From the launch of the art exhibition we moved on to the opening of a Polish cultural evening at the Committee, to mark the beginning of the Polish Presidency. The evening was opened by our President, Staffan Nilsson, by the Polish agriculture minister, Marek Sawicki, and by the Polish permanent representative to the EU, Jan Tombinski (in the picture, Tombinksi is speaking, with Sawicki behind him with an interpreter), and then the evening got under way with a jazz trio and, later, a pianist, Anna Ciborowska (playing the most wonderful Chopin – of course!). The Polish regions had brought display stands and there were generous quantities of Polish food and drink, including excellent wine. Most importantly, there was conversation and interaction. Tombinski is, quite rightly (and despite the fierce personal workload the Presidency imposes), taking a ‘business as usual’ and ‘teamwork’ approach to the Presidency, but I remember attending a Salzburg seminar in the early 1990s with central and eastern European fellows, including young, dynamic, enthusiastic Poles, participating for the first time, ever, where we dreamt about a unified Europe and I think that for a Polish presidency to be considered business as usual is just brilliant.

This evening, just after the EESC plenary session had closed, we raced back to our Jacques Delors headquarters building for the launching of an exhibition of the work of Polish satirical artist Pawel Kuczynski, organised jointly by the European Economic and Social Committee, the Permanent Representation of the Republic of Poland to the EU and the Museum of Caricature and Cartoon Art in Warsaw. There are many of his works on display. Most deal with the human condition, using metaphors and black humour to make sharp comments about politics, the environment and the built world. For the record, the illustration for this post is my Vice-President’s favourite.

This afternoon Polish deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy, Mr Waldemar Pawlak, was joined by the President of the European Parliament, Mr Jerzy Buzek. Coincidentally, both men are Polish and both have served as prime minister of their country. I write ‘coincidentally’ because, of course, this month marks the beginning of the first ever Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The common theme our visitors addressed was ‘For a sustainable Europe: meeting the expectations of EU citizens – the answers of the EU institutions.’ Both Pawlak and Buzek argued strongly that Europe should consciously seek to come out of the current crisis stronger and that it shouldn’t abandon its common values nor allow itself to shrink back to the old nationalisms. As President-in-office, Pawlak will oversee the beginnings of the negotiations about the 2014-20 multi-annual financial framework for the European Union and in a sense he used this occasion to set out his stall. This could be summed up as follows: the EU budget is tiny and it is wrong to calculate the benefits (or the ‘costs’) of membership only in terms of those tiny financial transfers. To calculate the real benefits of membership of the EU one has to look at the bigger picture: the benefits of trading within a single European market, for example. It will be an interesting autumn.

This morning I joined our Vice-President, Jacek Krawczyk, in greeting Mr Waldemar Pawlak, Polish deputy prime minister and minister for the economy. Pawlak, who went on to lunch with our President and then a press conference with Polish journalists before addressing the EESC’s plenary session, is a highly experienced minister who has among other things, twice been prime minister of his country. He had come to address the Committee at the start of the landmark first Polish presidency of the Council of the European Union. It is a powerfully symbolic moment for the new Europe and for Poland. Pawlak was particularly interested in the EESC’s composition (that is, the fact that it goes beyond the ‘social partners’) and in its consensus building working methods. During the Polish Presidency the Committee will be holding a lot of meetings of different sorts in Poland and Pawlak expressed the hope that, through such activities, the Committee could enrich Poland’s domestic debate about whether and how to move beyond the tripartite model of the Polish Commission for Social and Economic Questions.

On Tuesdays of plenary session weeks the EESC’s Bureau always meets, primarily to prepare the agenda of the plenary session (Wednesday and Thursday) but also to discuss important political issues. In addition, today the administration made its annual report to the Bureau about human resources management. In that context, as a small institution with probable zero growth over the next few years, tied into (an entirely positive) cooperation agreement with the Committee of the Regions and facing further budgetary squeezes, it is clear that the environment is challenging and likely to remain so for a considerable period. Nevertheless, as an Economic and Social Committee it is imperative that we should offer a competitive and exemplary working environment and, as the report today showed, on the whole we do. As our Swedish President, Staffan Nilsson, declared, we want an administration where women (and men) with young children do not feel obliged to put their ambitions on hold and where careers and families are considered compatible. It’s not always an easy balancing act, particularly in a period of austerity but, as he also pointed out, many of the reforms we have been introducing – flexitime, teleworking, etc – either have no negative effect on productivity or actually enhance it, particularly if we take the longer-term view, as administrations should.

It’s hard to believe (time just goes so fast) but the European Economic and Social Committee is back in a plenary session week and, as with all plenary session weeks, today began with a series of preparatory meetings (the management board, the ‘pre-session’) at administrative level, followed this evening by a meeting of the enlarged Presidency (the President, Vice-Presidents and Group Presidents). There were a couple of hot topics on the table but decisions were amicably reached on all points upstream of tomorrow’s Bureau meeting.

