I had to leave Borzée in order to race to Zaventum for a flight to Madrid, so that I could be present at an extraordinary meeting of the EESC’s Employers’ Group (Group I) on the theme of ‘A New Business Policy for Europe’. The Conference was being co-organised with the Confederation of Spanish Employers (CEOE) in the context of the Spanish Presidency. The Group President, Henri Malosse, had kindly invited me to act as moderator for the closing session of the Conference (which is taking place tomorrow). For those who haven’t been following the news, an ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano has been playing havoc with flights in northern Europe. The cloud is drifting slowly south and I was concerned that it might reach Belgium before I had departed. My flight was at 14.20 and the lady at the check-in desk informed me, off the record, that they had been told Zaventum would be closing down at 16.00. I breathed a proverbial sigh of relief, checked in and waited in front of a screen. My flight was clearly indicated and then, at 13.40, it suddenly wasn’t. Large crowds were gathering around every available official. I queued and was informed that my flight had been cancelled. No reason was given. I dashed – well, actually, stampeded – with hundreds of other travellers towards the desk where I might, just might, be able to get another flight. But in the time it took us to stampede a few hundred metres, the screens went red – Zaventum closed down. So, sadly, I am not writing this in my Madrid hotel room, as I should be, but in my Brussels office. It’s a great disappointment and frustration for me but of course hundreds of thousands of travellers will have been similarly affected and I wonder what the total bill of this wretched ash cloud is going to be. Meanwhile, you can find out more about the Madrid event here.

This morning the meeting got down to work with keynote addresses from EESC President, Mario Sepi, Group II President, Georges Dassis, and the EESC member who had effectively made the Borzée sojourn possible, André Mordant (Honorary President of the General Labour Federation of Belgium). These were followed by a working session on the economic and social situation in Belgium and the EU, with interventions from a number of leaders of Belgian trade unions. Yes, this crisis is a tough one and it is far from over yet, but I can’t help but feel that Europeans are handling it well – certainly much better than they would have been able to do twenty years ago. And surely one of the reasons for that enhanced capacity is the mutual trust and confidence that has been built up through such processes as European social dialogue and, yes, through the Committee. Unfortunately for me, I had to leave before the end of the conference (see next post), but I sneaked in an early morning run through the beautiful forests under a blue sky and a morning sun and so came back to Brussels with a warm feeling from the lovely social and musical occasion, a strong feeling that Europe has reached a significant degree of maturity with regard to the management of crises, but also feeling refreshed and relaxed.

The ghastly accident that happened on Saturday morning at Smolensk has cast a heavy pall over this busy week. The EESC’s President and his SG have of course sent letters of condolence to the Polish government and people and to our own members and staff. Today, each formal meeting in the Committee is beginning with a minute’s silence and our Bureau and Plenary Session in two weeks’ time will similarly pay tribute. The President and I have just returned from a terribly touching commemorative ceremony in the European Parliament’s hemicycle. The event began with Beethoven’s Ninth and the Polish national anthem, and then Parliament’s President, Jerzy Buzek, himself a Pole of course (but also Prime Minister when Lech Kaczynski served as Minister of Justice), spoke with great sorrow and dignity about the tragic event to the assembled representatives of all of the European Union’s institutions – their Presidents, their members, their Secretaries-General and high administrators, and member states’ permanent representatives as well as ambassadors from other countries. Buzek spoke about how touched the Polish people had been by the Russian reaction, ‘full of dignity and understanding’ and, though it would be grossly inappropriate to talk about silver linings in this particular cloud, the tragedy has clearly engendered fellow-feeling and respect among these two historically divided peoples. And then, respecting Polish tradition, Buzek and a number of dignitaries read out the names of the 96 dead, with a short description of the life and position of each, whilst their images were portrayed on the screens above and schoolchildren brought a single white rose for each victim to a central vase. The vast scale, human and political, of what had occurred was thus slowly brought home to us all. The ultimate blow, for those already swallowing hard, was Chopin’s Funeral March – so terribly, horribly appropriate, of course. It was all so very, very touching and I hope that, amid their profound grief, the Polish people can find some consolation in the fact, so clearly demonstrated in the Parliament’s hemicycle today, that the whole of Europe is with them. You can see and hear President Buzek’s tribute here.

