There were a number of important opinions on this afternoon’s plenary agenda, and it’s always invidious to single out one for special attention. Nevertheless, an opinion on the future strategy for the EU’s dairy industry (rapporteur: Frank Allen, an Irish member of the Various Interests Group) caught my ear and my eye. One striking statistic in Frank’s introductory presentation explains why milk is such an important topic for the EU. The European Union is responsible for 27% of the world’s annual production of milk. In second place comes India, with 20%. The United States is third, with 16%. Whenever the EU debates agricultural issues, the arguments are as much about cultural and social identity as they are about economics, and this occasion was no different. As Frank pointed out, large scale feedlots, with over 2,000 cattle on ‘a patch of sand’ and dependent only on foodstuffs and chemicals rather than grazing, are already a reality in the US. Whatever the future of the EU dairy industry, it cannot be – shouldn’t be – this.

Irini Pari

This week’s plenary session kicked off with a presentation by Irini Pari, our Vice-President responsible for communication matters, of the Committee’s communication strategy for the next five years. Irini, who is, as she put it, ‘A Greek, a Belgian and a passionate European’ gave convincing reasons as to why and how the Committee and its members had a special role to play. Above all, she argued, the Committee’s perceived weaknesses are actually its strengths; being ‘only’ a consultative body, it can speak its mind, and the fact that its members are part-time volunteers gives the Committee a special and unique authenticity. Irini stressed the fundamental difference between information and communication, which latter was as much about listening; ‘two monologues do not make a dialogue’. In the ensuing debate, the new strategy that Irini has so passionately and eloquently championed was soundly endorsed. It was a great start to the plenary!

Jeannette

I have been been blogged again by Jeannette. My ‘exercise’ from two weeks ago is now on her blog, which is very kind of her. You can read it here. The story it tells is basically true. I have been thinking of writing it up into a ‘proper’ short story – when I find the time, that is. Brussels, I feel, is full of such stories, particularly among the drifting expatriate community.

This morning was a typical Monday morning in a plenary session week, with an earlier-than-usual meeting of the Directors followed by a ‘pre-session’ meeting of all of the services involved in the organisation and management of this week’s plenary session. But then, just as the pre-session meeting was about to begin, we heard news of a bad train crash at Halle, on the line from Mons to Brussels. Twenty or more people may be dead and a much larger number are feared injured. At least one of our colleagues was on one of the trains involved although, thankfully, survived with only minor injuries. We anxiously await news and, of course, our hearts go out to those who have lost loved ones or been badly injured. There is, as yet, no clear indication of the cause. Stop press: another colleague was on board one of the trains but is fortunately OK.

This evening I had a most enjoyable meal with Nigel, Brian and John; the composer and two musicians involved in the West Malling Concert (see various October posts including this one). Before the meal we listened to an electronically-produced version of Nigel’s Earthrise composition. I am amazed at how quickly he has produced a substantive and original piece of work – though he confessed he had been getting up at three or four in the morning to get the thing written out. And I got a chance to try out the first draft of my accompanying poem. Sharing a meal with musicians – especially those that have worked together – is always an enjoyable experience. They have a seemingly inexhaustible fund of stories and anecdotes about musicians, composers and performances. The last time we met we had been laughing about a Charlie Drake joke. Drake plays, among others, a triangle player in an orchestra who has a single note to play. He starts counting right from the very beginning of the piece and the gag is that he counts wrongly and so never gets his moment of glory. (You can see the whole sketch here.) John, a conductor, explained to me that this is not so far from the truth. There is, somewhere out there, a whole orchestral piece where the score calls for just one cymbal clash, but he couldn’t remember which it was. The search is on! Was it Bruckner? Beethoven? I await the winning entry!

