We have had the immense privilege and pleasure of meeting in the massive neo-Gothic building of the Hungarian Parliament. The Hogwarts episodes of the Harry Potter films could easily have been filmed here. In some senses, the building is similar to the British Houses of Parliament (just by the river, flamboyantly neo-Gothic), but the eye-catching centre-piece of the Hungarian Parliament is not a clock tower but a ninety metre-high dome. Some of the statistics about the building give an idea of its grandeur: 700 rooms, 268 metres long and 118 metres wide, and studded with vast quantities of gilded statues. The parliamentary chamber where we have been meeting is underneath the dome. The president sits on a podium so high that you need opera glasses to make out who it is. And every day we file in past the Hungarian Crown (more than a thousand years old!) in its glass case and its two ceremonial guards, their sabres drawn. I used to bore my students at Bruges about the significance of parliamentary architecture. This building, completed in 1904 and still one of the largest parliamentary buildings in the world, was clearly more a deliberate celebration of Hungary’s glorious past than a paean to democracy. Indeed, universal adult suffrage only came to the Hungarian people in 1945. The experience gave us an insight as to how it must feel to work inside such a building, as we kept scurrying away into meeting rooms for our ‘bilaterals’. This morning I nipped out of a ‘bilateral’ to spend a penny and found myself in a small, circular room in a turret. It was quaint; a toilet in a turret. (Did the architect have that in mind, I wondered?) Just how quaint was revealed when I happened to gaze upwards and realised that the ceiling was three or four storeys above me. Can you imagine the heating bills? Hogwarts has got nothing on this.

Huangshan

One of my more enjoyable ‘bilaterals’ was over lunch with a young Chinese director of the international department of the Chinese Economic and Social Council, Jizhong Wu. He had benefited from a British Chevening scholarship and had studied at the London School of Economics. He is now Beijing-based but his hometown is Huangshan, in Anhui Province. As it happens, just three summers ago I was sipping delicious tea in the high street of his hometown! How the world has shrunk. We visited the town on our way to Huangshan Mountain, easily one of the most beautiful natural sites I have ever seen.

The Budapest meeting was, from the EESC’s point of view, also important because of all of the ‘bilaterals’ that went on in the margins of the meetings proper. ‘Bilaterals’ are standard international jargon for one-on-one meetings, though the term is more loosely used nowdays. Thus, I accompanied the President and other members to the following ‘bilaterals’ during our two-day presence in Budapest: ‘the Chinese’ (the China Economic and Social Council’; ‘the Russians’ (the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation); ‘the Ukrainians’ (the National Tripartite Social and Economic Council of Ukraine); and Monaco (yes, it has an economic and social council). There were also meetings with the French Economic, Environmental and Social Council, the next ‘troika’ of the Spanish, Belgian and Hungarian Councils, Professor Rodriguez and various other officials and VIPs. Not bad when you consider all of these were done during lunch- and tea-breaks!

Having done the Brussels 20 k, I am now stuck with the running virus. When I have to travel I pack my running shoes and get up earlier so that I can run around wherever it is I happen to be staying. Budapest is a brilliant place to run. My hotel is just near the Chain Bridge, and I have plotted out a course that takes me down the Danube to the Liberty Bridge, then up on the other bank all the way to the Margaret Bridge, where there is an island just made for joggers, and then back down the Danube to the hotel. I’ve managed to run this twice now. The weather is beautiful and, once again, I found myself bemoaning the lack of such a river or water course of some sort in central Brussels. Yes, there’s the canal, but it’s not in the centre and, well, it’s just not the same thing. Back to Budapest. As I was running I was struck by the relative absence of something, but at first I couldn’t work out what it was. Then it dawned on me; you very rarely hear a police or ambulance siren in Budapest. In fact, you only hear one when, presumably, they genuinely need to put the siren on. In Brussels or London you can hear them virtually all the time. I can still – just – remember the thrill of the bells that the old police cars and ambulances and fire engines used to ring when on urgent duty in London. And I remember the first appearance (if that’s the right word) of an ugly siren. Soon that horrible noise had become ubiquitous – the bane of modern urban life. (Whenever my mother heard a police car’s siren she’d complain that it must be teatime.) They are now generally misused simply to get a police car past an obstruction of some sort (how often have I seen police cars turn on their sirens when stuck in traffic jams!). I have a terrible story to tell about police cars and sirens in Brussels, but I am saving it for the right strategic moment. In the meantime, I’m open to all suggestions as to how we, the common people, can curb the misuse of sirens. To the barricades!

