When a Secretary General of one institution visits another, similar institution there is also institutional diplomacy involved, and so it was today. I met my good friend, CESE President Jacques Dermagne, for example, and we spoke about the growing cooperation between our institutions, and I had a series of meetings with CESE members and two future members of the European Economic and Social Committee. But perhaps the greatest privilege was to meet the doyen of the CESE, 91 year-old Philippe Dechartre, a truly historical figure who was born in Truong-Thi in Vietnam in 1919, served in the resistance with François Mitterrand, was a close friend of Pierre Mendes France, worked with Charles De Gaulle and served as a minister under Georges Pompidou, Maurice Couve de Murville and Jacques Chaban Delmas. Still sharp and lucid, Dechartre is a veritable living link with history.

… and I got up very early in order to take the seven o’clock train to Paris. After all that stress I needn’t have worried. The evidence-giving went very well and, taken together with the ensuing exchange, it did indeed feel almost like an academic seminar. As the Section’s rapporteur neatly summed up, I presented thesis, antithesis and synthesis. My thesis was the Jean Monnet vision of the nation state slowly dissolving. My antitheses (there were two) were, first, Alan Milward’s brilliantly counter-intuitive argument about The European Rescue of the Nation State and, second, the just-as-brilliant Andrew Moravcik’s argument that the self-interested nation state can best pursue its interests through liberal intergovernmentalism. The synthesis was the Luuk Van Middelaar analysis of three spheres: the traditional ‘concert of power’, based on alliances and balance of power; the Monnet vision, based on the Community method; and a middle sphere where the state paradoxically played a role that went beyond itself. I met Van Middelaar a month ago and I am convinced that we’re going to hear more from him. He’s currently Herman Van Rompuy’s speechwriter but he is best known in the Netherlands as an incisive and original political philosopher and a political commentator. His book, The Passage to Europe. A History of a Beginning, is currently being translated into both English and French, and will surely provoke a lot of interest. Anyway, my evidence was faithfully recorded by a stenographer and I’ll surely post it all when I receive the final version.

I stressed out for the rest of the evening. The thing is, a long time ago, when there were still reassuringly blank spaces in my diary, I agreed to give witness to a specialized Section of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council on a theme completely ‘out of area’ for me – namely, the role of the state in the new institutional context. In the meantime, however, all the blank spaces disappeared and now I suddenly realized that I had no speech just twelve hours before I was due to give evidence for at least 45 minutes to a large group of learned Frenchmen. Oh my gawd! I felt like an undergraduate again, on the eve of a tutorial for which I hadn’t yet written my essay (an all too frequent occurrence, I must confess). Back in those days I would have done an ‘all nighter’ – indeed, I still have fond memories of the college and chapel clocks chiming the hours as available time slowly diminished and my word count and knowledge slowly increased. I don’t have the stamina for all-nighters any more, but I did stay up into the wee small hours, ‘slogging’…

Later this evening I heard David Milliband, one of the five contenders in the forthcoming Labour leadership contest, talking at a private function. In appearance and mannerisms he is eerily reminiscent of Tony Blair in 1994 (I was writing a study of the 1994 European elections in the UK, when John Smith unexpectedly and tragically died and Blair came to sudden prominence). But Blair was then towards the end of a long period in the wilderness of opposition for his party (he himself was elected an MP in Labour’s notorious 1983 rout), whereas Milliband was talking at the end of a long period in government (Milliband, first elected as an MP in 2001, has already got one of the great offices of state, Foreign Affairs Secretary, under his belt). Unlike in 1997, whatever weaknesses Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition may have, lack of front bench experience is not among them.

This evening I met a living legend. The term is much-abused but sometimes it is appropriate. Richard Rose is one of the fathers of political science and, although he is an American, is also one of the fathers of European political science, most notably instrumental in establishing the European Consortium for Political Research back in 1970. He has been an extraordinarily prolific analyst of the political process (take a look at his publications list here). Interestingly, he has started to turn his inquisitive gaze beyond representative democracy and to look at interest group representation in the European Union and so, even more interestingly, he has started to look beyond the European Parliament and national parliaments and to take a particular interest in the European Economic and Social Committee. Yes, that’s right; the Committee. To give a taster, here is the intriguing title of a paper he has just submitted: ‘Explanation is not justification: Representation in the European Union System.’

