London here we come

Then it was a dash to the Gare du Midi to catch the evening Eurostar to London with the family. Rapid rail transport is one of those areas where Europe’s startling technological development and the beneficial consequences of this are most tangible. When I started out in the EU institutions, Paris was a three-hour trek away by rail and London – well, a trundle to Ostend then the hydrofoil and then a trundle from Dover to London took all day (though veterans will remember that in the beginning you could take the hydrofoil all the way up to the Tower of London). Now, Paris is barely an hour away and London just two.  Indeed, I don’t want to sound a sourpuss but there’s hardly time to read your newspaper now. Anyway, it was the start of the sort of eventful weekend only a London, or a Paris, or a Berlin can provide…

As described in the previous post, I spent the whole day (literally) in interviewing candidates for a director’s post within the Committee’s secretariat. It’s a key position and we’re determined to get it right, and so I was accompanied in the advisory selection panel by a Director, two Heads of Unit and three of the Committee’s members (one for each Group). The fact that we are currently recruiting several directors makes all of this a little bit heavy for me and my current directors, since we have spent quite a lot of time sat in job interviews over the past month or so. But the real heroes of the day were our three members, who gave up a day out of their working lives to be with us. As Secretary General, I get paid a salary whether I am sitting in a selection panel or in my office. But our three members get paid their travel costs and a per diem and have to pay the opportunity cost of not being back in their own organisations or businesses. That they should have been present from 08.30 till 18.30 on a Friday to help the Secretary General in making a key strategic choice is yet another illustration of their commitment.

This morning the Committee’s plenary session held a thematic debate on air transport in the presence of the Czech Deputy Transport Minister, Roman Kramarik. The Committee’s rapporteur, Jacek Krawczyk, is, as you’ll know from previous posts, a former commercial airline pilot and he clearly knows what he’s talking about. Two themes were stressed in the debate. First, air travel is one of the safest forms of transport and getting safer. Second, paradoxically, accidents will still happen. At the end of the debate our President called for a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of the Air Bus disaster. There, but for the grace…

copyright Laresche

This evening the Committee hosted a magnificent photo exhibition about Europe’s Rroma people by Yves Leresche by organising a fascinating debate about the Rroma and the challenges they, and Europe, face. A first extraordinary fact. The debate began after the plenary session had ended for the day, at seven, and continued until well after nine; that is, during the two hours when most people usually eat their evening meal. And yet, the meeting room was choc-a-bloc full. Among our spontaneous guests was Dani Klein, lead singer with Vaya con Dios and a strong supporter of the Rroma cause. The speakers on the podium, in addition to our President, Mario Sepi, included two of our members who have been most active in this field, Anne-Marie Sigmund and Madi Sharma, Jan Jarab from Vladimir Spidla’s Private Office and Alekos Tsolakis (a Commission official who has done a huge amount of good work on this cause), but also Santino Spinelli, a Rroma musician and artist and Nicolae Gheorghe, also a Rroma and a very learned one at that. Among our guests also was ‘Payou’, President of the Gitane and Tzigane Association in Languedoc Roussilon. I cannot summarise the debate easily, so what I’ll do is just jot down some of the views and observations I noted. (Click on ‘read the rest of this entry’) Continue reading

Meanwhile, outside our plenary session, an exhibition was staged of ‘the vote that broke the wall’. On 4th June 1989 the first free elections behind the Iron Curtain took place in Poland. The elections brought an overwhelming victory for ‘Solidarnosc’, led by Lech Walesa at the time, and it was this first democratic eruption that paved the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the unification of Europe as we know it today. Looking at the posters and photographs, it all seemed so far away. Could it already be twenty years? In any case, when history has a mind to, it can move very, very fast.

The EESC held a special commorative plenary session debate this afternoon to mark the twentieth anniversary year of the fall of the Iron Curtain and the fifth anniversary (already!) of the 2004 wave of enlargements. The guest speakers included: Catherine Lalumière, a former Secretary General of the Council of Europe, a former MEP and currently a vice-president of the European Movement; Olli Rehn, the Commissioner for enlargement; and Jaroslaw Pietras, a former Polish Secretary of State for European Affairs who worked closely on Polish accession to the EU. All of the speeches and the debate more generally were rich and thoughtful. If I had to take out three observations, though, I would turn to Lalumière’s analysis. In a sense, she argued, Europe’s division was for a very long time the EU’s raison d’être. Once that division no longer existed, a new raison d’être had to be generated and the EU hadn’t yet entirely managed to do that. Her second argument was that the death of communism, both as a political system and as an ideology, had led to a triumphalist illusion that the western model (however one defined it) had somehow ‘won’, and that there was no alternative. Yet the current economic and financial crisis demonstrated graphically that the western model required considerable adjusting. Her third observation was that we ‘in the West’ didn’t really measure the true scale of the changes that were occurring, both to ‘us’ and to ‘them’, and so we hadn’t yet fully measured the consequences.  For my part, I still remember solemnly lecturing a German friend, whose family had come from Chemnitz (renamed Karl Marx Stadt during the communist years), that he would just have to get used to the fact that German unification was unlikely to take place during his lifetime. That was in – er – about 1987… By the way, the EESC has produced a really neat little (three minutes) DVD about what enlargement means to its new members. You can watch it here. Please go and have a look.