On 6 April UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown confirmed that the next General Election will take place on 6 May and the campaign is now well under way, but it’s a curious affair. On the BBC radio, veteran political commentator Anthony Howard declared that this was so far the most boring campaign of the seventeen that he has covered as a journalist. The BBC’s chief political correspondent, Nick Robinson, has repeatedly described how, in carefully choreographed events, the leaders of the three main parties are concentrating discussions on very narrow policy areas and activities on the key marginals. In today’s Financial Times, Philip Stephens argues that though the leaders talk about the future, they are fighting in the past. Meanwhile, in his blog the FT’s Gideon Rachman complains about a ‘quite exceptionally dull’ campaign, despite the fact that the race is too close to call and that the polls are consistently indicating a hung parliament. All eyes are turning to an interesting innovation in this election – the televised debates between the three leaders (the first is this Thursday evening) – but unless somebody slips up big time these are unlikely to be decisive and, because of the need for extreme prudence, risk being staid affairs. In his comic column in Sunday’s Observer, David Mitchell wrote that: ‘Everyone is saying how exciting this year’s (election) is going to be because you genuinely can’t predict the result. This is a reason to engage, to enthuse, to speculate – all of which activity, like organising a wedding to breathe life into a failed relationship, disguises the awful truth that we don’t much care any more.’ As they put at the end of essay questions, ‘discuss’.

That'll be 18 euros, guv.

We spent a few days in Venice last week. In outer aspect it really hasn’t changed much since I first went there thirty years ago – because it can’t. Its skin – the buildings, the canals – cannot be removed. But the contents have changed immensely. Gone are most of the shops and bars that once serviced the local community. In their place are endless restaurants and boutiques and glass shops and carnival mask shops. One basic statistic says it all: there are 60,000 Venetians, but Venice receives about 20 million visitors every year. The result, increasingly, is an economy geared to a single objective; fleecing the tourists. As we wandered the crowded streets on our last day with a permanently sad Venetian friend, he told us how the city has entered into an entirely logical spiral of dependence and exploitation. To give one example, a ticket to enter the Doge’s Palace will set you back 18 euros, whether you are a child or an adult. The reason, ostensibly, is that this ticket gives you entrance to five museums, but there is no ticket for entrance only to the Palace. Even a trip up the Campanile is a major expense, especially in famiglia. Everywhere there is a sense of mammon, symbolised for me by the vast advertising hoardings erected (supposedly during restoration work) on churches, on parts of San Marco and even around the Bridge of Sighs. Meanwhile, on Murano, the city’s only remaining industry – glass – is on its knees, brought low by efficient competition from elsewhere (already, it is alleged, most of the glass in Venice’s shops does not come from Venice) and its own complacency, some say. Travel writer Jan Morris recently penned an affectionate tribute to la serenissima and she is of course right. Venice is unique, is still atmospheric, is still romantic (I overheard a French tourist tell his three infant daughters ‘you will come back here when you are in love’)  and is still very, very beautiful but, my goodness, she’s certainly not cheap.

My third piece of holiday reading was The Ways of White Folks, a collection of short stories by American poet and author Langston Hughes (thank you to Tonnie for this). It was a sobering read. Through a series of vignettes set in the 1920s and 30s, Langston Hughes dispassionately illustrates the sort of racism suffered by black Americans, both in terms of the attitudes of whites towards them (particularly in the south) but also their living and working conditions. However, Langston Hughes is also sardonically critical of those blacks who managed, through luck, intelligence and diligence, to make it out of the misery, only to try and ‘out-white the whites’. Langston Hughes’s preferred character in the collection is clearly Bert Lewis/Norwood, the protagonist of ‘Father and Son’. The bastard offspring of a fiercely proud white plantation colonel and a compassionate black housekeeper, he refuses to know his place and ultimately shoots himself to cheat a lynch party.

