Just one week to go now until we welcome our new members to the Committee; remember, 102 members, almost a third of our 344 full complement, will be new to the Committee and, many of them, new to the European Union, the institutions and ‘Brussels’. This afternoon I chaired a last coordination meeting of the task force we have set up to make sure that we introduce the new members to the Committee and to its administration in optimal fashion. The leitmotif throughout has been ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’. Judging from this afternoon’s meeting, we should need no second chance. Everything is falling into place and the good efforts of the many colleagues involved are paying off. We may be a very small administration (smaller than virtually all Commission Directorates-General, for example) but we do big things, and we do them well.

Today we are enjoying beautiful weather in Brussels. At midday we walked from Tervuren to Jezus-Eik through the arboretum, ate a traditional Belgian lunch there, and then walked back. The simple fact that such enjoyable places exist on our collective doorstep reminded me of the discussions at the Citizens’ University the previous day. Brussels may not have the splendour or the beauty of a Paris or a Vienna, it may not have the timelessness of a Rome or an Athens, and may not have the grandeur of a London or a Madrid or a Milan but it is nevertheless not a bad place to live – not bad at all.

I was delighted to read in my Sunday newspaper that a number of world cultural figures are grouping together to call upon the Venetian authorities to pull down the vast advertising hoardings that currently disfigure so many of its beautiful ancient buildings. The illustration here sums it all up. In aesthetic terms, it is just ghastly. As one conservationist put it, ‘No company sponsoring a concert would get its jingles played in the middle of a Mozart symphony.’ It is not only cheating the tourist (nothing can quite describe the shock of seeing so many familar scenes so grotesquely defaced). What sort of message does it give young people? Come on, Serenissima!

I happily gave up part of this Saturday morning to take part in a panel discussion at the Brussels Citizens University, organised on the premises of the Free University of Brussels (ULB). This ‘attempt at collective intelligence’, as it describes itself, brings together people from Brussels, experts, political, economic and associative representatives as well as simple citizens ‘to come and think out their city region’. I was on a panel entitled ‘Europeans and the City’, encompassing such thorny issues as rights and duties, taxation, the attractiveness of the city and civic participation. I had come along with notes for a speech about how we civil servants can and must do more. But the first speaker in our panel played devil’s advocate by presenting the European Union and its institutions as a milch cow that ought to be giving much more milk, so I abandoned my initial intentions and came out fighting. Where would Brussels be if it didn’t have the European institutions? Interestingly, my generally pugnacious line got quite a lot of support from the audience. In due course I shall write up both sets of speaking notes and post them here and on my website. At the end, I got showered with visiting cards and e-mail addresses and I am definitely going to try and keep in touch with those members of the audience (charity workers, students, academics, civil servants) who spoke out. Warm congratulations to the organisers of the Brussels Citizens’ University for providing a context in which such dialogue can take place. I hope I’ll be invited back next year.

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of German unification – a far more significant date than my own little anniversary. In my own modest way, as an underling in the Commission’s secretariat general following the work of the European Parliament’s ad hoc committee and reporting to the Commission’s task force, I had the immense privilege of working on this file and thus had a ringside seat. And I have a piece of the wall enclosed in a perspex box engraved with an image of the Reichstag – a thank you gift from the German government – to prove it. For the anoraks and institutionalists, the history included all sorts of ‘firsts’ in terms of legislative procedures (two readings of implementing legislation in one week, thousands of amendments, shuttle diplomacy in parallel with shuttle legislation between Brussels, Strasbourg, Bonn and Paris, etc). I even wrote an academic article about it all (‘The Community Express Service: The Rapid Passage of Emergency Legislation on German Unification’, Common Market Law Review, 28, 1991). But my overriding impression was of an unstoppable force. It was as though a dam had been breached. Problems were simply washed away. We technocrats and bureaucrats (a small gang, now dispersed to Dublin, Geneva, and other points of the compass) knew that there was a greater cause. As one old Council hand put it to me, this was a powerful example of political will. It was also truly history in the making and I, among others, had the immense privilege to witness it.

This morning I went to the Centre Borschette (a big conference centre owned and run by the European Commission) to speak at a seminar jointly organised by the European Union Institute of Security Studies, the United Nations Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies and the European Commission’s Research Directorate General on the theme of ‘civil society in global governance’. The conference participants (about sixty of them) were an eclectic mix of academics and practitioners from all over the world. Whilst I was on the panel with my practitioner’s hat on (my two fellow panellists were distinguished academics: Professor Jan Aart Scholte; of Warwick University, and Distinguished Professor Deng Zhenglai, of Fudan University), I enjoyed being able to adopt a more ‘academic’ approach. Indeed, I am currently writing up my speaking notes as an academic article (which I will post below in due course). My basic thesis was that over the past two decades we have seen five distinct and converging trends. Within the European Union, there has been a growing conceptualisation of the role of civil society. In parallel, there has been a greater institutionalisation (most new member states have opted to create an economic and social council or something similar). Precisely the same two trends can be observed worldwide; for example, in 2003 Brazil created an Economic and Social Development Council modelled closely on the European Economic and Social Committee. The fifth trend, facilitated by the internet, is the growth of networks of such bodies. At EU level, there is the network of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions and, at world level, there is the burgeoning International Association of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions (known by its French acronym, AICESIS). The membership of the latter has grown from 24 in 1999 to 56 today, and many of its new members are also new institutions. This new aspect of governance, though ‘messy’ (there are, for example, no commonly agreed definitions of ‘civil society’ and ‘civil society organisations’ as there are for ‘electorate’ and ‘political parties’), is of growing importance. It was good fun to swim in such waters for a few hours…

