Rien ne va plus

The EESC President’s two-day conference on this theme is over.  Given the gravity of the situation (jobs lost, homes re-possessed, shrunken savings) it would be inappropriate to adopt a congratulatory tone but, from the organisational and content point of view, the conference was a big success.  It also generated considerable media interest. The conference press release can be read here. See pictures of the conference here. A summary record of the proceedings is being prepared. There were two common themes among speakers, no matter what sector they represented: we need more Europe (inter alia, a European regulator); we need more long termism (a paradox in parliamentary democracies with relatively short term electoral cycles).  What I propose to do in the remainder of this post is bring you a flavour of the conference through a selection of ‘soundbites’ (see ‘read the rest of this entry’).

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President Sepi

Mario Sepi, the President of the EESC, yesterday started a blog. Hurrah! You can visit it here. The first post is about the financial crisis and the Stability Pact. This afternoon and tomorrow, as it happens, the Committee is hosting a big conference about the consequences of the financial crisis and ways to rebuild the European social market economy (it is one of President Sepi’s flagship events). I’ll almost certainly write a separate post about the Conference proceedings. In the meantime, if you’re interested, you can find out more about it here.

Sustainable speaking

In the evening, to the launch of an exhibition on the Committee’s premises on the theme of sustainablme architecture. It was opened by Jan Figel and attracted a lot of people whom, I would guess, we wouldn’t ‘normally’ see in the Committee. The exhibition was put together by an extraordinary colleague, Antonia, who’ll sadly be leaving us soon to go back to Vienna. But she has almost single-handedly put the Committee’s flagship building on the cultural map and that will be her lasting testament.

Nikolai Lugansky

On Friday evening we went to hear Nikolai Lugansky playing at the Palais des Beaux-Arts.
His interpretations of Janacek, Prokofiev and Chopin were sublime and – the icing on the cake – he played no less than three encores!

Three cheers for Russian romantics.

Silvia Gauci

I promised a post about last Tuesday’s quaestors’ meeting, and here it is. This three-man body, elected every two years, has as its mandate to oversee the members’ statute – put another way, to look after the members’ well-being. Last Tuesday they had an exchange of views with a Maltese Employers’ Group member, Silvia Gauci, about defining a complex or difficult journey. I am not going to repeat the debate here, but the underlying point is that many of the EESC’s members, who do not receive a salary and could be described as volunteers, have to make huge efforts to get to Brussels for the Committee’s meetings. In this context I don’t think we (by which I mean ‘Brussels’, collectively) have fully realised the ramifications of the last two waves of enlargement. Personally, I am much aware of the effort members put in to carry out their work. To get to a meeting in the morning, I pedal in on my bike. It generally takes me fifteen to twenty minutes and, though my days may be long, most nights I am back home. For Silvia and the other Maltese members, they have to take a flight the previous evening. As she pointed out, for a three-hour meeting in Brussels she has to be away from home for a total of thirty-six hours! We call it the ‘Maltese problem’ but this is a sort of shorthand for all of our members with difficult trips. Among the most difficult must surely be that of a Scottish member, Brendan Burns (Employers’ Group).

Brendan Burns

His home and business are in Killen, in Ross-shire, which is a long way from the nearest international airports. His is the real McCoy; the journey from hell. If he wants to catch the first morning flights from Aberdeen or Edinburgh he has to leave home and start driving at 1.30 a.m.! In effect, he has to add a day on before and after each meeting he attends here. It is because of experiences like this that I am determined that members’ comfort should be high on my list of priorities as Secretary General.
 
 
 
 

Jacek Krawczyk

Another significant debate in the Committee’s plenary session last week concerned an opinion drafted by Jacek Krawczyk (Employers’ Group) about the performance and sustainability of the European aviation system (the Commission’s proposal is known in shorthand as ‘Single European Sky’). There is but one sky, clearly, but the European sky is fractured by all sorts of different air traffic control responsibilities. Integrating all of these into a ‘single sky’ makes obvious sense from the safety, economic and environmental point of view. Some of the statistics Jacek reeled off were stunning; some 30,000 flights daily involving almost 5,000 commercial aircraft covering an aviation market of 37 countries and 500 million citizens. Because of air traffic fragmentation each of those airplanes flies, on average, 50 kilometres more than it needs to, with all that that implies for the environment and the economy. I found the picture below whilst surfing for an illustration for this post. It’s taken from a satellite and shows air traffic vapour trails over the UK and it speaks for itself, really. Oh, and what made the debate particularly convincing is that Jacek is a former airline pilot, so he really does know what he’s talking about…