The second book, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankel (1905-1997), was on an altogether deeper plane (my grateful thanks to Alice and apologies for taking so long to read this). Frankel, something of a child prodigy in psychiatry, turned down the opportunity of an American immigration visa to stay with his ageing parents in Nazi Vienna. In September 1942 he and all of his family were deported to concentration camps. Only Frankl, who spent time in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering and Dachau, survived. The book is in two parts. The first is a memoir of his time in the camps. The second is a summary of his theory of logotherapy. There are two profoundly touching moments in the memoir. The first comes as he enters Auschwitz, when he is obliged to give away his very first manuscript, a labour of love, together with all of his clothes. In return, he receives the rags of a dead man. In the pocket of the tattered coat he finds a single torn-out page of a Hebrew prayer book with the Shema Yisrael. The second comes at Dachau, when the guards suddenly change to civilian dress and a white flag is run up the flag pole. The surviving inmates, bags of skin and bone, wander tentatively out of the camp but return to their huts in the evening and, swapping notes on their experience of the freedom that they have waited so long to regain, agree among themselves that they hadn’t enjoyed it – indeed, couldn’t. They had gone beyond it. There are many memorable passages in this book. Memorable, too, is Frankl’s resort to Nietzsche (‘that which does not kill me makes me stronger’), but above all, like all the camp survivors’ accounts, this work is profoundly humbling. They were truly a race apart: ‘No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.’ It is also uncanny how the young Frankl had already elaborated his theory of man’s search for meaning which would enable him to give meaning to the horrible experiences he was about to undergo. This is surely a work of permanent relevance.

Easter and some holiday at last, and a time for catching up on reading. Knowing that I like books, people are very generous to me and I have a pile beside my bed of gifts to read. This week I have ploughed my way through two such gifts. The first, My Estonia, by Justin Petrone, was a gift from a new Estonian colleague who thought that it might help me better to understand his country (thank you, Aivar). The name of the publisher, ‘Petrone Print’, gives the game away. This is a young American journalist’s self-published account of how he met, fell in love with, married and started a family with a pretty and softly eccentric Estonian journalist, Epp. Through his eyes the reader learns about a young Estonia as it starts to reassert its identity after centuries of domination by Soviet Russia and before that by Germanic baronies. I enjoyed the book but I have to say that a lot of it was not so much about Estonia as about the experience of a) settling down and b) settling down abroad. What Italo-American Petrone experienced in Estonia (rubbing up against local culture, customs and people) could just as easily have occurred, say, to a German-Canadian settling in Hungary. And his experience of love and fatherhood was presumably no less nor more joyous and momentous than anybody else’s experience. Petrone’s observations are perhaps sharpest when he encounters older generations away from the major cities: older, poorer people unable or unwilling to change and quietly resentful of the hedonistic habits and easy wealth of younger generations. I imagine he could have made similar observations in most if not all of the countries that had to exist behind the Iron Curtain for so long.

Today I received an e-mail from an EU official (somebody I do not know) with the subject heading ‘permission to poke fun at you, sir?’. The e-mail went as follows: ‘I have been asked to contribute to a not-as-yet online satirical magazine and attached you will find one of the posts I have prepared. The project aims to provide light relief to those who occasionally find the Brussels bubble claustrophobic, while steering clear of anything scurrilous or nasty. In keeping with this ethos, I wanted to solicit your approval before publication of this item that concerns you directly. Hoping it appeals to your sense of humour – at least it gives a plug to your blog!’ Now, in my book you don’t need to ask somebody’s permission to poke fun at them, especially if you don’t know them, but let’s leave that to one side. The gist of the draft item in question is that I was hospitalised for shock because a Google search had given more than ten hits for the EESC. I had previously given up hope after several hundred blog postings ‘in a desperate attempt to drum up interest in the little known and consistently overlooked advisory body.’ Très drôle. Don’t worry, this is not a sense of humour failure but I would like to make something clear. This is my blog. I pay for it and maintain it. I decided to keep it as a way of providing illustrations as to what an EU institution and a Secretary General do. I wanted to humanise the EESC and the role of SG (and I am proud to point out that I am the only SG who keeps a blog). But, as readers of this blog know, I also write about a lot of other things. If you want to know about the EESC, you have to go to its website here. In due course, I’ll provide a link for the satirical website when it’s up and running. After all, one good plug deserves another. And here (posted 12 April) is the site of ‘the Brussels Jungle’ as promised.