I came across a terribly sad story in my newspaper this week. In Africa, in Somalia, somewhere near the Ethiopan border, a family sat down for their meal this past weekend. The mother was preparing the meal. The father and their children, a baby and six siblings between the ages of three and eleven, were just sitting down when an explosion occurred. The parents and the baby survived, but the six other children were killed outright. What had happened? There was a conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia in the late 1970s. Lots of landmines were sown in the frontier area. One of these had escaped the sweepers and inadvertently the family had built their house over it. The movement of the children had set it off. How dreadful! I could not get this story out of my head all week.

I am writing this at the end of a very busy week that saw, variously, meetings of the Committee’s Bureau (on Tuesday afternoon) and of its Plenary Session (Wednesday and Thursday). Thankfully, all went well. The plenary saw a number of important debates. I should flag up in particular a debate about food security in the world with guest speakers including Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Repporteur on the Right to Food, and Stephen Muchiri, Chief Executive of the Eastern African Farmers Federation (EAFF). The Committee’s clear conclusion is that food security is, and should be, a fundamental human right. We also had a distinguished guest in the form of Lalko Dulevsky (picture), who is President of the Bulgarian Economic and Social Council and who has been acting with great success as President of the overall network of national economic and social councils of the European Union. There could have been no better illustration of the way the newest member states are, at all levels and in all contexts, eager to play a full role in the Union’s economic and social life.

A tradition has grown at the Committee whereby on the Wednesday evenings of our plenary sessions ‘cultural evenings’ are organised. These provide food and refreshment but are primarily windows to illustrate the culture of a particular country or region. This evening the country was Italy, the country of our current President, Mario Sepi. Through the generosity of a number of Italian companies and organisations we were treated to a sumptuous feast and a wide array of examples of Italian culture, from antiquity through to modern times. As part of my official duties (honest) I posed with some examples of Italian fashion garments. The clothes, as you can see, were magnificent.

Talk at the dinner table over the weekend about my recent visit to the Bolshoi (to see The Nutcracker) led on to a discussion about Tchaikovsky and from there we got on to Swan Lake and from there it was but a small step (thanks to WiFi) to getting the laptop and digging out some clips on YouTube. So it was that we became fascinated by the pas de quattre. Here’s one Bolshoi version (here) and here’s another (here). Here’s a Kirov version (here). There are loads more clips out there but there is one wonderful parody that had us in stitches – repeatedly (here); see those men up on their points! – and one Japanese version that is just very clever as well as being very skilful (here). Extraordinary stuff!

I do solemnly swear to have lots of fun...

I wrote a post last year about an event that I think epitomises all that is best about the European Union and the European Economic and Social Committee and its staff. The staff Christmas party is an extraordinary feast. Tonight, two floors of the Committee’s atrium were choc-a-bloc full of laden stands, groaning under the weight of regional and national food and drink, much of it cooked or created by staff themselves, and all of it – absolutely all of it (extending to music and dance) – done on a voluntary basis. This event, which is, as far as I know, unique among the EU’s institutions, is a wonderful visual and culinary and cultural representation of Europe’s rich diversity. Every year our staff committee works this major organisational miracle and it really does warm the heart to see how much generosity and enthusiasm goes into the event. Well done, everybody; well done! To the left of me in the picture, incidentally, is Alan Hick, who has served as the staff committee’s President for many a year and announced in his opening speech that he was stepping aside. I am firmly of the opinion that the staff committee and the staff representative organisations are as vital a part of the overall administrative structure as any other, and I certainly rely heavily on their advice and support. Thank you, Alan, for everything!

cut!

This afternoon I had a novel experience. The Committee’s officials are spread out over six different buildings and there are simply too many of them for us realistically to be able to invite them all to a single meeting. At the same time, I wanted very much to be able to thank them personally for all of our extraordinary achievements this year and to wish them season’s greetings. The Communication Department’s answer is a recorded Christmas address that will be posted on our intranet site and can therefore be ‘streamed’ by colleagues when they wish. So at five this afternoon, when I got back to my office after a day of meetings, I found no less than seven people (variously; manager, director, camera operator, sound operator, telescript operator, make-up, and gofor) in my office, together with a jumble of very bright lights and a camera. I have never delivered a speech to camera before and never used a teleprompter. My colleagues will be the judge of how good my delivery was. I was conscious throughout that I was tired and tense and not smiling enough. Also, this was a ‘speech’ that I had written but not practised, and so there were quite a few awkward passages to be navigated. Still, this was an experiment and, if it works, I’ll be using this method again in the future so as to be able to communicate directly and personally with all of my staff.

In the evening I joined EESC Vice-President Irini Pari to award the top three prizes to the winners of the EESC’s 2009 European Design Award For a Sustainable Present (in cooperation with ‘Designed in Brussels’). The Committee had organised the awards in order to celebrate the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. First prize went to a young Irishman, James Ennis, who had designed a ‘bee house’, ‘united in diversity, living with bio diversity’.

