Various environment-friendly vehicles and curiosities were on display at the Move It! event, and visitors could try some of them out. So it was that I found myself on a Segway. It was an interesting experience. Two gyroscopes control the two wheels so that, though it seems counter-intuitive, the machine balances perfectly when you step onto it. The handle bar in front serves two purposes: to steer and, I think, to provide psychological comfort for the nervous user. Having misspent a lot of my student days on a motorbike, my hands searched in vain for a throttle, clutch or brake. No; the position of your body is what controls everything. Lean forward, and you move forward. Lean back, and you slow down. It can be mastered in a few minutes. So I went for a ride but, alas, there were quite a few people taking photographs and even filming me. Oh my God! There was no way I could fall off. Imagine the fun people would have! As a result, I was nervously stiff (just look at the picture). Yes, I look daft, but I would surely have looked even dafter if I had fallen off. All in a Secretary General’s day of work…

To Place Flagey this morning for an event, Move It!,  organised by the European Economic and Social Committee that begun yesterday and will end on Wednesday. The basic theme is encouraging people to think in terms of sustainable forms of transport. Yesterday the tents and their exhibitions were crowded with visitors encouraged out by car free day and the local market. This morning came the speechifying. We were welcomed by the mayor of Ixelles, Willy Decourty, and his Deputy in charge of European affairs, Delphine Bourgeois, and then we were addressed by Isabelle Durant, Vice-President of the European Parliament, and Siim Kallas, Vice-President of the European Commission. The Committee’s own members were much in evidence: notably, Staffan Nilsson, our future President; Irini Pari, our outgoing Vice-President, Janos Toth, outgoing President of the Committee’s Transport and Energy Section; and Stéphane Buffetaut, outgoing President of the Committee’s Sustainable Development Observatory. I participated in a round table discussion in the second half of the morning. My speech, in French, is pasted below. I am proud of what our Committee is doing in this context – changing the behaviour of our colleagues and encouraging the use of  more sustainable and healthier forms of transport. I had the privilege of sitting beside Luc Schuiten, a Belgian architect whose wonderful images of a future organic city graced the exhibition. Continue reading

Today was car free day in Brussels. The cold and gloomy weather in the early morning could not repress the exuberance of the city’s inhabitants as they ‘reclaimed their city’ – words I repeatedly heard throughout the day, and it really does make you realise that traffic is a form of repression. Our local council organised a number of brocantes (jumble sales) and we sent our sprogs off to earn some pocket money with bits and pieces from the attic, cellar and garage. They ended up making quite a lot of money from what was, basically, junk. Their trick was low price, quick sale. I couldn’t help but notice who was buying: very old people and people of immigrant origin – Poles, Turks, Moroccans, Algerians… I shan’t quickly forget an old (Belgian) man haggling over the price of an egg cup (twenty cents), nor a Turkish mother determined that her children should have some toys, notwithstanding their poverty. For that was what it was all about. Of course, in the early morning the stalls were scouted by antiques dealers and collectors looking for a bargain find, but for the rest it was a parade of the poor. There is, I realise, a thin dividing line between poverty and thrift but this was a reality check for me.

Mario shows us how to build a proper wall against free kicks

I have just returned from the Palais d’Egmont and an all day conference organised jointly by the Belgian Central Economic Council, the Belgian National Labour Council and the European Economic and Social Committee, with support from the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. A long and rich and thought-provoking agenda saw speeches from, inter alia, Steven Vanackere, Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ms Joëlle Milquet, Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Employment and Equal Opportunities, Maros Sefcovic, Vice-President of the European Commission, Lorenzo Codogno, President of the EU’s Economic Policy Committee and Ms Maria Joao Rodrigues, aka ‘Mme Lisbon Strategy’. The central theme and conclusion, strongly evident in all of the contributions and all of the discussions, was that the Europe 2020 strategy will only be a proper success if stakeholders feel ownership of the strategy and therefore work to make it a success. Coda: coming back to the office after a week camped out in meetings of various sorts, I found two neat piles of files to read and sign – the traditional penance! Still, it has been a fantastic week, rich in very positive activities and mixed emotions. In three days the 2006-2010 mandate will be formally over, and then we must work hard to make the next mandate a glittering success. (In the picture: Robert Tollet, President of the CEC, Maros Sefcovic, Mario Sepi, Paul Windey, President of the NLC, and yours truly.)

Simply sublime

Our Belgian hosts, the Central Economic Council and the National Labour Council, generously invited all of the ESC Presidents and Secretaries-General to an evening meal. Before that, though, they laid on a guided tour to the Magritte Museum. This was a rare treat. Please don’t tell anybody, but by chance I found myself alone in a room with Magritte’s Empire of Light. For some five minutes I gazed without interruption or noise at one of my all-time favourite paintings. The more I gazed at it, the more fascinated I became. Why does this particular image exert such influence on us (well, on me, at least)? Those privileged minutes were an oasis of calm in a hectic week of much activity and many emotions.

