A buzz in the air?

This morning I chaired the usual Monday morning management board meeting but there was one slightly out-of-the-ordinary, though enjoyable, point on the agenda. To bee or not to bee, that was the question: we heard a presentation about how we might, via a specialised organisation, Apis Bruoc Sella, be able to put several bee hives on the roof of our flagship Jacques Delors building. I hasten to add that, since we share the building with our Committee of the Regions friends and colleagues, this would have to be a joint initiative, and this is indeed our intention. We must also look into health and insurance issues, but it seems entirely feasible. During what was a very convincing presentation we learned that city bees seem to be doing better than country bees – probably because they are less exposed to pesticides. The Jacques Delors building is well placed because of the proximity of the Parc Léopold alongside us. It will be great if we can contribute to the fight against the bee’s decline whilst producing our own honey.

This afternoon we listened to an exquisite concert; Bl!ndman (a saxophone quartet) playing Bach in a small Baroque church in the Ardennes. Bl!ndman’s founder, Eric Sleichim, has explained how once he practised Bach’s flute sonatas on a soprano saxophone and was astounded to realise that the sounds produced resembled woodwind and brass, voices and organ sounds. Years later, Bl!ndman used Bach’s four-part chorales to sound out the acoustics of concert rooms and also to practise close harmony. Though playing Bach on the saxophone seemed taboo, Sleichim became increasingly convinced that his saxophone quartet could offer ‘an essential view of this almost 300 year-old music’. And then he discovered the younger Bach’s little-known organ works, the Choralpartiten, and knew that he had found what he was looking for. Beautiful; simply beautiful.

What is the collective noun for Secretaries-General?

The meeting of the Secretaries General finished this lunchtime after two rich and dense half days of presentations and discussions. It is difficult to draw across-the-board conclusions from the proceedings: the circumstances differ considerably from member state to member state and from Council to Council. Nevertheless, it seemed that in some cases the traditional processes of dialogue and the search for consensus risked being undermined by the need for urgent responses to the economic and financial crisis. At the same time, several of the Councils have been quietly reforming themselves in order to be able to deliver shorter, punchier and earlier opinions. The European Economic and Social Committee itself falls clearly into that category.

This morning I ran along the beach to the port under a rising sun and alongside a murmuring sea. The beach is broad and the sand fine and it is easy to see why this place became a resort. However, at a discreet distance from the beach is a massive sea wall, and this speaks of a less placid sea; the then village of Scheveningen was damaged and sometimes entirely destroyed by storms in 1470, 1570, 1775, 1825, 1860, 1881 and 1894. It was after the 1894 storm that the villagers decided to build a harbour. Until then, they had fished from flat-bottomed boats that they would drag up the beach. There are very few traces of the fishermen’s village now. Scheveningen is a part of The Hague and pretty much built up. The sea front now boasts an esplanade and double rows of shops and boutiques stand where the bomschuiten were once dragged.

Our hotel is situated a short way inland from the seafront at Scheveningen. This evening the Dutch SER hosted a dinner at a seafront restaurant. We walked there in the early evening, with a promisingly reddish sunset out over the sea to the west and a bracing breeze helping us on our way. I had the honour of sitting at a table notably with the SER Chairman, Alexander Rinnooy Kan, and the Secretary General of the Bulgarian Economic and Social Council, Anton Lazarov. Inevitably, we discussed political and societal change. Alexander set us a challenge. He has to deliver a speech in a few weeks time to Dutch business representatives. How could he convince them to facilitate a return to the collegial, consensual domestic political arrangements that had served the Netherlands so well for so long and, equally, how could he get them to encourage a return to the traditional basically pro-European attitude that had for so long characterized and well served the Dutch people? We spent much of the rest of the evening writing segments of an imaginary speech. It was an interesting and illuminating exercise, with representatives in the discussion of ‘Brussels’, ‘old Europe’ and ‘new Europe’. There was an underlying point: how to provide a positive ‘narrative’ when, if not wisely defended, Europe will increasingly be portrayed as being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

