This morning the Committee adopted by a large majority a resolution entitled ‘No Turning Back’ which will be submitted to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. The resolution spells out the EESC’s disappointment with the lack of progress in the negotiations and insists that the EU should honour its original commitment of a 30% reduction by 2020 and its recently-endorsed long-term target of reducing emissions by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. You can read the resolution here. The Committee went on to stage a set-piece thematic debate on Compenhagne and the climate change issue together with Jöran Hägglund, Swedish Secretary of State for Energy (on behalf of the Swedish Presidency), MEP Jo Leinen, President of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee, and Olivier Deleuze, Director of the United Nations’ Environment Programme. It was an excellent debate. Everybody is agreed on what needs to be done, so why isn’t it happening? I record here just one ‘soundbite’, said by Jo Leinen: ‘Europe has established peace between man and nations; now it must establish peace between man and nature.’

It’s very nearly ten this Wednesday evening and I’m still with my files in the office and with one engagement still to go this evening but, nevertheless, a number of those ‘planes’ I wrote about in the previous post have come in smoothly and on time.  The enlarged Presidency and the Bureau meetings yesterday went very well. Happily, the Bureau confirmed the appointment of one of two Deputy Secretaries General, Wolfgang Jungk. This is excellent news all round.  It means that I can start doing some serious delegating and concentrating on the more strategic stuff. And today’s plenary session, despite a very heavy agenda, was a great success. One of the highlights was the visit of the European Parliament’s new President, Jerzy Buzek (a former Polish Prime Minister). His speech (in part about EESC-EP relations but mainly about climate change) and reply was full of witty observations. For example, when the President of our Various Interests Group, Staffan Nilsson, pointed out that Sweden and Poland had shared the same king (Sigismund III Vasa) for a while (1592-1599), Buzek jocularly recalled that in the seventeenth century it had been possible to travel by horse from Gdansk to Stockholm across a frozen Baltic sea. Not possible now, he speculated, because of … global warming. I’ll write some separate posts on the substance of the debates but I’d better run now.

Lisbon supporter

After the visit of President Buzek and the awards ceremony for the civil society prize, the Committee’s plenary session moved onto a thematic debate about the post-2010 Lisbon Strategy. (You can read more about the debate and the various resolutions and opinions here.) The main opinion (rapporteur: Wolfgang Greif, Employees, group, Austria) argues that the post-2010 Strategy must necessarily take into account the effects of the current crisis as well as the effects of all the efforts to limit the crisis and get out out of it. Special emphasis therefore needs to continue to be placed on growth and jobs and the importance of safeguarding social rights. The opinion, together with an integrated report to be drafted by the EESC and national Economic and Social Councils, will be submitted to the March 2010 European Council.

with our Vice President Irini Pari

This afternoon the Committee awarded its annual civil society prize to no less than six civil society organisations. A joint first prize was awarded to LIBERA international and Confindustria Sicilia (Italy). Two second prizes were awarded to two European organisations: the European Association of History Educators (EUROCLIO) and Volonteurope. Lastly, two third prizes were awarded to the Fondation Nicolas Hulot pour la Nature et l’Homme (France) and to the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber (WKO). You can read all about the winners here. Both LIBERA and Confindustria Sicilia received their joint first prizes for their work in fighting against organised crime and the enlarged Presidency will be travelling to Palermo next week for a special award ceremony to honour and support their courageous stance.

Afficionados of Star Trek will fondly recall how Captain Kirk would sometimes order the good ship U.S.S. Enterprise to proceed to Planet X with all speed, whereupon Sulu would accelerate to Warp Factor 5, and suddenly the Enterprise would accelerate beyond the speed of light and, via time warps, race to its new destination. Like a latter day (former day?) Sulu, President Vaclav Klaus signed the Lisbon Treaty at 15.00 today and suddenly the good ship EU Enterprise has accelerated towards its post-Lisbon Treaty destination, where it will arrive at precisely 00.01 a.m. on Tuesday, 1st December. The sound of drawers collectively clicking open and Plan As being brought out of their plain brown paper envelopes was almost audible. In a matter of seconds we warped forward from possibility to certitude, from the desirable to the definite, from discreet speculation to hurried planning. We SGs and administrators are busy strapping phasers to thighs as we head for the transportation room. We’ve been studying planet Lisbon Treaty from a distance for some time now. It seems similar to Planet Nice in many respects, but our sensors are picking up some important differences. Prepare to beam us down, Scotty!

