Today we went for a long walk in the Ardennes and came across a dead fire salamander. They are beautiful and mysterious creatures and, at least in my experience, rarely seen (you can read about their curious attributes here). Indeed, the last time I saw a fire salamander it was similarly dead, crushed by a vehicle of some sort. It inspired the following, published by Poetry Now in United in Words (2009, edited by Helen Davies, ISBN 978-184418-490-3):

Crushed Salamander

The vined hills massed expectantly

As we left the field and headed

Down the track towards the stream.

Colour flashed in the rutted lane;

A crushed salamander, vividly dead,

Spread gut-strewn in a puddle.

The straggling blackthorns shrugged, as if to say:

‘You may have been able to walk through fire, my friend,

But you were no match for a tractor.’

I had that Bono chap in my bedroom tonight. I should explain. U2 played two concerts at the Heysel stadium yesterday and tonight. My bedroom is high up and looks out towards the Atomium and the Heysel. I had the window open to watch an electrical storm as it developed. When the wind is blowing in the right direction I can hear everything that’s happening in the Heysel. And so it was that I listened in to U2’s performance, though I must have been at least five kilometres away. Miss Sarejevo and Pride were particularly clear, and there was a great With or Without You in the encores. When it started to rain about half way through the set Bono sung a snippet from Singing in the Rain and I could have sworn he was in my bedroom. He sung it again right at the end, and then left the crowd to continue. So I was there, you know, even if I wasn’t there!

I chaired two big (in terms of numbers of participants) meetings today. The first, this morning, was the task force set up to manage the ‘renewal’ process within the Committee. The mandate of our current members expired on 20 September. Our new members, both those returning and those newly nominated, take up the cudgels on 20 October. One hundred and two of the three hundred and forty-four members will be new to the Committee. That’s almost a third, though there are some big variations (all previous Estonian members were confirmed, whereas just one-third of previous Slovakian members will be returning). As I never tire of pointing out in this context, we will never get a second chance to make a first impression. Fortunately, I could not want for a better group of colleagues and all is going smoothly. This afternoon I co-chaired, together with my counterpart in the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, a meeting of our directors of the joint services and our directors of our respective administrations. This regular meeting is a part of the overall mechanics and governance of the two Committees’ administrative cooperation agreement, under which we pool and share a significant proportion of our human and budgetary resources in order to achieve economies of scale. Again, nobody could want for a more cooperative group of colleagues and good progress was made on a number of administrative dossiers.

Various environment-friendly vehicles and curiosities were on display at the Move It! event, and visitors could try some of them out. So it was that I found myself on a Segway. It was an interesting experience. Two gyroscopes control the two wheels so that, though it seems counter-intuitive, the machine balances perfectly when you step onto it. The handle bar in front serves two purposes: to steer and, I think, to provide psychological comfort for the nervous user. Having misspent a lot of my student days on a motorbike, my hands searched in vain for a throttle, clutch or brake. No; the position of your body is what controls everything. Lean forward, and you move forward. Lean back, and you slow down. It can be mastered in a few minutes. So I went for a ride but, alas, there were quite a few people taking photographs and even filming me. Oh my God! There was no way I could fall off. Imagine the fun people would have! As a result, I was nervously stiff (just look at the picture). Yes, I look daft, but I would surely have looked even dafter if I had fallen off. All in a Secretary General’s day of work…

To Place Flagey this morning for an event, Move It!,  organised by the European Economic and Social Committee that begun yesterday and will end on Wednesday. The basic theme is encouraging people to think in terms of sustainable forms of transport. Yesterday the tents and their exhibitions were crowded with visitors encouraged out by car free day and the local market. This morning came the speechifying. We were welcomed by the mayor of Ixelles, Willy Decourty, and his Deputy in charge of European affairs, Delphine Bourgeois, and then we were addressed by Isabelle Durant, Vice-President of the European Parliament, and Siim Kallas, Vice-President of the European Commission. The Committee’s own members were much in evidence: notably, Staffan Nilsson, our future President; Irini Pari, our outgoing Vice-President, Janos Toth, outgoing President of the Committee’s Transport and Energy Section; and Stéphane Buffetaut, outgoing President of the Committee’s Sustainable Development Observatory. I participated in a round table discussion in the second half of the morning. My speech, in French, is pasted below. I am proud of what our Committee is doing in this context – changing the behaviour of our colleagues and encouraging the use of  more sustainable and healthier forms of transport. I had the privilege of sitting beside Luc Schuiten, a Belgian architect whose wonderful images of a future organic city graced the exhibition. Continue reading

Today was car free day in Brussels. The cold and gloomy weather in the early morning could not repress the exuberance of the city’s inhabitants as they ‘reclaimed their city’ – words I repeatedly heard throughout the day, and it really does make you realise that traffic is a form of repression. Our local council organised a number of brocantes (jumble sales) and we sent our sprogs off to earn some pocket money with bits and pieces from the attic, cellar and garage. They ended up making quite a lot of money from what was, basically, junk. Their trick was low price, quick sale. I couldn’t help but notice who was buying: very old people and people of immigrant origin – Poles, Turks, Moroccans, Algerians… I shan’t quickly forget an old (Belgian) man haggling over the price of an egg cup (twenty cents), nor a Turkish mother determined that her children should have some toys, notwithstanding their poverty. For that was what it was all about. Of course, in the early morning the stalls were scouted by antiques dealers and collectors looking for a bargain find, but for the rest it was a parade of the poor. There is, I realise, a thin dividing line between poverty and thrift but this was a reality check for me.

