New York has several rich art collections, all housed in impressive buildings. We had to ration ourselves to one this time, so this morning we went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). On this trip my posts are soon going to run out of superlatives. MoMA deserves quite a few. Here we saw Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Matisse’s Dance, Jasper John’s Flag and Andy Warhol’s soup cans, among other iconic works. But why, you’ll wonder, have I illustrated this post with a picture of my friend and European Parliament colleague, Steve Clark? Simple! The Clarks, like the Westlakes (our sons are also classmates and best buddies), are in New York and so we met for lunch in an upstairs Japanese restaurant. The world is small…

Very early this morning I jogged down Broadway and then off over to the Lower East Side to an area of the city, between Houston Street  and 23rd Street, that was once a thriving German neighbourhood, known as Kleindeutschland (‘Little Germany’). I came to do some local research for my magnum opus. If you know what you are looking for there are still a number of traces of the area’s German past. These include the Freie Bibliothek und Lesehall (New York’s first free lending library), the German dispensary (both in the picture) and the German-American Shooting Club, with its legend ‘Einickeit Macht Stark’ still proudly emblazoned on the brown stone facade. If you look at a map of New York, you’ll see that Broadway doesn’t at all respect DeWitt Clinton’s grid system. This is because it follows an ancient Lenape pathway – probably the native Indians’ regular route to the end of the island. Thus, as I jogged back up Broadway to our hotel I was following one of the few traces of the island’s original inhabitants.

In the early evening we headed up the West Side to meet a good friend, Kate Ascher. Kate has published two authoritative works respectively about the city and its logistics (The Works) and about skyscrapers (The Heights). Currently Milstein Professor of Urban Development at Columbia University, Kate gave us a guided tour of the university campus before we headed off to an Italian restaurant on Morningside Heights. She described to us how Mayor DeWitt Cinton had effectively imposed New York’s familiar grid system on middle and upper Manhattan in 1811, at a time when most of that land was still undeveloped. The name, Manhattan, is a corrupted version of the indigenous Lenape Indian name for the island, ‘Manna-hata’, and apocryphally means ‘many hills’. That there aren’t any hills any more is also down to DeWitt Clinton and the city’s early developers, for as Kate explained to us, they levelled everything out to maximise the number of plots that could be built upon. The grid and Manhattan’s relative flatness make New York an easily navigable city and are now completely taken for granted but the creations of both were, in their day, prodigious feats.

We are staying on Broadway, on the Upper West Side. In a day of rituals, N° 1 sprog and I got up early (New York is in the middle of a heat wave)  and ran into Central Park and around the Jacqueline Onassis Reservoir together, it seemed, with about half of New York. (If the number of joggers and walkers is any indication, New York is a seriously fit city.) Later, we took a bus tour around the city’s main sights (our wise-cracking New York guide was good on the nuances of the city’s language – ‘downtown’ for example is somewhere you go but you can never arrive; it is a direction and not a place) and then, inevitably, a boat trip out to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.  N° 1 sprog, a dancing fanatic, had been advised to visit a well-known dance school, Steps, whilst in New York. Lo and behold,it transpired that Steps is just opposite our hotel and so this afternoon she had a work-out there. This coincided with the grandaddy of all storms, so that, for an afternoon at least, New York cooled down a little (just a little). We have been badly infected with New York’s incessant, frenetic activity!

On the flight over I had time for two films; Alexander Payne’s excellent 2011 The Descendants, starring George Clooney, and Guy Ritchie’s altogether less memorable, if still enjoyable, 2011 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, starring Robert Downey Jr. I wonder if Clooney has ever made a bad film. In The Descendants he plays Honolulu-based land baron Matt King, a ‘back-up parent’ of two daughters whose philosophy of parenting is to ‘give them enough money to do something but not enough to do nothing’. When a boating accident sends Matt’s wife into an irreversible and ultimately fatal coma, he suddenly finds himself looking after his teenage spoilt brat of a daughter, Alex, and the altogether more vulnerable ten year-old Scottie. Through Alex he discovers that his wife was having an affair. As he comes to terms with this (and he does) and as his solidarity with his daughters grows, Matt’s philosophy of life changes, leading him to turn his back on a deal that would have sold 25,000 acres of pristine land on the island of Kaua’i for development. In short, adversity and self-knowledge transforms him into a better person. The cast turns in a strong performance, particularly Shailene Woodley playing the spoilt Alex, and the director cleverly mixes sentiment and humour without ever slipping into farce or melodrama. In the second film, a Hollywood Holmes does battle with a Hollywood Moriarty; cue action – lots of it.

