To Halle this afternoon for a show entitled ‘Stars in Brass’. The primary stars in question were Brassband Buizingen, one of Europe’s top amateur brassbands. Under the skillful baton of Luc Vertommen, the band performed a series of pieces ranging from an adaptation of Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro) to the world premiere of composer-in-residence Nigel Clarke’s When worlds collide. The band’s manager, Eddy Vanhaelen, is making a conscious effort to bring in a new, young audience, and so the second half of the bill saw the band accompanying Flemish heart throb Jasper Steverlink as he worked his way through a song list that concluded with an excellent rendition of David Bowie’s Life on Mars. This was followed by a last surprise act, a Michael Jackson imitator dancing and singing Billie Jean. Vanhaelen’s plan worked. There were plenty of young people in the audience who probably would never otherwise have come to listen to a brass band and it was clear that they had liked what they’d heard. After all, few sounds can be more impressive than a brass band working its way, crescendo fashion, to a loud conclusion!

For once, the sun shone on Schaerbeek’s annual Carnival parade. Whenever I can, I walk to the end of my road each year to watch it. It is a quintessentially Belgian occasion, from the somewhat moth-eaten old mascots and giants to the beer-drinking performers and marching bands and the sheer fantasy of the costumes. (The ones in my picture were literally fashioned out of lampshades!) This year, as I was minding my own business, watching the floats as they proceeded towards me down the rue Dailly, I got pelted with boiled sweets. Now, this is a traditional part of the occasion, the throwing of sweets and fruit to (or at) the onlookers. But this bombardment of sweets was particularly persistent. I looked around and there was Isabelle Durant, Vice-President of the European Parliament, resplendent in a Caribbean costume and bandanna and with a big grin on her face!

Today the European Economic and Social Committee’s steering committee on the Europe 2020 strategy met in the presence of representatives from the network of national economic and social councils and similar bodies. The steering committee, chaired by Joost Van Iersel (Dutch, Employers’ Group), was addressed first by the Committee’s President, Staffan Nilsson, and then by Richard Corbett, a member of the private office of the President of the European Council. Corbett came to recount the substance and the dynamics of the European Council’s recent work in looking beyond the crisis towards growth and jobs. It was good to welcome Richard to the Committee. I have known him since we were young officials, he in the Parliament, me in the Commission, and we were both writing academic articles about the institutions and the integration process. Later, we would become fellow authors under the same publishing imprint. Richard went on to become a much respected MEP and now he is an advisor to Herman Van Rompuy. The basic message: we are not out of the woods yet and much remains to be done but if we stick to what we have agreed then the worst is over as far as the financial markets are concerned, leaving the Union to concentrate more fully on the twin challenges of sustainable growth and jobs.

We held another meeting – the fourth – of our enlargement (Croatia) task force this morning. Preparations are well under way for the July 2013 arrival of the European Union’s twenty-eighth Member State, our nine new Croatian members and a twenty-fourth working language. It looks as though this task force will become a standing one, as various potential new Member States work their way towards us; no more ‘big bangs’ of the 2004 and 2007 sort, then, but gradual expansion.

Over the past two days the European Economic and Social Committee has been holding a conference to mark the 50th anniversary of EU farming policy. The aim of the conference was not only to celebrate the CAP but also to highlight the future challenges and opportunities facing the EU, regarding this key policy, and to express the expectations of European civil society. Participants from EU institutions, Member State governments and stakeholder organisations have been discussing the CAP’s impact on farmers, consumers, food security and trade. They have also been sharing their hopes and expectations concerning EU agriculture over the next 50 years. In his introductory speech, EESC President Staffan Nilsson, stressed that “after 50 years, the CAP is still very young and constantly changing, and remains the only truly common European policy”. He continued, saying that “we all have the responsibility to build the new CAP for our future and for the future of our children” and emphasised the importance of “supporting innovation, research and development, strengthening the capacities of farmers, increasing investments in agriculture and reducing food wastage at all stages.” Mario Campli, President of the EESC’s Agriculture, Rural Development and Environment (NAT) section, said that a “new pact” is needed between different actors of European farming “to secure the future for agriculture in Europe”. Commissioner Dacian Ciolo?, responsible for agriculture and rural development, took part in the closing session. “The road towards the new Common Agricultural Policy is still ahead of us, its destination being a policy that answers the expectations of all European citizens”, he said. “Civil society’s contribution to this reform process is vital, and the role of the European Economic and Social Committee as a platform mobilising all stakeholders concerned is essential”.

