This afternoon I chaired a meeting of the EESC’s IT Steering Committee, which brings together our IT services with our IT users (senior management) to discuss and approve the Committee’s IT work plan and to make sure that the present and future needs of the operational services will be adequately supported. IT policy is by its very nature long-term and it is important that we should get this bit of the governance equation right, particularly in a period of austerity, when resources will be particularly scarce and investments more fiercely scrutinised. The big projects on our agenda today were our future migration to a European Commission software package for the management of human resources, the improvement of an in-house work-flow management programme, the creation of a pilot civil society consultative platform and the electronic management and archiving of documents. Thanks to the excellent preparatory work of super-Bernard (to whom go grateful thanks) all went very well.

At lunchtime today the European Economic and Social Committee threw its doors open for a public screening of a documentary film about the comprehensive restoration and embellishment with modern art of Frederik VIII’s Palace in Copenhagen before it became the official palace of the Crown Prince couple. The Committee is hosting a photographic exhibition (also open to the public) about the complicated resoration project and in late January the royal couple themselves came to visit the Committee and the exhibition. Their commitment to the project and their enthusiasm for modern art and artists comes across strongly in the film, as does their essential simplicity and attachment to their young family. Other points I found particularly interesting in the film were the interactions between modern artists and techniques and an ancient building and materials, the very particular way in which rooms (with pre-imposed dimensions and perspectives) may inspire commissioned artists, and the necessarily open-ended nature of such a restoration project (towards the end of the project, for example, dry rot was discovered in a wooden beam, imposing extra costs and stretching the completion date). The film is available on a loop alongside the photographic exhibition and is worth a watch if you’re in the neighbourhood. The house of organised civil society likes opening its doors to the public!

Tonight, thanks to a generous gift from E (thank you!), we watched George Clooney’s 2002 directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a biographical spy thriller based on the real life claims of American game show producer Chuck Barris. In one life, the public life, Barris, played by Sam Rockwell, is in the front wave of the new 1960s television programmes that based themselves on audience participation and mass voyeurism. He staggers from success to success and from priapic conquest to conquest. In another, parallel, life, he is a CIA assassin who carries out his hits whilst on mission for his first life. Drew Barrymore suffers as the frequently betrayed but patiently waiting true love back home, and Julia Roberts as the Mata Hari femme fatale figure dominating his other life. There is more than one autobiographical aspect to the film, in which the real Chuck Barris was deeply involved, for Clooney’s own father had a TV game show and the young Clooney grew up with cue cards and intermission acts. The film, which bombed at the box office, was highly rated by the critics and is well worth watching. Anybody who has known sufferers of Münchausen syndrome will know where this film is coming from.

This evening I had a drink with a Scottish friend, a fellow high-up in another institution. Somehow we got on to a chat about the relative distance of war and he told a moving tale. In February 1917 his grandfather signed up to the Army, crossed the Channel and joined the British forces on the Western Front. He kept a diary of his experiences until he was wounded and invalided out in October of the same year. The diary (which I have now read) is full of laconic and ironic entries. Somehow, the short, terse, descriptions of the horror and terror he lived through render everything more vivid. The diary is also full of familiar place names. Seventy years later my friend came to Belgium for the first time and travelled through the landscape (around Armentières – that’s the station of Armentères in the picture) described in his grandfather’s diary. Now, viewed from the Thalys, it is pastoral land; vast fields, occasional copses, neat brick villages. Then, as his grandfather’s diary entries make clear, it was hell on earth.

This afternoon I gave my traditional closing address to new colleagues joining the European Economic and Social Committee’s staff. My talk comes at the end of a two day information programme, and I see my task as being to put everything in perspective. In the first place, the more I have come to know of the EESC, the more I am convinced of its unique role, derived from the authenticity of its members, who don’t get a salary and can genuinely be described as volunteers. In the second place, we put a lot of emphasis, collectively, on having a good and positive working environment in the Committee; it’s a good place to be and to work, with a happy, highly professional and efficient work force. In the third place, we are immensely privileged, both in terms of the quality of our work (working together with so many nationalities and in different languages is, of itself, I believe, a wonderful experience) and our conditions (a decent salary, a job for life and a pension afterwards is an increasingly rare phenomenon). Last but not least, we should never forget that our ultimate masters are the people, Europe’s citizens, on whose behalf we purport to work. Here endeth the sermon.

