This evening I had the honour and the pleasure of dining with three EESC Presidents – the current President, Staffan Nilsson, and two previous Presidents, Roger Briesch (in the middle) and Dimitris Dimitriadis (on the left). By chance, they also represented the three different Groups in the Committee; employers (Dimitriadis), employees (Briesch) and various interests (Nilsson). The conversation ranged far and wide. A Thessaloniki-based businessman, Dimitriadis knows all about the current economic and social crisis. Briesch, a former Alsace-based steelworker, knows all about the side effects of re-structuring and the importance of social solidarity. And Nilsson, a dairy farmer, knows all about the current crisis in the dairy industry (caused through over-production and collapsing prices). Above and beyond all of that, though, all three remain convinced Europeans. Like all EESC members, their feet are firmly planted in the reality ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’ and that expertise is what they bring to the European policy-making process; they truly know what they are talking about.

The European Economic and Social Committee’s primary decision-making body, the Bureau, met today to prepare this week’s plenary session and to engage in a number of political discussions. The Bureau meeting had been well prepared by the enlarged Presidency’s meeting in Stockholm a week ago and all went well. Beyond the preparatory work, other highlights included an exchange of views with Danish Ambassador Jonas Bering Liisberg, on the balance sheet of the outgoing Danish presidency of the Council of the European Union and proposals from the Secretary General (that’s me) for adjustments to the administration’s establishment plan. In the sociology of EU institutions, changes to establishment plans (more often referred to, using the French term, as ‘organigrammes’) are potentially fraught affairs. The big structural changes came in December 2008, just three months after I had started as SG. Today’s proposals were simply adjustments, particularly taking into account the current climate of austerity, but also the potential arising out of the Lisbon Treaty. Thus, taking advantage of a retirement, I proposed to do away with one of the two positions of Deputy SG (a rationalisation but also a budgetary saving) and to beef up the Committee’s prospective function. Happily, the proposals were, just like my December 2008 proposals, unanimously approved, which is just how it should be. Normally when I write a post about the Bureau I put, as an illustration, a picture of… a bureau. Today, for a change, I am posting a picture of an insect, fashioned out of paper clips by the President, Staffan Nilsson, as he also concentrated on the debates. I should add that I did the wings. Anorak that I am, I have a collection of such ‘doodles’, including many of Martin Bangemann’s expert yacht designs, ‘doodled’ during parliamentary debates. Both Staffan and I liked the insect, now immortalised on this blog!

This lunchtime I attended the launch of a very good book, just produced by the EESC, entitled Active Citizenship. As Vice-President with responsibility for communication, Anna Maria Darmanin, explained in her speech at the launch, ‘In this book, 24 EESC members talk about their personal contribution, as business people and trade unionists, campaigners and volunteers, revealing a vast and fascinating range of different interests and priorities. What they all have in common is that they express a sense of solidarity with others in society, and concern for their welfare.’ I particularly like the book because it gives a good cross-section of the Committee’s membership and, in so doing, provides examples of the authenticity of its members and hence demonstrates why the Committee is unique among the EU institutions – and its free upon request (the book, not the Committee)! The picture shows Anna Maria with our ever-excellent head of communication, Peter Lindvald Nielsen, whose team provided the technical and journalistic back-up that made the book possible. Well done everybody!

We found ourselves at a dinner table this evening with two very distinguished academics, historian Jonathan Steinberg and musicologist and dance historian Marion Kant, with specializations in, among other subjects, matters Germanic. Steinberg last year published a major new biography of Bismarck and Kant has edited the Cambridge Companion to Ballet and published widely on the relationship between ideology and dance. The conversation scintillated and it was one of those most pleasurable of occasions when you know you are going to learn a lot effortlessly and enjoyably. Among Steinberg’s many fascinating forays was a comparison of English and German university systems in the nineteenth century. Whereas English public schools were turning out ‘chaps’ ready for the regiment or the city and only budding clergymen went to university, Germany was bathing in the dynamic concept of wissenschaft, a term impossible to translate and representing a holistic concept of the acquisition of knowledge which became the guiding spirit of German universities in the 19th century.

