Such a lovely boy

In the newspapers this morning there were exciting stories about how the lost tomb of Caligula had been found. Apparently, last week officers from the archaeological squad of Italy’s tax police arrested a man near Lake Nemi, south of Rome, as he was loading part of a 2.5 metre statue into his lorry. It is known that Caligula had a villa on the shores of Lake Nemi, together with a floating temple and a floating palace. The police saw that the statue was shod witha pair of ‘caligae’, the sort of boots favoured by the emperor. His real name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. When young, he would accompany his father on his campaigns in Germany, wearing a miniature uniform, hence his nickname, Caligula (‘little boot’). Convinced that the statue had come from Caligula’s villa, the police questioned the thief who eventually led them to the site. But the most extraordinary aspect of the accounts from my point of view was that in Mussolini’s time the hulks of the temple and the palace were recovered from the lake bed, only to be destroyed during the war. That is how near the Roman era is to us! Caligula ruled from AD 37 to 41 – so near that the wood of his palace had not yet had time to rot away in the mud.

Institutions, especially venerable ones, develop rhythms and cycles. When I worked in the European Commission’s Secretariat-General, life was governed by two rhythms, one weekly – the preparatory meetings leading up to the college’s Wednesday meetings – and the other monthly – the preparations leading up the European Parliament’s plenary sessions. When I worked in the Council Secretariat-General there was a subtle interplay between the weekly rhythms of Coreper II and I meetings, and the preparatory work leading up to sectoral Council meetings. When I worked in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, it was an interplay between preparations for the Committee of Ministers and those for the plenary sessions. All institutions develop these rhythms, and they become almost organic. In the case of the European Economic and Social Committee, no matter what the political substance on the agenda, for me the rhythm of a pre-plenary session Monday is always the same: early morning meeting with the President, coordination meeting with the head of my secretariat, chairing the management board from nine-thirty till eleven-thirty, at eleven-thirty chairing the ‘pre-session meeting’ with all the colleagues involved in the preparation of the plenary and in the afternoon and evening representing the administration in the meeting of the enlarged Presidency where the political agenda of the Bureau and the Plenary Session is prepared. Such are institutions that ten years ago I am sure my predecessor could have written an identical post and in ten years the SG will no doubt also be able to write exactly the same account. It is such reflections that convince me of the truth of the old saw that within institutions positions of leadership are loaned but never owned.

Just when we were getting used to the concept of the ‘BRIC’ economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China), this morning’s Financial Times reports that Jim O’Neill, the man who coined the phrase, has argued that the economies of Mexico, Korea, Indonesia and Turkey should be added to the list of what he calls ‘growth markets’. O’Neill, until four months ago chief economist at Goldman Sachs, argued that the term ’emerging markets’ (a term coined 30 years ago by a World Bank economist, Antoine van Agtmael, and until now what the four newcomers have been called) is no longer appropriate. ‘Any economy from the emerging markets that is already 1 per cent of global GDP or more, and has the potential for that to rise, has the ability to be taken seriously,’ says O’Neill. Mexico and South Koreau currently account for 1.6 per cent of global GDP in nominal terms, with Turkey and Indonesia worth 1.2 and 1.1 respectively. So; say goodbye to the BRIC economies and say hallo to the BRICKTIM economies – and remember that you read the acronym here first!

I went to two circuses today. The first was a visit to the Cirque du Soleil with the sprogs to see Corteo, in which a clown dreams about the funeral procession after his own death. There were some magical moments in there between the more traditional acrobatics, juggling and other feats of strength, skill and balance. One of these, judging from the faces around me, was when a midget actress (together with her midget partner one of the stars of the show, incidentally) floats and bounces above the audience, suspended below a bunch of helium baloons. A few dropped catches aside (only the jugglers, not the trapeze artists!) this was up to the usual high standard. In the evening I took my daughter to the Cirque Royal to see God Speed You! Black Emperor. Like Sigur Ros more recently, in 2002 it seemed that this Canadian ‘post-rock’  band had run out of collective creative steam and fragmented amicably into individual projects, so it’s a surprise to see them back together and on tour. Doubtless, Mammon is in there somewhere, but so much the better for us. Although for long rumoured to be anarchists, there is nothing anarchic about GYBE’s music. A layer of sound is laid down, typically using feedback, and maybe accompanied by a few harmonic guitar chords. The musicians (a double bassist, several guitarists) build on top of this, using loops, and above it all a violin keens. They build to successive crescendos, each wave of sound marked percussively by their two drummers (yes, two!). And the whole is wrapped in a symphonic structure. There is a complete eschewal of traditional big act apparatus. The band play in a gloomy light that occasionally brightens imperceptibly – there is no light show, there are no strobes. The looped images on the screen behind them – grainy photographs, enigmatic fragments of film – are an integral part of the overall concept. The musicians sit as much as stand. They concentrate on their instruments to the exclusion of the audience. (There is a good essay about them here.) In my opinion, when they loop in fragments of voices (poets, revolutionaries, angry protestors) they are very close to the minimalist music of Steve Reich – indeed, I could almost have imagined this concert at the Palais des Beaux Arts. A rich day.

Here’s an easy one: where and when did the United Nations come into being? Easy peasy! San Francisco, 1945. Wrong! The correct answer is Washington, 1941. Every so often a journalist comes along and tells us something that we probably already knew but had forgotten. Thus, Simon Tisdall has created a little flurry of interest in the British media by telling us something that, actually, was already well known. Indeed, if you just Google ‘origins of the UN’ the right answer pops up straightaway. But if you didn’t know the story, or had forgotten it, you might like to read Tisdall’s article here. This includes the wonderful anecdote of how an excited FDR wheeled himself into Churchill’s guest room at the White House and blurted out his invention – ‘United Nations!’ – to a stark naked and ‘cherubic’ Winston, who was towelling himself down after a bath. This was on 29 December 1941, so this year marks, in a sense, the 70th anniversary of the UN.