A working lunch today, at the invitation of former EESC President Dimitris Dimitriadis, with a delegation of the National Confederation of Hellenic Commerce, headed by its President, Vassilis Korkidis. On our side, our President, Staffan Nilsson (in the picture with Korkidis), Vice-President Jacek Krawczyk, former Vice-President, Irini Pari and REX Section Chairman, Sandy Boyle. Korkidis explained that the delegation had come to Brussels to correct the misleading impression given by media coverage of the situation in Greece. Yes, things were grim, with tax over 40 per cent and wages slashed by 30 %, two-thirds of people living off of their savings, 1 million unemployed and 28% of the population under the poverty line. But most people were not rioting and over 80 per cent of the Greek people continued to favour membership of the EU and of the euro because they believed, despite all the pain, that it was the best alternative. Certainly, he insisted, no Greek businessman wanted a return to the drachma. The emphasis now must be on facilitating growth and enterprise. The Confederation had identified eight ‘rising star’ areas of economic activity (including tourism, wholesale retail, east-west trade, ports, shipping, recycling, agriculture and solar energy) where Greece had a comparative advantage and should be pushing hard. But, he acknowledged, all this was against a grim backdrop: by 2021 the Greek economy will be where it was in 2009.

After the keynote speeches I dashed one floor down from the Employees’ Group’s meeting to a public hearing organised by the EESC’s ‘ECO’ Section on the theme of the EU Budget 2014-2020, a topic on which the Committee is producing an opinion (rapporteur = Stefano Palmieri, Employees’ Group, Italy). The Chairman of the Study Group, Seppo Kallio (Various Interests’ Group, Finland), introduced EESC President Staffan Nilsson and two guest keynote speakers; European Commissioner Janusz Lewandowski (who was at the working dinner in the Parliament yesterday evening) and the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the multi-annual financial perspectives, Ivailo Kalfin. Both speakers highlighted a number of ironies: the EU budget is in decline (a projected 20% decrease between the 1990s and 2020) whilst national budgets are steadily increasing; that no deficits are possible, whereas a number of member states have run up massive deficits; and that administrative spending, at 6%, is very low compared with any national budget. The relative decline in the EU budget means that it is becoming less powerful as a tool and therefore must be carefully focused in order to enhance its impact, hence the Commission’s proposal to shift resources away from agriculture and towards innovation, research and education – areas in which the EU has a comparative advantage.

This morning I attended the opening session of an extraordinary meeting of the EESC’s Employees Group devoted to the theme of ‘Anti-crisis measures and the social situation – a low-carbon industrial policy.’  The meeting was opened by a keynote address by Bernadette Ségol, Secretary-General of the European Trade Union Confederation (which is organising a day of action tomorrow), before moving onto the presentation of specific studies about the situation in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy. This afternoon the meeting will consider a low-carbon industrial policy as a way out of the current crisis, including the participation of MEPs Yannick Jadot and Claude Turmes.

This evening I accompanied Michael Smyth, the President of the EESC’s ‘ECO’ Section, to a working dinner organised by the European Parliament and its new President, Martin Schulz, in the context of interparliamentary dialogue on the European Semester for Economic Policy Coordination. Pervenche Beres launched the debate. Other speakers included Martin Schulz himself, MEPs Sharon Bowles, Elmar Brok, Alain Lamassoure, European Commissioner Janusz Lewandowski and Bill Cash, MP. ‘Bill Cash?’ I hear you say. Yes, a delegation from the House of Commons was present and participated actively in the debate. Eurosceptic Bill Cash may be, but where all the participants in the meeting agreed was that, whilst the current economic and financial situation requires urgent measures, democratic parliamentary oversight should be fully asserted.

I had lunch today with an old friend, Hussein Kassim (picture), who is a distinguished professor of politics and head of school at the University of East Anglia. Hussein, who has written a lot about the European Union and its institutions has been leading a fascinating research project which has sought to find out more about the identity of European civil servants and, in particular, those working in the European Commission. Over several years he and a distinguished team of fellow academics have interviewed an impressively large number of Heads of Unit, Directors, Directors-General, cabinet members, political advisors and Commissioners in a quest to know more about their core beliefs, career paths and backgrounds. The fruit of this labour will be published by Oxford University Press in the autumn, but Hussein has been giving sneak previews to the Commission’s directors-general (and, over lunch, to this old friend). The fascinating findings scotch several myths and are generally, I found, reassuring. I won’t steal Hussein’s thunder but would just note that Jean Monnet would be happy!