I spent all of this morning, together with approximately five hundred other anxious (and then relieved and proud)  parents, at my daughter’s school for the proclamation du baccalaureat. There were speeches and musical interludes (provided by brilliantly gifted young musicians) and then the names of the 223 bacheliers were read out and each made his or her way up to the podium to receive the certificate. Among the speeches was an excellent one made by European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic. He told the bacheliers passionately that it was ‘a duty of each generation to change the world’. ‘You’ve been born with laptops and mobile phones in your hands… you don’t know what it is to be racist…’ But perhaps the most touching phrase was made by one of the student representatives, a young lady whose name I didn’t catch. She told her fellow bacheliers that ‘You should in your own way put stars on our blue flag.’ I am sure they will. (The photograph shows proud father with happy daughter and the equally happy son, Matthieu, of a Committee colleague.)

Today the European Economic and Social Committee held one of its summer ‘literary lunches’. The theme this year is the crime novel and the guest author today was Simon Lelic. Simon read excerpts from two of his three novels, Rupture and The Child Who, before taking questions from the audience. Of course, I was there as SG, but I also had my notebook out. Simon explained the concern, explored in these novels, as to why atrocities occur (a shooting incident at a school and a child who murders another child respectively) and his dissatisfaction with simply labelling people, or children, as ‘monsters’. His books, therefore, could be better described as ‘Why dunnits?’ rather than ‘Who dunnits?’ I was interested to learn that Simon does any necessary research after he has got the first draft out of the way. He feels research risks getting in the way of the writing. Simon was introduced by EESC member Richard Adams and the British Council’s Robin Davies. The EESC has always enjoyed a good relationship with the British Council and no doubt that will continue. Still, we were sad to learn that Robin is moving on (to Bangladesh, as it happens) and we wish him well.

Sad news from Paris. Jacques Dermagne, President of the French Economic and Social Council 1999-2010 and of the International Association of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions 2003-2005, died yesterday in Paris at the age of 75. I came to know Jacques well and counted him as a friend. He was very supportive when I first started as Secretary General of the European Economic and Social Council. He was absolutely convinced of the important flanking role organised civil society should play in his own country and the European Union but also in all countries, hence his passionate involvement in the International Association of Economic and Social Councils. As a person, he was warm and witty, as this little episode illustrated. Characteristically, he spent the last part of his active life in supporting humanitarian work.

Our last formal engagement was a lunch hosted by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) at the organisation’s headquarters, where we were welcomed by the EESC’s own Ellen Nygren. A venerable organisation (it was founded in 1898), LO is imbued with a particularly Swedish mixture of common sense and collegiality. There was a David Low cartoon on the wall, together with several paintings of industrial landscapes, but this could otherwise have been any boardroom. The LO has published a leaflet on the Swedish model and the importance of collective agreements in Sweden and it is well worth while reading. Food for thought!

Between the end of the enlarged Presidency meeting and our last formal engagement in Stockholm I just had the time to catch up with an old friend and former fellow Brussels writers’ workshop member, Jeremy Duns. Jeremy used to be a Brussels-based journalist, writing a spy thriller with the workshop. When he’d finished the manuscript he started to send it to agents. One agent, specialised in the genre, liked his work and before Jeremy knew it he had got a three book deal with Simon and Schuster. Now he enjoys that much dreamt-of status; he is a full-time author. We caught up on friends and acquaintances and Jeremy gave me some valuable tips on approaching the modern market.

The EESC’s enlarged Presidency met again this morning, first holding an exchange of views with Sweden’s Minister of Environment, Lena Ek. Like our own President, Staffan Nilsson, the minister had just returned from the Rio+20 conference. Swedes and Sweden feel a paternalistic sense of responsibility for the Rio process; after all, the first major international conference on environmental issues was the 1972 Stockholm Conference. With great lucidity and mastery of her subject, Lena Ek described the underlying dynamics of the negotiating process and the various tactics and strategies involved. In overall terms, the conference outcome was not on a par with the EU’s ambitions but she argued that it nevertheless gave the EU a basis on which to continue its work in a key number of areas. She was frank about the disappointments, particularly on the marine environment front, and she stressed the role that the Committee and civil society organisations more generally now had to play in ‘bringing Rio home’.