This evening we had the privilege of dining alongside a top opera director. The purpose of this post is not to drop his name (which I won’t). Yes, there was some talk about the creative process, but the most striking aspect of the evening was his selection of anecdotes, recounted in resigned frustration, about a major opera house in a European capital city (which had better also remain nameless). These included a one-armed cellist, several eccentrics on the opera house payroll who did nothing but sit in the stalls all day and the orchestra refusing to finish rehearsing the fifteen minutes at the end of an opera because, according to their rules, they were entitled to fifteen minutes to put away their instruments. (This reminded me of how quite frequently at La Monnaie most of the members of the orchestra have left before the applause has finished.) It cannot be for a visiting opera director to try to reform such practices and so our fellow guest had to resign himself to working within those restraints but the experience had clearly been a stressful and a puzzling one. To finish on a positive note, the one-armed cellist story reminded me of this classic sketch.

I travelled to Strasbourg today for work, a quick in-and-out. I used to live and work (at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) in this beautiful city and I am always happy to return. However, as I get out towards the Council of Europe and European Parliament complex of buildings I do tend to get a little nostalgic. I used to walk to work and had a favourite route that, at its end, took me past a green field where storks would hunt for frogs, over the Ill river and past an old tennis court and swimming pool complex. My favourite spot on the walk, though, was the wall of an old barracks (still functioning as such). There was a little gatehouse with a miniscule garden in which the occupant had built gaily coloured windmills and aeroplanes and other constructions. And at some time a Captain (I imagined it was a Captain) had planted a vine. The vine, carefully tended, had grown and grown, pushing several bricks out of the way and itself through to the outer side of the wall. I once managed to look at the other, inner side of the wall. The rest of the vine had long since gone, but the bit in the wall remained. I am not completely sure why, but I used to get a lot of pleasure out of seeing ‘the Captain’s vine’.  Today, I had half an hour to spare, so I retraced my old steps. The green field and the storks have disappeared. First the field became a car park and now ARTE has a building there. The tennis courts and swimming pool also went a long time ago, replaced by a multistorey car park. The gatehouse is abandoned and the brightly coloured windmills have rotted away. But the barracks are still there and I looked eagerly for ‘the Captain’s vine’. Horror of horrors! The wall has been repaired. The Captain’s vine is no more.

When I first started school a factory hooter at five to eight and another at eight o’clock signalled when we had to leave home.  The hooter was at the Kodak factory in Harrow, which then enployed around six thousand people. Started in 1890, it was Kodak’s first factory in the UK and for most of its life it was one of the largest photographic manufacturing sites in Europe. It wasn’t just a set of manufacturing plants turning out film. It was a whole city, dominated by a massive chimney. It had its own artesian well and water supply and its own electricity generating plant. It had its own fire station and fire engines. Its own theatre. Its own playing fields and cricket pitches. Its own football team. Its own everything. Nearby Harrow and Wealdstone station was built to bring the workers to the Kodak plant. For those with parents who worked there, it was a handy source of summer jobs and we were frequent visitors to Kodak’s pool and billiard tables. But the factory made film and nobody uses film anymore. When I heard today that once mighty Kodak had filed for bankruptcy I did a quick surf and, sure enough, what had once been a vibrant city, its machines humming and lights shining all day and night, is now a development opportunity. You can visit it here. Progress always comes at a price…

This evening I hosted a farewell reception for one of my two Deputy Secretaries General, Wolfgang Jungk, who is retiring at the end of the month. In fact, all through this month there have been a series of ‘lasts’ involving Wolfgang; his last pre-session meeting, his last Bureau, his last plenary session… He has worked for the Committee for no less than twenty-seven years, during which time he has served six Secretaries-General and 15 Presidents and participated in roughly 240 plenary sessions and 150 Bureau meetings.  His retirement is well-earned and I wish him well. But I shall miss him enormously. Wolfgang was always loyal, collegial, constant, wise, courageous in a non-conflictual way and had a mischievous wit that defused many a tense situation and lightened many a gloomy meeting. He was the perfect gentlemen. He also had a compendious knowledge of pleasant seaside watering holes and I have fond memories of sipping a beer with him in, among other places, Portoroz, Lisbon and Piraeus, after lengthy meetings. Auf wiedersen, lieber Wolfgang, und danke schön!