Third prize winner

Second prize went to a young Italian, Mauro Amoruso, who had designed a small device, built out of recycled beer cans, which converts stress into green energy. Third prize went to a young Pole, Nika Anna Rams, who had designed a very witty sink plug to go in power sockets and hence remind us of the need to try and use less energy – cleverly entitled ‘useless’ (use less – dur….). Those ideas on the ‘long short list’ were also exhibited and it was clear that the jury had had a tough job – there were loads of excellent ideas. PS You can read what our Vice-President Irini Pari made of the experience on her blog here.

Ben Walden

I spent most of the day in a training seminar with all middle and senior management in the Committee. In the morning, we were addressed by Ben Walden (son of Brian), who is one of Olivier Mythodrama’s senior partners and an excellent actor. He took us through William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, teasing out the lessons within it about influence and leadership. In the first place, this was great fun, and not just because Walden brilliantly brought to life the characters and themes in Shakespeare’s play. The whole thing was a group experience and there were also interactive elements to the course. The basic message I, as Secretary General, wanted to get across, is that we are all – at whatever level and in whatever specialisation – part of the same management team, and that we must all pull together. A strong secondary message is that, to my mind, leadership is a public good and we owe it to ourselves and to those we manage to give ourselves such ‘time outs’ to think things through and discuss the common challenges we face.

My thingy got blocked and so I had to reset it. According to the factory settings, it gives a loud ‘ping’ whenever I receive an e-mail and a similarly loud ‘dring’ when I receive a text message. I haven’t had the time to adjust the settings yet, so this morning it started doing an imitation of Big Ben at six. There were understandable grumbles from the other side of the bed. ‘Who would start sending you e-mails or texts at six in the morning?’ came the demand. The answer is EESC members and, in particular, those in the eight EU member states who are on East European Time (one hour ahead of the Central European Time that Brussels is on). The EU has three time zones altogether, with a two hour difference between West and East. I remembered how the two-hour difference in Moscow had given me a sort of mini jetlag but, then, thought about the United States, which has nine standard time zones, and that led me in turn to remember a portrait somewhere in George Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human of Bill Clinton working the phones to the West Coast in the White House in the middle of the night. But the champion electoral challenge for time zones must be Russia, which has no less than eleven. Imagine working the phones there!

Jogging on the more familiar terrain of the Foret de Soignes this morning, a number of experiences came back to me and I list them here in no particular order. The first was some three years back, in Huangshan, China. Our guide one day was a young university student, eager to learn and completely open to discussion. He and I became engrossed in a discussion about political systems and at some point I made a dismissive comment along the lines of ‘but you don’t have real political parties’. ‘But of course we do!’ he replied, astounded, and then he listed some; a green party, I recall was among them, but not the Communist Party. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘and what about the Communist Party?’ ‘Ah!’ he replied, ‘but that’s the government.’ In the same period I participated in a seminar in Budapest with a number of television and newspaper journalists and was asked for my reaction to the recently-published Commission White Paper on Democracy, Dialogue and Debate. So I gave my reactions, in passing regretting the lack of emphasis on the role of political parties. ‘Political parties!’ they all exclaimed. ‘We’ve had enough of political parties! We don’t trust them at all! We’d much prefer to receive information through other vectors.’ And then there was that meeting in Moscow in the White House three days ago with the Vice-Prime Minister and three clearly very powerful figures: the business and trades union leaders and the President of the Civic Forum. I thought back to Italy and the Christian Democrats’ lengthy de facto monopoly of government (what Giovanni Sartori called ‘polarised pluralism’). What happened in that case was the evolution of ‘currents’ within the governing party, with competing personalities at their helms. Is that not what has been happening in China? And in Russia (where the United Russia party has 315 out of the 450 seats in the Duma)? One-party (or one-party-dominated) states are not necessarily monolithic nor are they necessarily undemocratic (or democratic) but clearly something new or different is occuring in these systems. Other organisations, in many cases with mass membership and considerable resources, are also ‘players’ in the system of governance (as they have always been, of course). But there are new such players and the balance of forces seems to be changing. When AICESIS President Antonio Marzoni explained the emerging concept of participatory democracy, about how civil society organisations’ legitimacy was drawn from the ‘real worlds’ which they represented, Zukhov and Velikov sat up and replied enthusiastically that that was what was also happening in Russia. And then I thought, last of all, about what the new European Parliament President, Jerzy Buzek, said to the EESC’s President, Mario Sepi, when the two met a few weeks back. ‘The Committee,’ he said, ‘is an important part of the democratic equation.’ Something is definitely going on, whether or not the term ‘participatory democracy’ is to be found in the Lisbon Treaty and it’s not just happening, or even not happening primarily, in the EU.