UK air traffic, seen from space

Derek Osborn

One of the plenary debates this week was around an opinion, drafted by a British member, Derek Osborn (Various Interests Group) about ‘facing the oil challenges’. The opinion was special in two ways. First, it was an opinion requested by the European Parliament, which was a previously rare occurence but an indication of the Committee’s growing profile among parliamentarians. Second, and as with the Delapina opinion (see previous post), it had to be drafted very rapidly and therefore Derek had to act as a ‘General Rapporteur’ (in effect, it’s the Committee’s ‘fast track’ procedure). I’ll post a link to the adopted opinion here as soon as it has been finalised, but during the debate I was struck by an observation made by Stéphane Buffetaut (Employers Group), President of the Committee’s Sustainable Development Observatory. He recounted that he had been talking with some oil industry executives and one had told him that the age of oil would end like the stone age had ended – not because there were no more stones, but because of a technological leap. Thinking about it, our generations have been living through the ends of a number of ‘ages’, precisely because of such technological advances – the age of steam, the age of the typewriter and the fax, the age of the incandescent lightbulb….

Stéphane Buffetaut

This was a big week for the European Economic and Social Committee and a very successful and productive one. For me, administrative-level meetings apart, it started on Tuesday morning with a fascinating meeting of the Quaestors (I’m going to do a separate post on that), continued on Tuesday afternoon with the Committee’s Bureau, and ended on Wednesday and yesterday with the Committee’s plenary session. The Bureau agreed on an action plan to flesh out the President’s ambition for the Committee to adopt a sort of ‘White Paper’, to be addressed to the other institutions, particularly the Parliament, in the run-up to the European elections. It also approved a new decentralised approach to budgetary management. This seems an esoteric topic but once implemented will actually represent a significant change in the way the Committee does its business. Then, on Wednesday and Thursday, we had a number of important debates, not least of them an exchange of views with Alexandr Vondra, the Czech Deputy Prime Minister (that’s him on the right in the picture) and one on the European Commission’s Economic Recovery Plan, culminating in the near-unanimous adoption of an opinion drafted by Thomas Delapina, an Austrian (Group II) member who is also Director of the Austrian Economic and Social Council (that’s him below). Vondra began with a wry observation about how the Czech Presidency’s ‘three Es’ (the economy, energy and external relations) had rapidly been reduced to the ‘two Gs’; gas and Gaza! The Delapina debate and vote was a graphic illustration of how the Committee can achieve broad consensus, even on potentially prickly topics. I’ll try and do separate posts about events this week, but today I am about to plunge into a series of follow-up and coordination meetings (indeed, Fridays are always catch-up days).

Delapina at the end of an excellent debate

Me in the office last Sunday

The cold snap is over now. Pedalling into work early this morning, I saw that virtually all trace of the snow has gone. The kids will be sad (on Sunday we made it into the woods with the toboggan one last time). Work-wise, though, the prolonged cold period has posed some interesting technical problems. In all of our buildings there have been cold spots that the heating systems have had great difficulty in heating up. My own office was like a refrigerator when I came in last Sunday. In some cases, the local heating systems were broken or needed adjusting, but in others there is an underlying problem about the technical specifications for the general insulation of the building. I suspect that we have been living with a consequence of ‘global warming’, in the sense that those specifications were drawn up when we were going through a series of mild winters. Now – arguably as a consequence of global warming, with the probability of more extreme weather incidents – we can possibly look forward to similar prolonged cold snaps in the future. This particular cold snap therefore did us a favour. It helped us to identify all the little local problems and fix them, but it has also enabled us to see where more structural problems might be involved and hence to be better prepared for next time.

A writer friend has started a new blog. It’s a blog, quite simply, about being a writer. She has taken the big decision that she is going to devote herself entirely to her art, so she gave up her job and now… well, now she writes. Because she writes for children, she has decided to blog anonymously, but I am sure she won’t mind if I call her ‘L’. Check it out here.