Mario shows us how to build a proper wall against free kicks

I have just returned from the Palais d’Egmont and an all day conference organised jointly by the Belgian Central Economic Council, the Belgian National Labour Council and the European Economic and Social Committee, with support from the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. A long and rich and thought-provoking agenda saw speeches from, inter alia, Steven Vanackere, Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ms Joëlle Milquet, Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Employment and Equal Opportunities, Maros Sefcovic, Vice-President of the European Commission, Lorenzo Codogno, President of the EU’s Economic Policy Committee and Ms Maria Joao Rodrigues, aka ‘Mme Lisbon Strategy’. The central theme and conclusion, strongly evident in all of the contributions and all of the discussions, was that the Europe 2020 strategy will only be a proper success if stakeholders feel ownership of the strategy and therefore work to make it a success. Coda: coming back to the office after a week camped out in meetings of various sorts, I found two neat piles of files to read and sign – the traditional penance! Still, it has been a fantastic week, rich in very positive activities and mixed emotions. In three days the 2006-2010 mandate will be formally over, and then we must work hard to make the next mandate a glittering success. (In the picture: Robert Tollet, President of the CEC, Maros Sefcovic, Mario Sepi, Paul Windey, President of the NLC, and yours truly.)

Simply sublime

Our Belgian hosts, the Central Economic Council and the National Labour Council, generously invited all of the ESC Presidents and Secretaries-General to an evening meal. Before that, though, they laid on a guided tour to the Magritte Museum. This was a rare treat. Please don’t tell anybody, but by chance I found myself alone in a room with Magritte’s Empire of Light. For some five minutes I gazed without interruption or noise at one of my all-time favourite paintings. The more I gazed at it, the more fascinated I became. Why does this particular image exert such influence on us (well, on me, at least)? Those privileged minutes were an oasis of calm in a hectic week of much activity and many emotions.

I spent this afternoon, together with my President, in the annual assembly of the Presidents and Secretaries-General of the national economic and social councils and similar institutions, of which there are twenty-two. There were formal and more academic points on a full agenda. We debated and adopted a joint declaration on ‘the involvement of civil society and social partners in the Europe 2020 Strategy’, and I presented a proposal to launch a study into how we might update and reformulate our Internet-based cooperation. The more academic point was a truly fascinating presentation by a team of Belgian, French and Dutch academics into the relationship between the European level and Belgian social policy. I cannot even begin to do justice to the many interesting findings described in their presentations, but I would like to cite just three findings that I, as an ‘institutionalist’ found particularly fascinating. The first concerned what the academics described as the ‘boomerang effect’, when national governments enjoying the presidency of the Council of the European Union feed up a domestic policy as a best practice to be generalised among all the member states. The boomerang occurs because, the research team found, quite frequently the European level adapts and enhances a domestic best practice, so that the member state in question will itself have to adapt what it previously considered to be an example for everybody else. The second fascinating finding is that member states have been using their presidencies of the Council of the European Union to enhance domestic networks, galvanised by a national presidency plan. The recurring presidencies give such networks the chance to be enhanced and ‘re-booted’ at frequent intervals. However, successive enlargements have meant that the intervals have grown much less frequent. As a result, these networks are inventing substitute reasons to re-invigorate themselves. The third finding was that many NGOs are empowered in the domestic context by the European level. The meeting was  another occasion for tributes and a fond farewell to Mario Sepi. In the picture Paul Windey, Chairman of the Belgian National Labour Council (Belgium is chairing the network this year), is offering Mario a commemorative gift on behalf of all the Presidents and Secretaries-General.

The proud authors

At one o’clock I joined the President for an unusual event. He and a Maltese member, Anna Maria Darmanin, have together written a sort of continuation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Their fable, entitled The Farm Revisited, looks into a future where the rats have taken over from the pigs. The farm and its inhabitants have been completely won over by the culture of financial capitalism and the passion for personal enrichment. This society appears to be free but the values of solidarity and community spirit have been lost. The farm animals become heavily indebted, their increasingly fictitious wealth based on a speculative bubble. The inevitable crisis occurs, with financial collapse and environmental disaster, and it is only then that the wise moral of good government and citizen involvement prevails. A cautionary tale and with absolutely no parallels with today’s world, of course….