At lunchtime to an informal meeting, organised by the EESC’s President, Staffan Nilsson, in order to explore new ways of opening up the EESC in areas such as consultation, working methods and content delivery. The guest speaker today was Hannes Leo, an Austrian economist specialised in innovation policy, and also a delegate to the EESC’s Consultative Commission on Industrial Change. Leo explained a software development, Cbase, that allows the authors of documents to consult with colleagues on all parts of the document, paragraph by paragraph and, through an algorithm, to identify possible bases for compromise and consensus. An interesting tool for consultative work…

I continued with my ‘meeting the troops’ series this morning, enjoying a working breakfast with the Infrastructure Unit. Infrastructure is part of the Joint Services, the pioneering arrangement whereby the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions pool their resources in a series of horizontal areas in order to achieve synergies and economies of scale. That meant that I met with officials from both Committees. Indeed, the Head of the Unit, Marc De Feu, is a Committee of the Regions official. The Unit is one of the Committees’ engine houses, maintaining and improving our buildings and the equipment within them. It has a major budget and is frequently involved in tendering processes and it has in its ranks a number of specialists. The Unit is also in the front line of the Committees’ successful efforts to win the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme award. I used the metaphor of a car. The driver does not worry all the time about the state of the engine and the functioning of the gears and the brakes. Indeed, drivers tend mostly to take these things for granted, for they are ‘out of sight and out of mind’. But it is only thanks to these colleagues that we, European Economic and Social Committee and Committee of the Regions, can drive our ‘cars’.

To the Bozar this evening to listen to Leonidas Kavakos’s sublime rendering of Sibelius’s violin concerto in D minor. I have blogged about Kavakos before. His is a natural talent that makes everything seem, well, easy. He was accompanied this evening by the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest under the familiar command of Valery Gergiev. The Sibelius was preceded by Henri Dutilleux’s Métaboles and succeded by Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. I am sure I was not alone in finding the Prokofiev a rather heavy digestif to follow on from Kavakos and Sibelius and I mean no disrespect to the performers nor to the composer in saying that I could have left happily after the violin concerto.

Phew! It’s over. As Peter Jackson put it on the tournament’s official website, ‘After a grand total of 4,387 passes, 2,965 tackles, 582 penalties, 336 lines-out, 128 scrums, 46 tries and 12 yellow cards, the six-week extravaganza boiled down to one undisputed fact. Wales swept the board – Triple Crown, RBS Six Nations title and the Grand Slam.’ Italy meanwhile won in Rome, leaving Scotland to pick up the wooden spoon. And England beat Ireland 30-9 with a lot of new young talent on display. Whilst Wales’s grand slam – their third since 2005 – provides some consolation for their World Cup quarter final defeat against France – the narrow (8-9) losers in the World Cup final, the same France, finished fourth in the table. Indeed, last autumn’s New Zealand World Cup seems an age away already. England host the next World Cup in 2015 and this new young team could peak nicely to profit from home advantage…. Well, it’s a nice dream.

I found myself at the lunch table with a Latvian, a Slovenian and a Swedish colleague. Somehow, the conversation got onto the former Yugoslavia and I found myself reminiscing aloud about two great Yugoslavian professors who had taught me at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) in 1980. One, the late Branko Pribicevic, studied with G.D.H. Cole and was a noted expert on workers’ participation, syndicalism and guild socialism (and supervised the MA thesis I blogged about here). The other, Bogdan Denitch (picture), took American nationality but retained his Yugoslavian passport and frequently went back there. Still very much alive, Bogdan, always a larger-than-life character, was that rarest of birds, an American socialist, and he taught a course (I forget its exact title) on comparative socialism (all credit to SAIS for offering such courses but, then, Johns Hopkins set up its Bologna Center precisely because until around that time it was, together with Turin and Milan, one of the tips of a ‘red triangle’). In those days, Yugoslavia was the champion of the Non-Aligned Movement, Sweden was a founder member of the European Free Trade Association, Latvia was under the yoke of the Soviet Union and Eurocommunism was a major debating topic in Italy and Spain.  And, I reminisced, I distinctly recalled Denitch comparing Yugoslavian and Swedish socialisms, among others (for, until the 1976 and 1979 elections, the Swedish Social Democratic Party enjoyed a sort of historical hegemony). It is extraordinary to recall how much the EU has changed in the meantime. In 1980 the EESC – as it then was – had just nine Member States; Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom had joined the founding six in 1973. Greece would join in 1981. The former Yugoslavia started to disintegrate in 1991 (when Slovenia declared its independence) before collapsing into ghastly wars. After the ‘singing revolution’ and the Baltic Chain, Latvia regained its independence in August of the same year and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved in December 1991. Sweden would become an EU member state in 1995. Latvia and Slovenia (the latter a former part of Yugoslavia) joined in 2004. So much history crammed into such a small period of time! Oh, and yes; nowadays Pribicevic and Denitch would be, respectively, great Croatian and Serbian academics.