Yes, I enjoyed writing that title (just call me Tom Wolfe). Two extraordinary facts caught my eye as I scanned my morning newspapers this week so far.  According to an article in yesterday’s Financial Times, the late Gabon ruler, Omar Bongo, had over seventy bank accounts. Over seventy! How the hell do you manage over seventy bank accounts? Of course, you’ll say ‘well, he must have had managers who managed the accounts.’ But who managed the managers? And where do you put all the cheque books? One thing is certain; he must have had a massive wallet to carry all of those bank cards. The second article came from the Guardian. ‘World spending on arms rises to record $1.46 tn’ was the headline. Apparently, worldwide spending on weapons has risen by 45% over the past decade.  I shall refrain from further comment other than to observe that there is an interesting coincidence: the country which accounts for over half of that total increase also houses most of the top arms-producing companies.

To the polling booth at 08.00 a.m. to beat the crowds (voting is obligatory in Belgium and long queues form later in the day) for, in Belgium at least, I have the right to vote in European elections. It still pains me hugely that I am no longer able to vote in the UK, but in a sense voting in Belgium is more fun. Certainly, Belgian voters are more sophisticated in calculating the nuances and balances of coalitionary forces and, although there are so many different layers of government, politicians are, if only because of the small size of the country, closer to the people. Nevertheless, I am nothing if not consistent in my support and so the choice for me was relatively simple. The polling station was in a nearby school. Not for the first time, I admired the organisation and the efficient infrastructure that made these elections such an apparently simple and straightforward affair. Last year I read an excellent book entitled In Praise of Bureaucracy by Paul Gay, a political philosopher. One of his neo Weberian arguments is, quite simply, that democracy cannot exist without bureaucracy. The holding of elections graphically demonstrates that point (and also why, simply on grounds of infrastructure and resources, it is so much easier to hold a democratic election in a developed country). But another lesson about Belgian democracy was on show; the strength of its civic culture. On Friday evening, the lady who was cutting my hair explained that she would be spending her Sunday acting as a teller at one of the polling stations, and through her I learnt that the whole workforce for these elections is generated through random selection from the electoral rolls. Serving at the polling booth is as much of a civic duty as serving on a jury. So I was effusive in my gratitude to the people at the polling station who made my vote possible.

Not from the Airbus

This morning’s news carried a strange but revelatory twist in the tragic tale of the ill-fated Airbus A330 lost somewhere over the Atlantic. The searchers had found debris and an oil slick. However, they have now announced that these did not come from the Airbus; ‘a large slick spotted in the area most likely spilled from a ship rather than from a downed plane’. So what exactly was a ship doing spilling a large slick in the middle of the Atlantic? If you do a Google on ‘ships dumping oil at sea’, you’ll find your answer. Here are some choice quototations from one of those reports that give you an idea of the sheer scale of what is going on out on the open seas where normally nobody is watching…

‘According to Poux, the amount of oil illegally dumped by oceangoing ships has a far greater impact on the environment than accidental spills. Some estimates, he said, put shipboard waste-dumping at more than 88 million gallons a year — some eight times the amount of crude oil spilled when the Exxon Valdez hit a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound 20 years ago.

‘Sludge filtered out from the low-grade fuel burned by many ships is particularly bad for the environment. It is supposed to be incinerated or off-loaded in port.

“It’s almost like tar; that’s what they are putting in the ocean,” the federal prosecutor said.

The oil dumping doesn’t have the immediate impact of an Exxon Valdez disaster, in which the thick toxic goo released from the ruptured hull of the grounded tanker suffocated or poisoned hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine animals. But it is by no means benign, said Michael Kennish, a marine scientist at the Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.

‘Salt marsh sediments can retain oil wastes “for years and years and years.” Emulsified oil solids sink to the bottom, where they affect bottom-feeding marine life.

“Oil is picked up by plants and animals everywhere,” Kennish said. “Dump it into the Continental Shelf, and that’s where our fisheries are. So the oil gets into the food chain.”

‘One study has estimated 300,000 seabirds are killed annually along Canada’s Atlantic coast from the type of routine discharge of oily waste, federal officials said. A chemical “oil fingerprint” analysis conducted by the Coast Guard found the bilge waste from one ship charged with environmental crimes was consistent with oil found on nearby beaches. ‘