I spent this afternoon, together with my President, in the annual assembly of the Presidents and Secretaries-General of the national economic and social councils and similar institutions, of which there are twenty-two. There were formal and more academic points on a full agenda. We debated and adopted a joint declaration on ‘the involvement of civil society and social partners in the Europe 2020 Strategy’, and I presented a proposal to launch a study into how we might update and reformulate our Internet-based cooperation. The more academic point was a truly fascinating presentation by a team of Belgian, French and Dutch academics into the relationship between the European level and Belgian social policy. I cannot even begin to do justice to the many interesting findings described in their presentations, but I would like to cite just three findings that I, as an ‘institutionalist’ found particularly fascinating. The first concerned what the academics described as the ‘boomerang effect’, when national governments enjoying the presidency of the Council of the European Union feed up a domestic policy as a best practice to be generalised among all the member states. The boomerang occurs because, the research team found, quite frequently the European level adapts and enhances a domestic best practice, so that the member state in question will itself have to adapt what it previously considered to be an example for everybody else. The second fascinating finding is that member states have been using their presidencies of the Council of the European Union to enhance domestic networks, galvanised by a national presidency plan. The recurring presidencies give such networks the chance to be enhanced and ‘re-booted’ at frequent intervals. However, successive enlargements have meant that the intervals have grown much less frequent. As a result, these networks are inventing substitute reasons to re-invigorate themselves. The third finding was that many NGOs are empowered in the domestic context by the European level. The meeting was  another occasion for tributes and a fond farewell to Mario Sepi. In the picture Paul Windey, Chairman of the Belgian National Labour Council (Belgium is chairing the network this year), is offering Mario a commemorative gift on behalf of all the Presidents and Secretaries-General.

The proud authors

At one o’clock I joined the President for an unusual event. He and a Maltese member, Anna Maria Darmanin, have together written a sort of continuation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Their fable, entitled The Farm Revisited, looks into a future where the rats have taken over from the pigs. The farm and its inhabitants have been completely won over by the culture of financial capitalism and the passion for personal enrichment. This society appears to be free but the values of solidarity and community spirit have been lost. The farm animals become heavily indebted, their increasingly fictitious wealth based on a speculative bubble. The inevitable crisis occurs, with financial collapse and environmental disaster, and it is only then that the wise moral of good government and citizen involvement prevails. A cautionary tale and with absolutely no parallels with today’s world, of course….

I shall miss them...

The plenary session continued this morning with a very heavy agenda, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Alongside a number of heavyweight and interconnected opinions on such topics as a new financial system for the internal market, practical initiatives for the economic recovery, green jobs, financing structures for SMEs and the interconnectedness of business registers, were two very well-researched opinions on the EU’s strategy for the Danube region and the EU’s multingualism policy. But beyond all of these, the plenary adopted a resolution on the situation of the Roma in the European Union. The full text of the resolution is below. The adoption of such resolutions is rare in the life of the Committee and is significant in itself. The rarity meant also that the plenary got embroiled in some procedural confusion but, in the end, the resolution was adopted and speaks for itself. Continue reading

From the vernissage we retired to a nearby Italian restaurant to which I had invited the outgoing President and all of his team together with my management board to say thank you and farewell in convivial circumstances. We have done a huge amount together and have always got on well. As I wrote in a previous post, we have been working with a passionate and committed President. Moreover, until the Lisbon Treaty EESC Presidents had a mere two years to push through their programmes (now it’s two-and-a-half years) so they are always in a hurry, whereas the administration’s primary concern is excellence and careful preparation. The potential for tensions and differences was therefore very high, but we always found a way to move forward together, for the better interest of the Committee. It was a good evening, with just a little bit of speechifying (my speech is below). The friendly atmosphere was in itself an illustration of how well the teams have got on. Now the administration must prepare itself to work with a new presidential team. The old team, meanwhile, will break up and its members will go their own ways. I hope they will all carry happy memories with them of their time in the Committee and above all, of course, their time with Mario Sepi. Continue reading

The President and I rushed back from the ceremony (our plenary session is being held this time in the European Commission’s Charlemagne building) so as to be present at the opening of an art exhibition in the EESC’s flagship Jacques Delors building. The exhibition, timed to coincide with the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, has the title ‘100 years of abstract art’ and features the works of five artists covering different Belgian regions: Guy Vandebranden (Antwerp), Jean Dubois (Hainaut), Guillaume Vanden Borre (Brabant), Victor Noel (Hainaut) and the sculptress, Hilde Van Sumere (Flemish Brabant). As Mario Sepi put it in his introductory remarks, the exhibition is proof that culture knows no boundaries. I had the privilege of meeting Guy Vandebranden (see picture), one of those people of great modesty and absolute determination and whose work features bold, geometric shapes and forms and bright colours surrounded by dark outlines that somehow create an illusion of depth and space.