We watched Casino Royale this evening with a young thing who had only seen Skyfall. The first difference that strikes the eye is how much Daniel Craig has bulked out and, well, aged in the intervening six years (Skyfall’s plot makes the most of that, portraying Bond as a clapped-out psychopath). The second is how much tighter the direction of Casino seems, compared to Mendes’s Skyfall. That is not necessarily a criticism. Mendes deliberately gave his characters (above all, Bardem’s villain) time to develop. The difference, to use a fairground metaphor, is like that between those modern roller coasters that just will not leave their passengers alone, from beginning to end of the ride, and those that give the passenger the time to wonder about – and fear – what is going to come next. Put another way, Skyfall is more old-fashioned in its approach than Casino. Both are great entertainment, though comic imitations of Craig’s Bond’s running technique (flat hands held parallel to the body and pumped up and down alongside the ears, suit still buttoned, flaps flapping) are now endemic in the household…

To Antwerp this evening, to De Singel, to see the Tanztheater Wupperthal performing Pina Bausch’s Ten Chi. The piece was written as a series of observations – at times witty, at times sharper in tone – about contemporary Japanese society and culture. We came out of the theatre with divided opinions. It was, as one would expect, very well performed, but I found myself getting distracted. Most of the second half of the piece takes place under a constant flutter of fake snowflakes and even if they were not so much of a cliché when the piece was written, they become monotonous and redundant. Music and dance are interspersed with the spoken word, which was fine, but the performers only rarely interact, so that the overall construction of the piece seemed (to me) to be reduced to a series of solos and monologues. Those who were more unconditionally enthusiastic would surely dispute my use of the word ‘reduced’. There is, indeed, nothing wrong with a series of solos, but we know what these dancers are capable of not only on their own but also when they dance together. There were indeed fragmentary moments when they did dance together, but those left me wanting more. I’d better shut up, though, because the audience applauded ecstatically at the end…

Today I received a sweet gift. Some of the first labelled jars of the Committees’ honey! Blog followers will recall that the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions have installed two bee hives on the roof of their shared flagship headquarters building (the Jacques Delors building). Now, following an in-house competition, the jarred honey is ready for consumption and sports a label that includes the slogan ‘the bees are back in town.’ For those not of a certain age, this is a witty corruption of a Thin Lizzie hit from the 1970s. You can hear it here. And, yes, it’s true; the bees are back in town – at least our part of it.

Later in  the morning the EESC’s plenary session adopted, by a significantly big majority,  a resolution on ‘More Europe’, addressed to the participants in the 22-23 November European Summit. The resolution states that in the light of the ongoing crises the EU must restore trust in a dynamic growth model and in the legitimacy of its decision-making process. A strong, sustainable, social and competitive Europe must be built.’More Europe’, EESC President Staffan Nilsson declared after the vote, will be mutually reinforcing and stronger than the sum of its parts. One of those parts is civil society, and the resolution once again underlines the importance of fully implementing the provisions of Article 11 of the Lison Treaty. The text of the resolution is available here.

The EESC’s plenary session got back under way this morning with a debate on, and adoption of, an opinion on the European Commission’s Communication on ‘A Roadmap towards a Banking Union’. The rapporteur, Carlos Trias Pinto (Spain, Various Interests Group – picture), eloquently explained how the proposed banking union would place the banking sector on a more sound footing and restore confidence in the euro as part of a longer-term vision for economic and fiscal integration. Shifting the supervision of banks to the European level would be, he argued, a key part of this process, which would subsequently be combined with other steps such as a common system for deposit protection, and integrated bank crisis management. A banking union would, he concluded, represent a step towards the euro zone and the EU as a whole embarking on a virtuous cycle overcoming its design flaws and enabling the single market to regain competitiveness. The plenary wholeheartedly agreed!

This afternoon the EESC’s November plenary session got under way with a thematic debate on the provisions of Article 11(1) and (2) of the Lisbon Treaty – frequently referred to in the Committee as ‘participatory democracy’. The occasion was the Committee’s adoption of an own-initiative opinion, authored by the President of the Various Interests Group, Luca Jahier (Italy), on the same theme and the Committee was happy to welcome Isabelle Durant, Vice-President of the European Parliament with particular responsibility for relations with organised civil society, and Diogo Pinto, Secretary general of the European Movement International. In his intervention Luca Jahier reminded the plenary of the process that had led to these provisions being in the Treaty before arguing that they still needed to be fleshed out and listing the various ways in which this could be done. Indeed, the EESC was calling for the full implementation of Article 11 as a means to strengthening the democratic legitimacy of the EU and avoiding the rise of extremism in Europe. Investing in Article 11 would, Jahier argued, help bring citizens closer to the EU project and provide the platform for the institutions to listen and better take into account the views of its citizens. The EESC should be a key player in this process. Durant and Pinto concurred. ‘Citizens do us good,’ said Durant!

The Committee’s Bureau met this afternoon and addressed itself to a rich and dense agenda. One of the highlights of the meeting was a presentation by European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic of the Commission’s 2014 work programme. This was not a public meeting but I am giving no secrets away by writing that the Commissioner happily stayed for over two hours and responded in detail to all of the questions and points that were put to him. Such occasions are the embodiment of one of the provisions of Article 11(2): namely,  ‘The institutions shall maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with representative associations and civil society.’ The Vice-President was also fulfilling the Commission’s commitment, set out in the revised Protocol of Cooperation with the EESC, to present the annual work programme to the Committee.

Once more the familiar machinery of a plenary session week whirrs into action: early this morning, the management board meeting, and then the ‘pre-session’, and this afternoon a preparatory meeting of the enlarged Presidency (the President, Vice-Presidents, Group Presidents and the Secretary General). The challenge, as always, is to alloy the reliability and dependability of the administrative machine (particularly making sure that everything works and is in place, including everything to do with languages – translation and interpretation) with the authenticity of due political process (including the give-and-take of political debate and, at times, the unpredictability of outcomes).

This Sunday morning I was, alas, in the office, catching up. But I left the BBC (Radio 4) on and so was well aware when the eleventh hour, UK time, of the eleventh day of the eleventh month came. When Big Ben’s bells had sounded and the first canon shot was fired I instinctively stood to honour the two minutes’ silence and did not sit down again until the canon fired again to mark the end of the silence. This instinct was inculcated into me when I was young. Indeed, when I was a kid drivers would pull over to the side of the road and stop to mark the two minutes. That doesn’t happen now, but I heard that Twitterers in their thousands stopped their tweets and, of course, in various other ways the war dead of Europe’s conflicts were honoured. For the two minutes I chose to stand by my office window, where I could gaze out and down on the flags of the EU’s member states. We are living the solution to what went before, to such an extent that what went before is now unthinkable as a possible future scenario. That, in itself, is a massive achievement and reason enough to stand and reflect for two minutes.

To my mind, Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian vision, Brazil, is an all-time cinematic great. Alas, the two fifteen year-old lads with us this evening didn’t quite agree. To be fair, the film is quite old now. Still, its mixture of the slapstick and the bleak is, like Benigni’s La Vita e Bella and Orwell’s original 1984 (on which Brazil is loosely based) also an exploration of how the human mind might survive when all is, quite definitively, lost. Escapism (self-delusion and fantasy) is the basic answer (there is no way out and so only a way inwards), but if this need not be quite as fatalistic as Brazil’s vision, it is surely the only viable solution, as Viktor Frankl concluded in the ghastliest of circumstances imaginable.