I am in The Hague today, at the annual meeting of the Secretaries-General of European Union economic and social councils and similar institutions. We are being elegantly and generously hosted by the Dutch Social and Economic Council and, in particular, by its Chairman, Alexander Rinnooy Kan, and its Secretary General, Véronique Timmerhuis. The theme of the two-day conference is the future of social dialogue in ‘a more diverse and polarised environment’ and of the roles of the economic and social councils. The keynote speaker this afternoon was Jelle Visser, professor at the University ofAmsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies. Now, it just so happens that Jelle is a very old friend (that’s him, together with Véronique, in the picture) – thirty years old, to be precise. He and I were direct contemporaries at the European University Institute in Florence, researchers in the political and social sciences department (1981-84). I lived in Fiesole, Jelle in Compiobbi, and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in Jelle’s battered mini estate. In those days, getting a lift from Jelle was a mixed blessing, since the engine tended to conk out and the only way to re-start it was to get out and push. I did an awful lot of pushing. I have been reminiscing on Facebook recently with another mutual friend, Hugo (now of New York), who used to bring fresh spring herring down to Florence from Amsterdam on the night train, the pot squeezed into the couchette attendant’s mini-fridge. How delicious they always tasted! Happy days!

This evening I attended a farewell dinner for John Monks, the outgoing President of the European Trade Union Confederation. He may be outgoing, but he is certainly not retiring. In the January 2011 Honours List he was appointed as a working member of the House of Lords, and he will now take his considerable expertise, political skills and passionate Europeanism to the UK’s second chamber. My friend, former European Parliament Secretary General Julian Priestley (who did a ten year stint) was a fellow guest at table and I shall shortly post a photograph of the three of us because, nationality and passionate Europeanism aside, the three of us have one particular thing in common; we have all given the annual John Fitzmaurice Memorial Lecture.

My planner, busy planning...

Today, a rare day in the office this week, was choc-a-bloc with more-or-less important meetings, but one meeting in particular was, to my mind, of great importance. Now that the Committee’s new establishment plan is fully recruited and in place I can start to concentrate in a more focused fashion on strategic issues and one of those is the drafting of a serviceable development plan for the Committee’s administration. I am allergic to bureaucratic exercises for their own sake, but the administration needs to have a sense of direction, particularly in view of the challenging times ahead, and that sense of direction must dovetail with the political vision of the Committee’s members. As a first step, a member of my secretariat, Bernard Thysebaert, has been consulting with all of the Committee’s senior management, seeking to make the plan a management tool generated by management itself. Further consultative stages will see Bernard consult the political authorities and the Committee’s management board will then consider a first draft of the plan. It is looking good, thanks in no small part to Bernard’s talent in both encouraging people to elaborate and in listening attentively.

Talking of institutions, today my wife and I are celebrating twenty-five years of marriage – our silver wedding anniversary, no less. Like all age-related matters these days, I find this simple fact hard to believe. I remember hitch-hiking down from Glasgow to be at my parents’ silver wedding anniversary bash and it seems like last week. I was extraordinarily lucky and got a single lift from Charing Cross, Glasgow, to Charing Cross, London, in an MG sports car driven by a man who had as many jokes as I did. We laughed all the way down the M1. If I close my eyes and think hard I can still remember the partying and the relatives and friends, many of them now, alas, long since gone. My parents reached gold before ill health took a grip and beating their record could I suppose, be considered our new target, though we don’t really think in those terms. I am certainly not going to pontificate. Suffice it to say that I am an extraordinarily lucky man.

Every year the European Parliament considers whether to grant the Secretaries General of the European Union’s institutions formal discharge for their implementation of their respective budgets. It is a sort of ultimate approval of their financial management record. The procedure runs two years behind. Last year, for example, I was granted discharge for the implementation of the 2008 budget but, since I took up my mandate in October, I was only truly responsible for three months of that year. This time, for 2009, the whole year was my ‘baby’, and I was therefore delighted to learn, via a telephone call from Strasbourg, that I, and the Committee, had been granted discharge. For, whilst the Secretary General is nominally the one granted the discharge, it is in reality a thumbs-up for the whole institution, including its administration and its political authorities.