I’m now at the airport. As if to mock my words of yesterday evening, it snowed during the night and Moscow is now covered in a fine coating of snow – it suits the city. Our exhausted hosts laid on one last treat for us this morning – a guided tour to the Kremlin. Where to begin? Those – so familiar – red walls were until recently whitewashed regularly. Old paintings show Moscow as a white city. Now, they are ‘redwashed’ regularly. And when I first gazed up at them, their design looked familiar. And so it should have done; they were designed by Italian military architects. They even showed the Russians how to build special brick kilns (a light brick technology until then unknown to them). No wonder they looked familiar. You can see exactly the same designs in Bologna, Verona, Ferrara, and so on. Now; here’s a game for those of you who have never been to the Kremlin. Think; what is the image you have in your mind? Those enigmatic red walls, right? And what else?
Maybe a hint of a mysterious cupola or two? But that’s about it, I would imagine. Well, once upon a time all Muscovites lived within the walls of the Kremlin. Now, nobody does (Stalin was the last leader to have lived there), but the place is to this day littered with palaces and churches (four palaces and four cathedrals, to be precise). Imagine! Back in the most revolutionary days of Lenin and the darkest days of Stalin, they lived and worked in a citadel of palaces and churches (okay, Stalin couldn’t resist pulling down a few bits and pieces but most survived and, anyway, Napolean did far more damage). When the Soviet government moved from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918, Lenin very deliberately decided that he would have his headquarters in this historical Russian dynastic stronghold. Boris Yeltsin just as deliberately decided to continue the tradition. There is powerful subliminal symbolism at work in the fact that Vladimir Putin does not now have his seat in the Kremlin but in the decidedly modern White House; clearly, he relinquished more than the Presidency to Dmitry Medvedev in 2008.

This evening we benefited yet further from our Russian hosts’ extraordinary hospitality, being taken to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker by the Bolshoi. I’d like to write ‘at the Bolshoi’, but the true Bolshoi theatre is still closed for restoration, so we went to the so-called ‘new Bolshoi’ next door, but the troupe and the performance was genuinely by the Bolshoi. And what a performance! It was also a perfect end to a week of hard work. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to visit the Kremlin before flying home to get a good night’s sleep. (Somebody depressed me slightly today by saying ‘we’re just getting old’, but I have found it curiously difficult to adjust to a time difference of just two hours.) By the way, our primary host, Russian Civic Forum President Yevgeniy Velekov, told me earlier today that in Pushkin’s time it never used to snow in Moscow until January. Snow, he assured me, is forecast for Christmas. I’ll have to make do with the snow in the Nutcracker!

This lunchtime five of us – AICESIS President Antonio Marzano and Secretary General, Patrick Venturini, French Council President Jacques Dermagne, EESC REX President Filip Hamro-Drotz and me – headed off in a delegation to meet Vice-Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov and a delegation composed of Yevgeniy Velikhov, President of the Russian Civic Chamber, Alexander Sholkin, President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, and Mikhail Shmakov, President of the Russian Federation of Independent Trades Unions.

I was met at the airport on Wednesday by the second secretary of the Russian Permanent Representation to the European Union in Brussels. A gentleman with exquisite French and perfect manners, he also happily acted as tourist guide during our long drive in. As we passed the headquarters of the city’s charismatic mayor, Yuri Luzhkov he told me a nice little story about a visit the mayor made to Brussels. He had been received there by Jos Chabert, then a minister for the Region Bruxelles Capital. Chabert explained that, as a Napoleonic officer, one of his ancestors had almost made it to Moscow. Luzhkov retorted that one of his ancestors had signed the papers releasing Chabert’s ancestor from prison! Whilst on historical snippets, the headquarters building of the Russian Civic Chamber has an interesting history. It began life in the Tsarist era as a cadets’ barracks. Under the Soviet system it became the headquarters of the chief censors of the Communist Party, so it is a very deliberate irony that it should now house the representatives of Russian civil society.

This morning I got up early and went for a long run down the Tverskaya ul, across the Red Square, past the Kremlin and St Basil’s, over and along the river, and back again. This part of the city at night (it doesn’t get light in the morning until nine) is a sort of floodlit Disneyland writ large: towers, turrets, spires, curly coloured domes, red stars, glittering battlements, swooping bridges and the deep, sparkling swirl of the river. It’s magical, simply magical.

