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.

It was back to school again today, out at Ottignies, in a second nine-till-six lesson on such themes as meteorology, nautical instruments, first aid at sea, map reading and navigation, in our search for the qualification of Brevet de Conduite (chef de bord côitier et hauturier). Should I tell you how tiny Belgium has one set of rules for sea-going vessels, another for inland waters, a third for its coastal waters, and others for the lower maritime Scheldt, the Meuse, the Gand canal at Terneuzen and even for the Brussels ship canal? Should I tell you that each uses a different vocabulary, that there are significant differences in rules and signals and that the examiners expect students to memorise everything?  No matter. My illustration will be familiar to all seasoned mariners. It was the moment our teacher told us the difference between true North, magnetic North and compass North. You all know, don’t you? What? You don’t? Well, obviously, Cv = Cc + D + d, where D = declinaison and d = deviation. Come on! Wake up at the back!

At the end of the conference today our Irish hosts, the National Economic and Social Council, kindly laid on a short guided tour to the state rooms of Dublin Castle and also, fascinatingly, to the underground ruins of the Powder Tower and tenth century Viking city wall, uncovered during building work some fifteen years ago. There were some Italian connections: a Bolognese, Gaetano Gandolfi, painted the decorations in the throne room – Murano crystal chandeliers grace the dining room; and an Italian expatriate, Vincenzo Waldré, painted the three ceiling paintings in St Patrick’s Hall – and we also saw two delightful portraits of a very young Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the state apartments. Visiting the Viking Wall, we learned that the wall was held together with mortar made out of eggs, sand, horses’ hair and ox blood! And then, for me and my literary readers (including the Joycean Domenico) came an unexpected connection. The view in my illustration is what those working for the Irish Inland Revenue would see, and still see, when looking out of their office windows in a Georgian annex to the Castle.  A certain Abraham Stoker worked in that building for forty years, and his third son, also Abraham, followed in his footsteps, publishing in 1876 a first learned book entitled The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. This younger Stoker was interested in art (he founded a sketching club) and theatre, becoming a critic and, later, a friend and associate of Henry Irving. He wrote some short stories and, in the 1890s, a series of novels. In 1897 Bram (as he was known) published Dracula. I know that Bram Stoker did a lot of research before writing his classic horror story, but this didn’t involve travel to Transylvanian castles and I would like to think that when he imagined Jonathan Harker gazing out of his bedroom window and seeing the bat-like Dracula flapping on the castle wall below him, he had Dublin Castle’s tower and the adjoining chapel in his mind’s eye…