It sound pretentious, but today, thanks to the wonders of modern aviation and time zones, we breakfasted in Kent and had dinner in New York. Our flight out from Heathrow was in the early afternoon so we could theoretically have motored over from Brussels this morning, but I was taking no chances. Instead, we stayed in a lovely Kent pub and then drove up to London Heathrow in good time for our flight. We are at the beginning of a grand coast-to-coast tour of the United States of America, long promised to our young things when they got to an appropriate age. With N° 1 sprog about to start university, this is the time, and so we are off. Once we had checked into our hotel, our first port of call was ‘the Rock’ – the top of the Rockefeller Center, where we gazed out over New York’s iconic skyline at night. As those who know the city will surely attest, New York positively throbs with energy, and it never stops. I am sure medical science could prove that pulses race on arrival!

Hard back from the plenary session, the President, Staffan Nilsson, and I attended a concert organised by the EESC’s staff committee. The concert was performed by Dusika, a youth symphony orchestra from Copenhagen. All of the musicians were amateurs and most were between the ages of 13 and 25 years. Dusika gives about eight concerts per year, with some abroad. Two of the orchestra members had studied at the European School in Brussels (Uccle), hence the Belgian trip. Under the baton of Christian Schmiedescamp, the orchestra played Carl Nielsen, Georges Hue and Pyotr Tchaikovsky – the perfect musical antidote to a long and dense plenary session!

Listening to today’s debates and votes, I was struck by how much of the Committee’s work is currently devoted, in one way or another, to the crisis, how to overcome it, and how to deal with its consequences. Thus, the plenary today debated and adopted opinions inter alia on: restructuring and anticipation of change: what lessons from recent experience? (Rapporteur = Antonello Pezzini, Employers’ Group, Italy; Co-rapporteur = Thomas Student, Employees’ Category, Germany); what changes for Europe’s banking sector with the new financial rules? (Rapporteur = Anna Nietyksza, Employers’ Group, Poland; Co-rapporteur = Pierre Gendre, Employees’ Catgeory, France); Youth Opportunties Initiative (Rapporteur = Tomasz Jasinski, Employees’ Group, Poland); White Paper on Pensions (Rapporteur = Petru Sorin Dandea, Emplyees’ Group, Romania; Co-rapporteur = Krzysztof Pater, Various Interests Group, Poland); Key actions towards a Single Market Act II (Rapporteur = Ivan Voles, Employers’ Group, Czech Republic); and Stability Bonds (Rapporteur = Gérard Dantin, Employees’ Group, France). All of these opinions were adopted by large majorities, thus underlining the consensus within the Committee, often expressed in debate on all sides, that the Union must continue to be a Union of solidarity and not be distracted and diverted into arguments about juste retour.

Later this afternoon the EESC’s plenary session held a thematic debate on the outcome of the Rio+ 20 Conference, bringing together as speakers the Committee’s own President, Staffan Nilsson, the European Commissioner for the Environment, Janez Potocnik, the President of the EESC’s sustainable development observatory, Hans-Joachim Wilms, the Director of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, Laurence Tubiana, and the rapporteur of the Liaison Group, Olivier Consolo (CONCORD). Wilms memorably described Rio as ‘not a meeting, but a location’. Overall, Tubiana argued, politicians had failed to give the right messages but civil society organisations were now mobilised. And so, as Nilsson argued, the challenge was now to ‘bring Rio home.’ Potocnik, acknowledging the disappointing results, still argued that it was better to have an agreement than no agreement at all: ‘It is still only a beginning, but we can build on it.’ All speakers drew encouragement from the fact the Europe had spoken with one voice. Potocnik insisted that ‘the power lies in our (European) hands. It depends on how strongly we continue to take this forward.’ As Consolo put it, civil society ‘must take its responsibilities.’  Altogether, it was an interesting and passionate debate.

This afternoon’s plenary session hosted Cypriot minister of European affairs, Andreas Mavroyiannis, who came to present the priorities of the Cyprus presidency of the Council of the European Union. Since the previous day’s Bureau meeting had heard a balance sheet of the Danish presidency, there was a clear sense of the baton being handed over, smoothly. This is the first Cyprus presidency and is therefore a flagship occasion for a relatively new member state. Mavroyiannis explained how Cyprus will work, across all policy domains, towards an ever more efficient and sustainable Europe, working in a consensual manner to provide coherence and continuity in the Council’s work so as to create a ‘filoxenos topos’ – a hospitable place.