In the morning we had a standard coordination meeting for the Committee’s senior management, but in the afternoon we retired to a conference room in a nearby hotel room, all blackberries and mobile phones off, for one of our occasional seminars. It has been fashionable to take the management team to a more geographically remote location, and to spend at least one night together in the hotel, and thus to favour team-building and socialization. But there is a crisis on out there and so we slimmed things down. The first part of our session was spent discussing how the administration can support political continuity, as we move into the last four months of Mario Sepi’s presidency. It is in the entirely understandable nature of things that each successive President wants to run a distinctive presidency. The administration is there to help ensure that the best of a presidency is preserved whilst each succeeding President is given the best possible support to achieve her/his aims. In the second part of the seminar we heard from an experienced management coach about the different ‘lenses’ through which colleagues can be viewed (for example, generalists versus details people). The underlying point is that a team needs differences in approach to complement team members’ strengths. Differences are not weaknesses, but strengths.

Today’s English newspapers carry obituaries of photographer Brian Duffy. Most of them describe his principle achievement as having been to capture the swinging 60s. But for me Duffy was always primarily famous for the image of David Bowie that appeared on the 1973 Aladdin Sane album. Once, on the H1 bus (a then new and revolutionary single deck bus line that ran from Kenton to South Harrow – single decker to get under various railway bridges), on my way to see a band at the Tithe Farm, I saw a boy with a perfect Aladdin Sane haircut plus the Sane lightning flash in make up across his face. I admired him hugely. In the first place, it must have cost a fortune (by our standards), for they would have had to dye his hair before ‘perming’ and blow drying it. In the second place, though, he was quite deliberately running a gauntlet, for the merest hint of androgynous features was regarded as a provocative target by the local bully boys, of whom there were many. To this day, a flash of that spikey red hair or even a few notes of Aladdin Sane transport me instantly back to the H1 bus and that Aladdin Sane look-alike on a long ago Saturday evening. Duffy is surely better known for other iconic images, but that’s the one that I’ll always associate with his name.

The only time I ever use the cruise control in our car is when we are driving through the St Gothard tunnel. The limit is a strict 80 kilometres per hour and you are strongly advised to keep a good distance from the vehicle in front of you. It’s a moment to stretch the legs and play the game of guessing the maximum temperature inside the tunnel (tip: there are two peaks at the southern end of the tunnel). On this occasion, though, I was suddenly given a graphic illustration of why – for right-handed people, at least – it is better to drive on the left. A lunatic in a camper van drove close up behind me and started to flash his headlights. No overtaking is allowed in the tunnel and I was going at my cruise-controlled 80 kph and, anyway, there was a lorry driving in front of me. And that’s when I realized. If we had been driving on the left, I could have wound down my right window and given the loonie an old-fashioned V-sign.

Yesterday we raced down to our beloved Italy in madcap style, here to this corner of paradise, for a few days’ escape. This morning I at last made it to the barber’s. Flavio is not Lino (see this post), but he plays a similar role in this local community and, just like Lino, he has forthright opinions on matters political. About half way through our conversation we got onto the Florida oil spill. Flavio was caustically scathing about the way in which our energy-hungry communities live beyond their means, taking technology beyond the prudent bounds that any halfway-serious risk analysis would impose. He told me about Tchernobyl and I understood why he felt quite so passionate. The cloud passed this way, and it rained. The inhabitants were banned from eating local-grown produce for many years. When they ran a Geiger counter over his hair it went wild. ‘And now we are paying the price,’ he told me grimly. The local death rate from cancer is much, much higher than the national average and people are dying much younger than they should. The lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s Yellow Cab came to me: Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you got till it’s gone… Will the Florida Keys ever truly and fully recover? Whatever, those people dying ugly, premature deaths in Northern Italy will surely not be around to see if that particular part of Paradise can be Regained.

At a recent writers’ group meeting, one of our venerable American members, Cleve Moffet, was vociferously championing the cause of the free-est possible forms of poetry. He cited as evidence the New York poets and, in particular, Frank O’Hara (1926-1966). To my eternal shame, I had never knowingly read Frank O’Hara, let alone the other members of the group of New York poets. So I immediately ordered an anthology and put the situation to rights. I am still not convinced (sorry, Cleve) that free-form prose presented in lines rather than paragraphs is poetry (though of course it can be poetical). On the other hand, I have discovered some real gems (thanks, Cleve). The New York poets may have been tortured souls, but they also had great wit. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’, for example, had me laughing out loud. You can read it here.