Today it is precisely two years since I became Secretary General of the European Economic and Social Committee, and thus also two years since I started this blog. The time has gone by at alarming speed whilst, paradoxically, many of the things that I wanted to do have taken longer than I had expected. Nevertheless, on balance I can look back with some satisfaction, I think. I have enjoyed a close and very productive relationship with the outgoing President and the enlarged Presidency (and will, I am confident, enjoy the same good relationship with their successors) and have worked hard to maintain a good and friendly working relationship with our members. The Committee has enjoyed a number of high profile successes and the Lisbon Treaty’s potential is beginning to be realised. The new establishment plan for the administration is fully in place and, notably, I am now flanked by two Deputy Secretaries-General, thus enabling me to avoid the pitfalls of excessively centralised responsibility. Whilst all financial activities have been regrouped within a single directorate, financial responsibility has been successfully decentralised to the various spending actors and the system works well. We have been steadily modernising the administration through such measures as training and the introduction of flexi-time, and tele-working is not far away. More generally, we have a high level of satisfaction among our work force and a good atmosphere in house. I certainly don’t claim to have achieved all of this alone (I am particularly spoilt by the excellence of my secretariat) , but I think that, notwithstanding all of the daily distractions of ‘events’ and firefighting, I have managed to keep my eyes fixed on the strategic objectives of serving our members better and of exploiting the twin wealths of our members’ authenticity and our administration’s rich potential. Above all, though, what I’d like to note is that the job is a privilege and a pleasure.

Anne in action...

This evening I had dinner with Ambassador Anne Derse. Thirty years ago (no less) we studied together at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Bologna Center. Since SAIS, Anne has followed an illustrious career as a diplomat, serving notably as economic affairs counsellor at the US mission to the EU, where, amongst other interesting and influential tasks, she was the last US commissioner on the Tripartite Gold Commission (which adjudicated sovereign claims for ‘Nazi gold’). In 2004 she helped establish the new US embassy in Baghdad. She was US ambassador to Azerbaijan 2006-2009 and is now US ambassador to Lithuania. At the same time, Anne has raised a family of four great children. I am an unconditional admirer of my friend and contemporary’s career. Remember, a lot of top diplomatic postings are made through political patronage, but Anne has advanced purely on the basis of ability. She is an enlightened internationalist and a fully paid-up supporter (as am I) of international exchange programmes. She is, in every sense of the term, a good American friend.

Sven and saw

Today was a bit of a speechifying day but altogether a rewarding one. It began in the early morning at La Hulpe, where one of my directorates had gone for a team-building ‘away day’. I was invited to give an introductory talk about the challenges ahead. The basic message that I hope I got across is that, with the start of a new mandate and a new Presidency and the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, the Committee is well-placed to play a valuable flanking role, not only by carrying out its advisory function but also by providing a forum in which the concept of participatory democracy may be fleshed out. In the afternoon I gave the closing speech to a group of new Committee officials. I try always to give a sense not only of what the Committee is about but also what the European public service is about and why there is a strong moral imperative upon us all to behave in exemplary fashion – it’s not just the Committee’s reputation that is at stake, but that of the European ideal as a whole. In between, there was a farewell lunch for the outgoing chairman of the Committee’s specialised section for energy and transport, Janos Toth, who will be much missed and, in the evening, a farewell for a colleague, Sven Damman, leaving for the European Commission. I dubbed the latter my ‘eco-warrior’, since he constantly sought to improve our environmental performance. For his farewell party he had written a poem and this he recited, accompanying himself with a musical saw (his usual instrument is the trombone). The day was thus a mixture of prospective and retrospective. All things must pass.

Bernd Hüttemann

This evening I met the Secretary General of the German European Movement and an old buddy, Bernd Hüttemann. Germany has no equivalent of the European Economic and Social Committee. Though it could never be such an institution and would never seek such a vocation, the European Movement has by its nature always encouraged civic dialogue. In this context, the German Constitutional Court’s recent ruling on the Lisbon Treaty has put fresh wind in its sails. In a little known passage in the judgement, the Court drew attention to the importance of civic dialogue and, yes, of participatory democracy, flanking representative democracy. This is a fascinating and unexpected offshoot of the constitutional debate surrounding the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty but, as Bernd argues, it should also be an important consideration in the implementation of the Treaty. Interesting stuff.