Meetings ahoy

When you go past London Heathrow on the M 25 you can sometimes see ten or more planes lined up in the sky, coming in to land. As I look out on the rest of this week, the ‘sky’ looks similarly charged with numerous coming events. It starts this morning at 08.30 with a meeting of the enlarged Presidency and this afternoon there’s the Bureau. Dotted between those are a business lunch and a business dinner and various other meetings. Tomorrow, we have a heavily charged plenary session, starting with a visit from the new President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek. Then our President, Mario Sepi, will be giving out the Committee’s annual civil society prizes. That’ll be followed by a set-piece debate on the Lisbon strategy and economic growth. At lunchtime, we’ll be watching a film about climate change, The Age of Stupid, and after the plenary there’s a Swedish Cultural Evening and after that I have another engagement. On Thursday the Committee will be debating and adopting a pre-Copenhagen resolution on climate change and following that up with a thematic debate on the topic together with a Swedish minister, Jöran Hägglund, and Jo Leinen, President of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee.  And on top of all of that we have plenty of ‘normal’ opinions to be debated and adopted. It’s my job in part to help all of those ‘planes’ come in, one after another, land and clear the runway for the next event. Here’s to smooth landings!

I took a few days’ holiday last week – mostly devoted, alas, to nursing myself back from a bout of flu. Oh well. I took advantage to re-read a book I enthused about in a post a while back, Leave Me Alone, by David Karp. ‘David Who?’ I hear you ask. Indeed. The first and last time I read this book was over thirty years ago. It made a deep impression on me then and I would still recommend it as an excellent read now. Karp, who died at the age of 77 on 11 September, wrote six accomplished novels before switching to writing television plays and scripts in his 40s. The back cover blurb to my Gallanz edition of Leave Me Alone states that Karp had ‘a touch of greatness about him’. The novels do indeed suggest great promise and then, with apparent suddeness, he switched to TV scripts. I assume (I can’t find a sufficiently long bibliographical piece with an explanation) that, on the one hand, he got fed up with low sales for his excellently worked novels and, on the other, he was tempted by the better money he would have been offered by TV. I suspect many other writers of that generation were similarly tempted and many of them probably succumbed. But the result is that today we still talk about Graham Greene (for example) but nobody talks about David Karp. I thought I was alone with this reflection until I did a Google and came up with this fellow blogger’s very similar view. The reflection was timely because my writers’ group met this evening minus one of its number (now there’s a good title for a radio play; One of Our Writers is Missing), who has decided that he’s going to concentrate on playwriting and video work, having got fed up with waiting for the publishing world to renew its interest in him (he has an excellent published novel under his belt already). I’m not making any sort of critical point here, especially not because I think our fellow writer is very talented and that something is going to have to break for him soon. But I can’t help but suspect that success as a novelist is more ubiquitous than success as a scriptwriter of any sort. After all, which is better known; Dashiell Hammet or David Simon? Is that, I wonder, why one of Karp’s characters remarks that ‘Fiction is the frosting to the cake of publishing’?

I received a very generous present this week from a part-Slovenian colleague. It was a replica of the decorated front board of a bee hive. By chance, the next day I welcomed a new Slovenian colleague, Vlasta, a translator, to the Committee and I mentioned the present and showed it to her. She, it transpired, had worked as a translator in the Slovenian press agency during Slovenia’s accession negotiations. I had forgotten (but did I know this?) that Slovenia has its own indigenous bee variety, the Carniolan bee, which is both docile and highly productive (see here, for example). Bees and honey have traditionally played a very important role in Slovenian culture, hence the painted hive front boards. Vlasta studied mine and then told me what the images were about, and I quote (Europe, endless!  – and thank you, Guy and Vlasta!): 

The picture is called “Pegam and Lambergar” and it depicts a duel between the mythical Slovenian hero Lambergar and a foreign soldier called Pegam. Continue reading

The other day I wrote a post about another of my poems, Crushed Salamander, that has recently been published in an anthology. My poet and fellow-blogger, Jeannette, very kindly proposed to post my poem on her blog, and so here it is, together with the little story that goes with it.

A friend, Kjell Torbiorn, who is the Head of Private Office to the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and a Professor at Syracuse University (see 15 October post) has the particular distinction of having been a pop star in Sweden in his youth. He wrote a number of popular hits and recorded several albums and then… And then he did several degrees and a doctorate and ended up as a high-ranking civil servant. But as Kjell gradually reaches retirement age so his previous incarnation is steadily reasserting itself. Just this week he sent me a demo recording of a song he co-wrote with two friends entitled ‘Once in a lifetime’. It’s a pretty duet and, well, I just cannot get the melody out of my head – surely a guarantee of success? In any case, they’re shortly going to record a professional demo and then try to sell their song. I am convinced you’ll be hearing it on your radios next year. You’ll know the one; the one with the melody you can’t get out of your head.