After the Mediterranean sun and sea of yesterday, today I experienced the very different beauty of the Belgian Ardennes in all its green and grey and gritty splendour. We went to pick up N° 1 sprog from her summer university at Libramont. Like the ADEPS summer camps, the summer universities are something the gregarious Belgians do very well. The idea is simple; courses of a week or more bringing together people of all ages, from teenagers to pensioners, to study and work in various branches of the arts, from painting through to photography, from music through to sculpture. With commendable generosity, the Communauté Française offers some thirty fellowships to students from la Francophonie, mostly from African countries such as Burkina Faso and Senegal. These fellows brought their own very special atmosphere with them (we couldn’t help but wonder how hard it was for them to swap the African sun for the low, grey cloud of the Ardennes). Though almost none of them could read music they were all prodigiously talented on a range of instruments (I thought of Paul Simon’s Graceland). N° 1 sprog showed us a block of classrooms, each with its own piano, and then told us that one of these African fellows, from Senegal, had deeply impressed her because back home he was a music teacher in a school. He had sixty pupils and one, just one, piano.

There was once a short-lived BBC Radio Four quiz programme based on the theme of historical connections. At some stage in the programme the panellists were invited to provide an example of their own historical connections. The example I have always remembered was from former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey. As a young man he met a lady whose mother remembered playing as a little girl in ‘summer snow’ in the garden of a villa near Waterloo. It was only when she was older that she learnt that the ‘summer snow’ was the cotton wadding from the muskets and rifles of the soldiers fighting the battle of Waterloo, the wadding having been blown into huge drifts against the garden hedge. I remember thinking that if ever I were invited to appear on such a programme I would have trumped everybody with Otto von Habsburg, who passed away on Monday (4th July) at the ripe old age of 98. For a while, when I was working with the European Parliament, I met him quite often. The former last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary and a direct descendant of Charlemagne (he would have been the Holy Roman Emperor if the Holy Roman Empire had not been abolished in 1806 and as late as 1961 Francisco Franco offered him the Spanish crown), he was a true gentleman who, all things considered (exile, statelessness, Soviet domination of one of his homelands) led an admirable life. Notwithstanding the temptations that such status might have brought, von Habsburg remained a modest, almost entirely humble, man who began his life as a true Crown Prince and ended it as a true European.

After the Palais Fesch I just had the time to visit la Maison Bonaparte (Casa Bonaparte), birthplace of Napoleon. Just a week ago I was pointing out the sites of Waterloo to our children and, as we drove through Genappe, recounting how the Prussians had chased Napoleon’s column through its narrow streets after the great battle had been lost. Now, I was standing in the house where it had all begun. Despite being choc-a-bloc full of Napoleon memorabilia, only the shell of the house the young Napoleon would have known remains. The restored décor and furniture dates from Napoleon III. The guidebooks I read were pretty dismissive about this museum but I think it is worth a visit because the overall exhibition (maybe it has been redone since the guidebooks were written) very cleverly hints at the probable origin of Napoleon’s imperial and dynastic ambitions. For the Bonaparte family only gradually acquired the whole of the house, buying floors and rooms over the years. Similarly, strategic marriages were an important part of their upward mobility. The revolution and all that followed transported the family to another universe but, the exhibition hints, the same instincts, of constantly adding on territory and marrying in and up, continued. I also learned two future Trivial Pursuits answers. The first is that Napoleon was actually Napoleone, with the last ‘e’ being pronounced, Italian-style, and indeed called himself by that name until his twenties, when he wanted to sound more French (he never got rid of his Corsican accent, though). The second is that his mother’s nickname for him was ‘Nabulio’, which is rather sweet.

With work over, I had a few hours to kill before the evening flight to Orly, so I went to the Palais Fesch, one of two ‘musts’ in Ajaccio. Napoleon’s half-uncle, Cardinal Fesch, was an art lover and ardent collector who first amassed a vast collection of French, Flemish and Dutch pictures and then completed it with the second most important collection of 14th to 18th century Italian works outside the Louvre. All of this was bequeathed to Ajaccio on condition that an academy of arts was created. His wishes were not entirely respected and a number of key works were sold off, but the palace was nevertheless built to house the collection and is still full to overflowing. For me, two paintings stood out. One was Titian’s Man with a Glove, the man’s pensive expression belied by the intricate lacework of his shirt. The other was Veronese’s uncompromisingly erotic Leda and the Swan. Downstairs there is a collection of Napoleonic memorabilia, including his first sword. I am not an expert on Napoleon but I know enough about his life story to know that he must have held that sword with immense pride.