I have just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It’s typically classed as a work of science fiction but it’s actually more a dystopia in the style of Huxley’s Brave New World, the science (in Dick’s case, transcontinental rocket flights) being incidental to a clever plot. The basic ‘what if’ conceit is that the Axis powers won a protracted Second World War and divided up the US between themselves, with American culture being subjugated and authentic American artefacts becoming collector’s items. It’s cleverly written, with lots of internal dialogue in a clipped ‘Japanese American’. The Japanese and German parts of America are uneasy neighbours and the man in the high castle of the title is an author who, against this backdrop, has written a bestselling novel whose basic ‘what if’ conceit is what if the Axis powers had lost? An excellent read.

This morning’s meeting of the administrative Council of ‘AICESIS‘ here in Moscow, at the headquarters building of the Russian Civic Forum, successfully approved an ambitious development plan for the organisation. There are a number of questions still to be addressed – particularly regarding eligibility and the legal status of the organisation – but the addressing of these questions in a structured and informed way is indeed an integral part of the development plan. In the nature of my job, I spend most of my time concentrating on developments within the European Union and its twenty-seven Member States. But this morning’s discussion shifted attention firmly to the world scale. There are all sorts of problems of governance to be addressed. Some relate to sheer scale and/or complexity (of countries like Brazil, China, India and Russia, for example); others concern situations where the traditional mechanisms of democracy (political parties, parliaments), either don’t function fully or function badly. And behind all of that are genuinely global problems: security and supply of food, water and energy; climate change; demography and population movements; and so on. The proponents of participatory democracy on this more global scale do not argue that it is an alternative to democratic governance, but they argue that it can and should be playing an important flanking role, and that the collective voice of civil society organisations should be heard in world organisations and fora, from the UN to Davos.

I flew into Moscow this afternoon and am writing this at midnight, Moscow time, in my hotel. (By the way, have they got a traffic problem! It took almost as long to get from the airport to the city as it did from Brussels to Moscow.) Anyway, I am here for a meeting, beginning tomorrow morning at the headquarters of the Russian Civic Forum, of the administrative council of the International Association of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions. This evening there was a welcoming cocktail and afterwards I went for a walk with my colleague Vasco along Tverskaya Street all the way down to the Kremlin and the Red Square. The sense of history and awe was spoilt a little by the presence of a temporary ice-skating rink in the middle of the square but, still, this was it. I grew up with images of the parades with the tanks and missiles rolling through this square, with Brezhnev and Andropov, etc, standing above Lenin’s tomb. And now here I was and, as Vasco pointed out to me, throughout the depths of the Cold War Moscow was only ever a three or four hours flight away from Brussels. The surreal nature of the experience was extended by the fact that there is no snow here; the temperature this evening is nine degrees!

The conference went well, and my fellow panel members, Mark Gray from the European Commission’s spokesman’s service, and Gregor Schusterschitz, from the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were both informative and insightful. But, in what is surely an early example of Lisbon fatigue, the audience were all done after a day of wrapping their heads around such sexy (but actually very important) topics as comitology after Lisbon. Aftewards, Mark, Gregor and I remembered and compared the dreams of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing with the prosaic reality of today’s Treaty. Ah! What might have been! If only! That led us to invent a new party game. It goes like this: if the European Union decided to have its own Mount Rushmore, where would it be and who would be represented? Answers on a postcard, please…

Did you notice the difference? Maybe not but, anyway, it’s official; since midnight we have been in Lisbon Land. This morning I gave a little welcoming address to a conference about the Lisbon Treaty being organised by the European Institute of Public Administration on our premises. (The timing is uncanny! ) This afternoon I’ll be going back to participate in a panel discussion about inter-institutional dynamics under the new Treaty’s provisions. Gathering my thoughts, I have decided to start with two literary references, one sublime, and one banal. The sublime reference is Shakespeare’s Tempest and the wonderful lines he gives to Miranda in Act V: ‘O brave new world, that has such people in’t!’ The banal is onetime poet laureate Alfred Austin’s lines on the illness of the then Prince of Wales: ‘across the wire the electric message came, He is no better, he is much the same.’ So which is it to be? A brave new world? Or much the same? That’s the question I’ll be addressing this afternoon.