This morning the EESC’s plenary session hosted the Danish Minister of European Affairs, Nicolai Wammen, representing the Danish Presidency of the Council of the EU, a Presidency which has just got under way and in the most testing of circumstances. In his opening remarks he nicely and neatly summed up the role of the Committee: ‘You offer important advice on a regular basis to Europe’s policymakers. You represent millions of workers, employers and civil society groups, who all keep the wheels of Europe turning at this critical juncture in our history. In short, the Economic and Social Committee is an influential partner for any EU Presidency. But let me take this opportunity to inform you that the Danish Presidency considers you more than an influential partner. Because of the exceptional economic and social challenges facing Europe today, the Danish Presidency regards you as a key partner in our efforts to help Europe deal with the current economic crisis.’ Wammel argued passionately that austerity must come also with growth creation. ‘This,’ he argued, ‘is a time when Europe must work together. Sometimes this is less true and sometimes it is more true, but today it couldn’t be more true.’

This morning’s EESC plenary session debated a, to my mind, highly significant own-initiative opinion on the role of the European Union in peace building in external relations. The rapporteur, Jane Morrice (Various Interests Group, United Kingdom), comes from Northern Ireland and had previously shepherded through a much-respected opinion on the role of civil society in the Northern Ireland peace process. Rather than describe the opinion, I would just like to quote some of its evocative language. ‘Peace-building is in the European Union’s DNA. Its very creation, enlargement and survival in times of crisis are a testament to its peace-building prowess. As a community of nations promotiong democracy, human rights, equality and tolerance, the EU has a moral obligation to support peace-building worldwide and it now has a Treaty mandate to do so.’ … ‘Without a clearly defined peace-building strategy…the EU’s potential to create a real and lasting difference in the world’s most troubled regions will not be fully realised. The challenge may be great, but the reward is greater. A peaceful Europe sits better in a peaceful world.’ Amen, Jane!

This evening I attended the vernissage at the European Economic and Social Committee’s Jacques Delors building of a photographic exhibition entitled  A Modern Royal Household. It is our first cultural event under the Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The exhibition documents, through photographs and a video, the exceptional restoration and contemporary artistic decoration of Frederik VIII’s palace in Amalienborg, Copenhagen. The restoration was carried out between 2004 and 2010 to transform the palace into the new official residence for the Danish Crown Prince Couple. The Couple were deeply involved in the renovation project. They invited ten contemporary artists to decorate some of the rooms in the palace and the exhibition shows the artists and craftsmen working closely together. It was, in effect, a rediscovery of an old symbiosis. EESC President Staffan Nilsson welcomed Klaus Bondam, Director of the Danish Cultural Institute and curator of the exhibition, and an old EU hand, Danish Ambassador Poul Skytte Christoffersen (in the picture). This was a première for the exhibition, which will stay in the Committee until March and then go ‘on tour’. It is open to the public and is well worth a visit.

The second opinion on this afternoon’s agenda that demonstrated the EESC’s consensus-building mechanisms hard at work was an opinion on genetically modified organisms in the EU (rapporteur = Martin Siecker, Employees’ Group, the Netherlands) where, rather courageously, I think, the Committee sought – successfully (by which I mean adoption of the opinion by a large majority) – to provide orientation for the future debate that will surround forthcoming legislative proposals. After a rich debate in which, among others, farming, consumer, environmentalist, business and scientific points of view were all cogently expressed, the Committee adopted an opinion that highlights various ethical, ecological, technlogical, socio-economic, legal and policy questions. The opinion provides an excellent tour d’horizon that is also, in my view, a tour de force.

When I give talks about the European Economic and Social Committee I always stress its fundamentally consensual working methods. The Committee is an advisory body. The greater the majority that votes in favour of an opinion, the stronger that advice will be. Over more than fifty years the Committee has evolved working methods that, in recognition of that basic fact, encourage the greatest possible consensus. The risk of such an imperative is that the content of opinions is watered down to the lowest common denominator but there were two opinions on this afternoon’s plenary session agenda that demonstrated how the Committee can avoid that risk, even on sensitive and potentially divisive comments. The first was an opinion (rapporteur = Peter Morgan, Employers’ Group, United Kingdom) on prudential requirements for banks and investment firms. The Commission has tabled a draft regulation that is, in effect, part of the post-crisis architecture that the Union is trying to build for the banking sector. Peter is a respected expert on banks and banking and this no doubt enabled him to rally a large majority to his arguments. The opinion calls strongly inter alia for ethical and sustainable new business models and radically revised reward structures and it urges the Commission to come forward with a directive relating to ethical and participatory banking.

At midday today I met with my counterpart in the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, for a spot of violin tuning. Both Committees are currently heading into the 2013 budget drafting exercise. Because we pool so many of our resources together in our Joint Services, we have to tune our violins – by which I mean ensure that our general approaches are consistent and coherent. Otherwise, our budgetary strategies would be asymetrical and inefficient. But more generally both institutions – like all EU institutions – face the reform proposals tabled by the European Commission as part, inter alia, of a response to the serious economic and social situation in the Union and its member states. Once again, and in the spirit of the cooperation agreement between the two Committees, it is important that we tune our violins about tactics and strategies and general approaches.