The European Economic and Social Committee’s Europe 2020 Steering Committee met today. In the picture are EESC President, Staffan Nilsson, and the President of the Steering Committee, Joost van Iersel (Netherlands, Employers’ Group). The Europe 2020 strategy is not just the EU’s best means of guaranteeing its economic and social future – it is the only one, and Staffan Nilsson and the Committee are determined to play their part in making sure it is successful. For it to be a success, though, all parts of our economies and societies must feel, to use a jargon term, ‘ownership’. That is why the Committee has established the steering committee which, following an invitation from European Commission President José Manuel Barroso last autumn, brings together the Committee’s members with representatives from the national economic and social councils in the Member States. On the agenda today were progress in exit strategies from the crisis, coherence between flagship initiatives, responses on innovation, work on the digital agenda, single market aspects and coherence between the national and the EU level.

Since watching the original Alien film back in October, we have been steadily working our way through the box set, including the Alien v. Predator pair. Some no-brainers: the original film was the best; Sigourney Weaver makes the series; Alien v. Predator is clever in making us sympathise with the Predators (basically, by morphing them into maori rugby players with tribal initiation customs based around courage)… In general, and despite some notorious production problems (particularly on Alien 3), the films are a good set of action-packed suspense movies. As we have worked our way through them I have read up a bit on some of the imagery and metaphors. In particular, there is quite a bit of literature out there on the internet about Freudian sexual undertones; the facehugger represents male rape; the bursting chest represents violent birth; and so on. Even the shape of the Alien’s head lends itself to such an interpretation. There is also a feminist branch that basically argues that Weaver’s character demonstrates that, in the end, women have got to sort things out. Weaver, so powerful already in the first film, certainly grows into her role, standing firm as the men around her are picked off. Lastly, there is a school of thought that points to the films’ religious imagery (salvation and damnation to start with!). However, another possible metaphorical interpretation occured to me as we were watching Alien 3. Of course, in this game it’s what you want to make of it. Nevertheless, what is the greatest scourge of the bourgeois world that has the time and the means to watch such films? It lurks within us. It can declare itself suddenly. It is dispassionately efficient as a killing machine. It picks us off, seemingly at random, leaving those behind fearful and counting their luck. Could Alien be a metaphor for cancer?

This lunchtime we were in Liege to help a good friend celebrate his sixtieth birthday. During the course of the conversations at the lunch table I heard two encouraging examples, one institutional and the other individual, that suggest the crisis may be easing. The institution in question is an aeronautics engineering company that employs around seventy people. Nobody has been laid off, but many work less than a full week. The company has greatly reduced its outsourcing but it has deliberately continued to outsource enough to maintain the lives of its principal suppliers. Work, currently, is picking up. It is clear from this example that European businesses have been far more canny in dealing with the crisis this time around. They have maintained their workforces and their suppliers as much as possible. They have regrouped, but in order to be well-placed when the economy picks up again. The second example is a lady who quit her job as a civil servant in order to set up her own business in what she calls ‘re-looking’. Basically, she provides individuals and organisations with advice about their images. This stretches from advising a busy businessman about his wardrobe through to advising young job seekers about their dress and body language in job interviews. She launched her business at what might have been considered an inauspicious moment but, after a first few faltering steps, she has gone from strength to strength. Her success is not just a happy personal example but, once again, would seem to suggest that the economy is picking up again.

This evening I went with N° 1 sprog to see an amateur production of a play entitled ‘Blud Lines’. The play was written and directed by Stephen Challens who is, to the budding actors in my daughter’s school, the equivalent of Colin Tufnel was to those in mine (see here). Challens had merged the Arthurian Legend and the basic plot of Macbeth into an essay on how envy and the power lust can warp minds. The young actors thoroughly enjoyed themselves (ah! I remember the fun we had with blood capsules) and the audience also had fun. Most of the students who played parts will doubtless go on to do other things in life. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear more in the future about one or two of them on the stage or in films.

I learnt today of the 19 December death of Karlheinz Reif, a German political scientist and later a colleague in the European Commission. I first met him in Florence, where he was a visiting professor at the EUI, through my thesis supervisor, Rudolf Wildenmann; the Mannheim connection, in other words. Born in the French-occupied zone of Western Germany, Reif had three great specialisations: French party politics, multi-level electoral systems, and popular support for the European integration process. Academically pugnacious and intellectually arrogant at first sight, he was in fact a kindly and friendly man, generous with sage advice, with the urbane cheerfulness of a Berliner and, though a lifelong trans-Atlanticist (he was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford) with a profound commitment to European integration. In his twilight years in the Commission (he was beset by ill health) there was nothing he enjoyed more than a wide-ranging discussion over lunch with a fellow political scientist and political anorak. I had first come across him academically because of a seminal 1980 article he had written, together with Hermann Schmitt, about the first direct elections to the European Parliament (later published as Nine Second-Order National Elections – A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of European Election Results). Though he wrote much about French politics and European opinion polling, the concept of second order national elections became a sort of albatross, primarily because his analysis was spot-on and still, in my opinion, applies fully. In the European Commission he transformed the Eurobarometer opinion poll from an arcane and relatively elitist instrument into a mainstream policy-making tool. An academic at heart, he never found the bureaucratic and hierarchical ways of the Commission easy but he nevertheless bequeathed a modern opinion polling instrument and should be remembered for that and (I hear him gritting his teeth in some celestical seminar room) for his perhaps eternal insight about second-order national elections.