Sadly, I had to cry off the official evening dinner on a cruise boat in order to pen a speech for the next day’s proceedings. My consolation was to meet up later in the evening with an old Turkish friend and his Austrian wife, a diplomat, in their Buda residence. We have known each other since 1979. Though we see each other rarely, we stay in touch through the internet, and when we do meet up we always go straight to the essentials. In my friend’s case, once we have got the gossip out of the way, those essentials consist of an improbably large collection of wonderfully filthy jokes and scurrilous cartoons, frequently with a political tinge. My favourite on this occasion was a cartoon from a Turkish newspaper depicting Europe as a lady of dubious morals opening the front door of a house and Turkey as an eager and thrusting (if you see what I mean) young man who has clearly just knocked on the door. The lady is saying to the man ‘you can enter, but you can’t come inside.’ I would give my eye teeth to be a political cartoonist. I never cease to admire their ability to sum up complex situations with a few strokes of a pen and a simple play on words.

Some of the themes in the first debate resurfaced in the second, which was focussed on a draft report on the above theme. The rapporteur, Artur Henrique da Silva Santos, is President of the Brazilian Workers Central Union, as well as being a member of the Brazilian Economic and Social Development Council. AICESIS is a relatively young organisation, still learning by doing. Drafting such reports in a consensual fashion, with so many stakeholders involved, is a major undertaking, but the rapporteur managed. The problem in many parts of the world is that economic development and social and environmental responsibility are all too frequently considered to be incompatible alternatives, rather than complementary components of the overall solution. In that context, food security – already an urgent issue in many parts of the world – is a graphic example.

Douste-Blazy

After the introductory speeches, the meeting proper got under way with a plenary debate on the topic of ‘the consequences of the financial, economic and social crisis for equal opportunities and sustainable development.’ It was a rich debate, preceded by a number of keynote speeches. It’s invidious to single individuals out, but Professor Maria Joao Rodriguez delivered a characteristically forthright appeal for a Global New Deal, whilst UN Deputy Secretary General, Philippe Douste-Blazy, made an impassioned plea for voluntary contributions to ward off the increased child deaths already occurring as a result of the crisis (estimated to be somewhere between 200- and 400,000 before the end of this year alone!). There were many memorable ‘soundbites’. Douste-Blazy, for example, pointed out after the introductory sentences of his speech that twenty additional children had died around the world since he had begun speaking. Our African, Asian and Latin American colleagues left us in no doubt about the gravity of what was occurring. It was, to use a fitting cliché, a sobering occasion.

Well, the international community does specialise in extraordinary acronyms, and ‘AICESIS’ is certainly one of them. It’s the French acronym (by which everybody knows it) for the International Association of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions and we had gathered in Budapest for the eleventh annual international meeting and general assembly. AICESIS’s membership currently includes 56 African, Asian, Latin American and European institutions and is rapidly growing in size. One of the main items on the agenda was therefore a medium-term development plan for the organisation, tabled by its new Secretary General, and my predecessor at the EESC, Patrick Venturini. I travelled as part of a large delegation, including the President, two Group Presidents and the President of our External relations Section.

Yesterday and today the EESC hosted the first meeting of the EU-Brazil Civil Society Round Table. The Committee’s growing role in providing the civil society dimension of the EU’s external relations is an aspect of its activities that deserves to be better known. In this case, the EESC has worked hard with the Brazilian Council for Economic and Social Development (founded in 2003) to set up a permanent structure for civil society dialogue within the overall framework of the EU’s Strategic Partnership with Brazil. This structured dialogue is designed to complement the EU’s political and parliamentary dialogues with Brazil. The first meeting of the round table was a great success. Once the ceremonial and procedural work was out of the way, the Round Table held two important and rich debates, one on the social consequences of the international economic crisis, and another on energy resources and climate change. Both debates demonstrated that we have much to learn from each other and that this sort of dialogue can greatly facilitate mutual understanding. The Round Table has its own pages on our website. You can visit them here.

A cow, possibly Finnish

I had lunch today with one of our Vice-Presidents, Seppo Kallio (a Finn, from the Various Interests Group), and the President of his organisation, the Finnish Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners, Mr Juha Marttila. Like some of our members, when Mr Marttila isn’t busy being President of his organisation, he is a farmer. The discussion was a graphic illustration of an obvious point. When somebody like Mr Marttila talks to me about what he represents, he knows what he’s talking about. (In the course of our discussions I learnt, for example, that the average Finnish farm has two or three cows – compare and contrast that with, say, the average UK farm!) Therein, in effect, lies the authenticity of the European Economic and Social Committee; its members are nominated precisely in order to represent an organisation of interests of one sort or another and they truly know what they are talking about.