Today is Open Doors Day for the European institutions and, as you can see from the image, notwithstanding the fact that it is a Saturday, a large number of the Committee’s staff and its members have turned out early in the morning (the picture was taken at 09.30) in order to prepare to welcome our guests. They were already queueing when our doors opened at 10.00. There is an excellent atmosphere (as always) and I am sure today is going to be a great success. Postcsript: the day was a great success. We welcomed about 3,500 visitors to the Committee.

Many moons ago, when I was a young and not particularly bright young thing in the Commission’s Secretariat General, my French no more than rudimentary even on a good day, I found that there were two types of official. There were the friendly and welcoming officials who treated me more-or-less as an equal and there were the rest. I shall not dwell on the latter here (though some would later became good friends) but Alain van Solinge, whose untimely death I learnt about today, was undoubtedly one of the former. He was a brilliant lawyer who gave dispassionate, incisive and dependable legal advice on constitutional, inter-institutional and trade issues to three successive Commission Presidents (Delors, Prodi and Barroso); he was an academic manqué, who gave courses and lectures at the ULB, and he was, perhaps above all, a nice guy, who was always ready to discuss whatever constitutional nuances I thought I had discovered and, in fact, he had long ago considered and resolved. He was never fazed, as I surely was at the time, by such higher authorities as François Lamoureux and Claus-Dieter Elleman and I suspect this was quite simply because he was one of them – not just a lawyer and indeed a member of the Commission’s elite legal service, but such a passionate believer in the integration process that, if it ever came his way, he simply transcended criticism. It had been a while since I last saw him, but what a shock to see in this week’s Commission en direct (the Commission’s in-house journal) that he had died (on 11 April)! The photograph (to follow) – that impish smile – says a lot, I think. Michel Petit, a former Director General of the Commission’s Legal Service, paid him a fine tribute in Commission en direct: ‘What talent, Alain! And the fragility that went with it. Farewell to the artist.’

This morning the ‘serious’ work got under way. I took this picture from one side of the podium in the main meeting room. Whenever I am showing young guests around I always begin by explaining to them the importance of languages. To the uninitiated, it is easy to overlook the importance of languages in the dynamics of the EU’s policy making and legislative processes. So it was interesting to see, sitting on the podium in the opening session, how our young guests adapted to the reality of interpretation, meaning headphones, microphones, and the difficulty of exploiting the traditional tools of oratory. Great stuff.

Hard on the heels of the plenary session, in the evening we welcomed about 100 young students and their teachers to the Committee for the second edition of Your Europe, Your Say! It is, quite simply, a wonderful experience for us to invite young Europeans to learn about our processes and procedures by playing out the roles of our members in a ‘simulation’. The picture, taken during the welcoming reception, is blurred because so much was going on. If you’d like a good overall impression of what our young guests experienced, there is a video here, and I recommend it to you.

After the plenary speech and debate, we hosted the visiting French party to lunch back at our Committee’s headquarters Jacques Delors building. The photograph gives an impression of the size of the delegation and, more importantly, of the good atmosphere that reigned throughout the visit. To me, the French Council is our benevolent uncle. The European Economic and Social Committee, created by the 1957 Treaty of Rome, was closely modelled on the French Council, created in 1927, and I like to think of us as a favoured nephew. Today’s enthusiastic and entirely positive interactions brought confirmation of that perception.

It was the European Economic and Social Committee’s great pleasure and privilege today to welcome the President of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council, Jean-Paul Delevoye, and a sizeable delegation of Section Presidents and officials, including my fellow Secretary General, Christian Dors. Delevoye’s speech was something of a tour de force, combining pragmatism with vision and passion with realism. He argued with particular lucidity that Europe must either be an additional problem for member states or it must be a solution. I will provide a link to the full speech as soon as I can (it is worth reading in full), but here are a couple of aphoristic ‘soundbites’ that I noted down: ‘perhaps we are too focussed on the pain, and not enough on the cause’ and ‘there are things we must do that are politically extremely difficult but economically extremely necessary’. Delevoye pointed to a series of potential crises which could easily rock the Western model still further, but he was nevertheless optimistic, quoting St Exupéry’s dictum ‘Create dynamics and the solutions follow.’

The Committee prides itself on having a balanced representation of different age groups, although we could always do with more younger members. We have therefore started a recruitment drive, to get members as early as possible. That’s one of our young members in the picture. Joking aside, the proud mum is a Swedish member, Annika Bröms (Employers’ Group), Deputy Director of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. This was such a nice scene that our press photographer snapped this lovely picture.

This afternoon’s plenary session hosted a visit from Laszlo Andor, European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. A partnership approach is the key to success in the Europe 2020 strategy, he argued, and therefore the European Economic and Social Committee must fully play its role as the link between the EU and civil society. This, he insisted, is to ensure that the voice of the most vulnerable is not drowned out. Andor outlined the methods and challenges of the Europe 2020 strategy. Drawing lessons from the failings of the Lisbon Strategy, i.e. Europe 2020’s predecessor, he pointed to the principle of partnership as a means of meeting the current strategy’s goals. “Engaging stakeholders in dialogue and ownership of the strategy must continue throughout the implementation process”, he said. One spontaneous observation stayed in my mind. The Commissioner was talking about the tragically high youth unemployment rates: ‘This is probably the best educated generation ever in Europe,’ he said, ‘and yet youth unemployment has never been higher.’

When I got home from work this evening it seemed as though the airline companies had been playing a gigantic game of noughts and crosses in the sky. This picture doesn’t really do the image justice but it gives you an idea. The sight reminded me of one welcome effect of the volcanic ash cloud, when our blue skies were purely blue but these inadvertent vapour trails do have their own beauty, particularly when nature lays on a good sunset. Somewhere in Melvyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy there is a scene where a man sells people deckchairs so that they can sit at the edge of a cliff and watch the sunset. I think they would have bought tickets this evening.

Enjoying a joke with the President

The Bureau met once again this afternoon. Like many standing bodies, the Bureau’s work divides into routine tasks (formal adoption of the draft agenda of the plenary session, for example) and more political discussions, with the latter dividing into internal and external matters. Today, beyond the routine tasks, the Bureau concentrated more on internal affairs. Though lengthier than usual, the meeting went very well. The President, Staffan Nilsson (sharing a joke in the picture), has a particularly witty sense of humor that can defuse tensions. Today’s meeting was by no means tense, but this was in no small part because the President’s well-placed humorous interventions kept everybody in a good mood.