My composer friend, Nigel Clarke, has invited me to team up with him once again. He was recently appointed guest composer for the Buizingen Brassband here in Belgium and is busy writing an original piece for them to perform in the European Brassbands Championship. The title of his piece is Earthrise and Nigel has invited me to write an accompanying poem, as I did for Heritage Suite. This is a slightly taller order than writing a poem about a Kentish town, though that too was a great challenge. To help me out, Nigel offered me a book, Earthrise, by Robert Poole, and I have been galloping my way through it. It’s a fascinating read. If I ever knew, I had long since forgotten that the Russians beat the Americans to the moon; their unmanned Zond 6 mission got there more than a month before Apollo 8, and took the first photographs of the earth rising (though a Lunar Orbiter probe took some fuzzy, grainy shots in 1966). But it’s the ancient history that is perhaps the most fascinating; Plato, Cicero, Ovid, Seneca and Lucian all tried to imagine what the earth would look like from afar, and with a fair degree of accuracy. In the 1630s already, Kepler imagined journeying to the moon and looking back at the earth and Jules Verne and H.G. Wells penned convincingly accurate descriptions of the clouds and the seas and the colours. Poole’s account is also full of wonderful ironies. For example, the crew of Apollo 8 only first saw the moon when their spacecraft travelled behind it. Because of the position of their ship, they had spent the whole of their quarter of a million mile journey gazing back at the receding earth! Happily, I have completed a first draft of the poem and must now start knocking it into shape.

It has been a strange week. Beyond the usual coordination meetings, there was only one ‘set piece’ meeting, of the Committee’s Budget Group, on Tuesday morning, and when I looked at my timetable on Monday morning it did not seem as full to overflowing as is normally the case. And yet, in reality, it was quite a heavy week. This was down to a succession of meetings, most of them with individuals – members and staff – on a number of fraught or difficult topics. It reminds me of the observation made by a military man (was it Wellington?) that he feared grape shot more than cannon balls. Meanwhile, in the EU institutions more generally, there was a strong sense of a collective rolling-up of sleeves and getting down to things: the Barroso II Commission was at last approved and able to get to work, and the new-style European Council met, convoked by its new-style President, Herman Van Rompuy. The birthing pains of the new External Action Service will no doubt rumble on but, thankfully, we can otherwise put constitutional discussions behind us (for a while, at least) and get back to the EU’s primary raison d’être; to make Europe work.

Peacemaking in progress

Barack Obama’s travails in both domestic and foreign policy have led me to re-visit American presidential politics a little. It is a land strewn with ironies. Take the three Presidents of my childhood; JFK, LBJ and Nixon. Kennedy won against Nixon in 1960 by just two-tenths of one per cent of the popular vote (120,000 votes); 49.7% to 49.5%. There were serious allegations of voting abuses in Texas and Illinois. Though it is a matter of record that Kennedy intended to withdraw from Vietnam if he had been re-elected in 1964 (whether he would actually have done it was another matter), it was Kennedy who first got America deeply involved. Johnson won in his own right in 1964 with a massive landslide; 61% of the vote and a 15 million vote margin. Thereafter, he introduced a raft of ‘Great Society’ domestic legislation, from medicare to civil rights, famously losing the south to the Democrats for a generation. Notoriously, LBJ escalated American involvement in Vietnam. In effect, ‘tough’ foreign policy bought him the support to get his liberal domestic agenda through. Put more bluntly, the Vietnamese paid for American civil rights. It was not until 1973 that Richard Nixon was able to drag America out of Vietnam with some honour. In religious terms, an East Coast Catholic was followed by a man drawn from the Southern Baptist tradition who was, in turn, followed by a West Coast Quaker. That last piece of information is surely the most ironic of all. Nixon, the ‘warmongerer’ of my childhood memories, stated in his inaugural address that “the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” Looking, in retrospect, at his first term – China, Vietnam, détente, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty – he could lay some claim to that title. And there may be lessons for Obama in all of that history, for Nixon first escalated the war in Vietnam and surrounding countries before negotiating a ceasefire and effective American withdrawal.

Anakrouze

This evening we went to a double charity performance for the Human Rights League. First up was Anakrouze, an all-female a capella choir. They treated us to a whistle-stop tour around the world, with songs from Corsica to the Congo, from Bulgaria to Togo, Lithuania to Zimbabwe. This was followed by a performance of Bach’s mass in B minor, performed by a largely amateur choir (Andantino) and a mixture of amateur and professional musicians (the Acanthe Orchestra). The performance was to a high standard and the more enjoyable for the fact that it was probably performed in conditions that Bach would have known well – in a church, with amataeurs and professionals. The conductor, Samir Bendimered, summed up the spirit of the evening; a Belgian, of Algerian origin, born in Morocco, performing for free for a common cause.