I took time out last night to re-read Barack Obama’s extraordinary 12 January Tuscon, Arizona, speech. Doubts about whether Obama was able to empathise that first surfaced during his campaign for the White House have lingered. But this speech will surely have put those doubts to rest for a long while, if not forever. It was one out of the top drawer, as was his delivery (watch here). His tributes to the dead, coloured with affectionate personal detail, were clearly heartfelt and deeply moving. But his reflections on what could and should be learnt from the tragedy and the way in which he argued against prejudice and sought to heal the wounds in the American psyche were marks of the great President that I believe Obama will become. His obvious affection for the common Americans whose lives he briefly described – both the victims and their relations and the everyday heroes (‘heroism is here, in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, all around us, just waiting to be summoned – as it was on Saturday morning’) – were the marks of one who, as Dreams From my Father vividly attested, happily worked among them in what was to become an apprenticeship for greater things.

Once a year the Belgian King and Queen organise a New Year reception for the ‘authorities of the European Union’s institutions’ – basically, the Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Secretaries-General, Permanent Representatives and other office holders. There’s some queuing, followed by an announcement and a quick handshake, followed by the reception itself. Whilst the King holds audiences with the Presidents of the Commission, Parliament and European Council, the other members of the Royal Family – the Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Mathilde – circulate. Last year I attended for the first time and wrote a post about Jan Fabre’s extraordinary ceiling. This morning, what struck me the most was that it is a sort of networking event par excellence. Certainly, my President and Vice-Presidents got a lot of business done, meeting with their counterparts in the various institutions…

The Lisbon Treaty – unanimously approved by the twenty-seven Heads of State or Government and ratified by the twenty seven member states – not only consolidated the roles of the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions but actually increased their tasks and prerogatives. The budgets of the Committees are truly tiny. Taken together, they represent just 2.56% of the EU’s overall administrative budget (the EESC represents 1.57% of that). The EESC’s budget of € 129m amounts to just 0.09% of the EU’s overall budget. Put another way, of the €284 that the EU will cost each citizen in 2011, just €0.25 will go towards the EESC – that’s right; just twenty-five cents.  The European Economic and Social Committee is composed of 344 members drawn from the twenty-seven member states, working in twenty-two different languages and producing on average over 200 reasoned opinions of high quality annually. Nine plenary sessions are held each year and in between these over two thousand meetings per year are organised, typically including a number of major conferences both in Brussels and in the Member States. A very small secretariat of around 750 officials (smaller than virtually all of the European Commission’s Directorates General) services all of these activities (translation included). When there’s talk about bangs for bucks, that seems to me to be a hell of a lot for 25 cents! Moreover, considerable economies – calculated to be around €30 million a year – are achieved because, in a revolutionary and exemplary arrangement, the two Committees pool a lot of their resources (they share their buildings and pool their translators, for example) in order to achieve economies of scale and synergies. But perhaps above all, the Committee provides excellent value for money because of the simple fact that its 344 members are not paid; their travel is reimbursed and they receive a daily allowance when on Committee business, but they do not get paid a salary for their work. (Reimbursement of members’ travel expenses will cost each EU citizen just 3.5 cents in 2011.) In other words, EESC members are volunteers; they work for the EESC because the organisations they represent in the member states believe it can make a difference and our members themselves feel that they can make an authentic contribution.

There has been a heavy emphasis on communication activities today. This morning I joined Anna Maria Darmanin, the Committee’s Vice-President with responsibility for communication, and Peter Lindvald-Nielsen, our head of communication, in a tutorial on the social media, including the niceties of Facebook and of Twitter. I have been thinking about the latter for quite a while but, after the tutorial, I took the plunge and did my first Tweet (@MartinWestlake). I now have all of the most appropriate bases covered, I think: website ; blog; Facebook; LinkedIn (though I am still uncertain about its use to people like me); and now, Twitter. Later, we had lunch together with Steve Clark, who is head of the European Parliament’s service for web communication and swapped notes with him about the most effective ways of using the social media (the Parliament had some significant successes in last year’s election campaign and has since been building on them). Last but not least, I went to our communication department’s mini-studio to record a New Year’s message to the Committee’s staff. In closing, I would like to reassure Mathew Lowry and all those who followed up his very interesting post (‘not losing the basics’) that I don’t believe the social media can substitute for getting the basics right, but they are increasingly important supplementary vectors and we will ignore them at our cost.

A full-page analysis in this morning’s Financial Times by Robin Harding and Chris Giles about inflation worryingly echoes the analysis Jeremy Rifkin made when he came to the European Economic and Social Committee last September. He reminded his audience that although everybody remembers 2008 primarily as being the year of the financial crisis, the first half of the year was characterised by rocketing oil and food prices, an inflation scare and food riots. (Google ‘2008 food riots’ and you will see for yourself just how worrying things got). Just recently the UN and the FAO have delivered solemn warnings that food prices are on the rise again. Rifkin’s argument was that one of these inflationary peaks for essential commodities such as corn and wheat could prove a tipping point into economic turmoil and social unrest. The FT’s analysis is more about the knock-on effects on inflation more generally (with the challenges that central banks will face). Not particularly agreeable morning reading…