Normally on this blog I am able to point to some big, set-piece meetings or events that occur during the week. This week, it is true, there were some important set-piece meetings; not the least of them our EMAS (Eco-Management and Audit Scheme) steering committee meeting on Wednesday, our last before the audit itself that will, we hope, lead to both the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions achieving their aim of a successful audit. There have also been several meetings to do, in one way or another, with the drafting exercise for the Committee’s 2012 budget, but that is normal; the Committee has to submit its draft by March. Above all, though, this was a week characterised by a very large number of small meetings, many of them with one, or just a few, individuals, and it explains why there have been no work-related posts on the blog until today.

I love reading the book review pages in newspapers and magazines. I read, in part, with the practitioner’s eye, since I occasionally review books in an academic context. But it’s more than that. I read about books I know I must or should read, about books I should at least be familiar with, and I also read about books I would love to read but for which I know I will never find the time. They are like far away places whose wonders others, luckier than I, describe. Into that category falls Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, learnedly reviewed in the pages of The Guardian by Miranda Seymour. Seymour stresses the contrast between what we think we non-scholars know about the Ptolemys and the  supposed glories of Rome. On the contrary, argues Seymour, Rome was backward, dull and drab whilst  ‘Cleopatra’s Alexandria… was a city full of dazzling luxury, beauty and culture; of broad, well-shaded avenues, ravishing mosaics, scholarly colleges, an unparalleled library, bookstores (Rome had none), and a social structure that – unlike Rome – allowed women formal education, divorce rights, property ownership and, most unusual of all, the chance to exploit their business skills.’  Over a third of Ptolemaic Egypt in Cleopatra’s day, Seymour continues, ‘was under the administration of women. A girl from the patrician classes could learn several languages (Cleopatra spoke nine, including Hebrew, Greek and Troglodyte according to Plutarch). An Egyptian daughter – thrashed like a boy if she failed to progress – could study philosophy and algebra. She knew the world was round. She understood the value of pi. She could run a business.’  With the regime of President Hosni Muburak, derided by the democracy protestors as a ‘pharoah’,  teetering on the edge, maybe Egyptians should also recall the many liberal aspects of their Ptolemaic past.

I recently read an excellent analysis of the growing phenomenon of Euro-scepticism. Cécile Leconte’s Understanding Euroscepticism is a book all pro-Europeans should read and ponder. I invited her to lunch today to talk through some aspects of that analysis. The concluding section of her book provides some reflections on ‘meta-narratives’ that have until recently underpinned the integration process: peace and prosperity, common values, the avoidance of the extremes of fascism and communism, the great ideal of Franco-German reconciliation after three murderous wars, and Europe as a socio-economic model. One of the problems she identifies is that the power and the resonance of these meta-narratives is fading. Ironically, as the European model becomes more attractive abroad, it is becoming less attractive at home. I think a good deal of the integration process’s credibility will be re-asserted once Europe’s economies climb out of the current crisis, but that can’t be the whole answer.

A golden queen's wreath, c310BC

There was a review in my morning newspaper today of a forthcoming exhibition that I would love to see: Heracles to Alexander the Great (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 7 April to 29 August). About 500 objects will be on display, many of them from recent excavations in Aegae, the ancient capital of Macedonia. ‘We are so focused on the history of Athens,’ says Dr Susan Walker, keep of antiquities at the Ashmolean, ‘that we completely underestimate the Macedonians.’ The reviewer is particularly taken by a series of portrait heads: ‘Unlike the idealised faces of classical Athens, they show furrowed brows, wrinkles and laughter lines and may transform the history of portraiture. ‘The Macedonia of Philip II is the birthplace and birth-time of realistic portraiture,’ says Dr Angeliki Kottaridi, the lead curator of the exhibition (and also the director of the excavations at Aegae).

This evening we went to the Kaaitheater to sit in on the second edition of Liquid Room. Faithful readers of this blog might remember the first edition, back in April 2009. We were treated to a rich feast. Chief among our discoveries in terms of modern works was the music of Benjamin De la Fuente, who was himself present and playing as a guest musician. And among older modern music, there were several pieces by Harry Partch. But for me personally the icing on the cake came right at the end of the concert, when we were treated to a performance of Philip Glass’s ‘Piece in the Shape of a Square.’ (And Dimitriou and Schmid played it faster than the example I have found on You Tube.) It is written for two flautists. Chryssi Dimitriou and Michael Schmid stood at opposite ends of the hall. Before them were ranged eight music stands with sixteen sheets of music. From my vantage point, behind Dimitriou, I could see that she had colour-coded each round of bars. They got it note perfect. Wonderful stuff.