packed my bag this morning nevertheless and came into work. A few hours later it was clear that things were getting worse and so, much to my regret, I had no alternative but to slope off to bed, like a plane being wheeled into a hangar for essential repairs, and leave the antibiotics to do their work.

This evening I gave the seventh John Fitzmaurice Memorial Lecture. John, a European Commission official, a prolific academic author and a founding member of the Brussels Labour branch, was in turns my academic mentor, boss, colleague, comrade and dear friend. He passed away suddenly in August 2003. It was a great pleasure and privilege to be able to pay tribute to him. Neil Kinnock delivered the first memorial lecture and the subsequent lecturers have been Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Geoff Hoon, Julian Priestley, Margot Wallstrom and John Monks. Until the end, John and I would have lunch about once every six weeks (our last lunch was just one month before he died), and we would use these occasions to bounce ideas for articles and books off of one another. I deeply miss those lunches, so I asked the audience to pretend they were John and bounced some ideas off of them. My chosen theme was the rise of Euroscepticism and the risk of a conflation with extremism. Basically, I think we have much to learn from American politics in the mid-1800s, when permanent political parties first started to form at the federal level. These have always remained loose coalitions and maybe that’s the way party politics in the EU will evolve in the longer run, with a loose coalition of pro-integration parties and a loose coalition of more Eurosceptical parties. I’ll post a link to the speech once I have written it up. Here’s that link.

Continuing our children’s education in the great film classics (well, that’s our excuse, anyway), tonight we watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I forget how many times I have seen this film. It’s always enjoyable. There’s the wonderful chemistry between Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the tragic-comic plot, some spectacular scenery lovingly shot, a great song (Raindrops keep falling on my head) and some brilliant one-liners: ‘you keep thinking, Butch; that’s what you’re good at’; ‘I don’t know where we’ve been and we’ve just been there’; and ‘Who’s the best lawman?’ ‘You mean the toughest or the easiest to bribe?’ What struck me more this time around was the darker, elegiac, allegoric side to the film. The cheerful and charismatic outlaws are inexorably hunted down just as the native Indians had been before them. The evil of the outlaws is extirpated but so is their fancy-free life and cheerful innocence. Civilisation is right and inevitable but it’s also boring… It’s strange to think that, before Redford landed the part (which made his career), Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Jack Lemmon and Newman himself were all considered for the role of the Sundance Kid. It’s impossible now to imagine it being anybody else.