A Peter Dahl image

To the launching of an exhibition of Swedish art this evening, hosted by our new President, Staffan Nilsson. The art was all modern, though not all of it was contemporary, but it was all very enjoyable. The artists now up on our walls include Iris Causevic, Peter Aeström, Eva Nilsson, Sven Ljungberg, Sven Jonson, Lennart Rodhe, Peter Dahl, Josef Frank, Robert van Bolderick, Inga-Karin Eriksson and Erland Cullberg. The schools of art covered include expressionism, ‘concretism’ and the Halmstad group (surrealism) and the mediums include engravings, paint (oils and acrylics), prints and textiles. In other words, it is a very cleverly curated and rich exhbition and I am very happy that it is going to grace the walls of the flagship building of the Committee for the next two-and-a-half years.

I met a few new Committee officials individually today, as is my habit, to welcome them to the Committee and to the Union. One of these officials was an older Lithuanian lady who had studied in Vilnius in the 1970s and so had worked for almost two decades in Soviet-era Lithuania. She told me how she had chosen to study English at university because she wanted to know more about a world from which she was excluded. But her choice was greeted with some consternation by friends and family. What would she be able to do with such a language (as opposed to Russian)? Of course, once the Iron Curtain had fallen, her language ability was much in demand. It was a graphic reminder of how far we have come, and how fast. It is also a graphic reminder of how improbable the current geographic extent of the European Union would have seemed even as late as the 1990s.

Continuing our habit of watching cinematic classics with the sprogs, this evening we watched Alien. I inadvertently got the Director’s Cut version and there seemed to be some significant differences from the version I remember from 1979 (can it have been so long ago?). We seemed to get more of the alien itself, for example, and right at the end Ripley comes across cocooned versions of Dallas and Brett (definitely not in the first version), yet the programme notes declared that the new cut was shorter. Digging a little deeper, it seems an expanded version was released in the 1990s and that the director, Ridley Scott, cut five minutes of footage from that, whilst also re-inserting four minutes that had been cut from the original (1979) version. Well, I won’t go back and watch it now, but I think I preferred the original (1979) version, since it left, I think, much more to the imagination in building suspense. The wikipedia entry is also interesting on the mechanics of the special effects – mostly done on a shoe-string. Like Some Like It Hot emerging from chaos, some of Alien‘s best effects were the result of brilliant technical improvisation brought about by necessity. Great stuff.

Yesterday evening’s speaking engagement was a challenge from three points of view: I had to speak for one hour, in French, and at the end of a very busy week. What I hadn’t realised, however, was that it would also be a physical challenge. I have had a small, sniffling cold over the past few days but, anyway, the past two weeks have collectively represented one of those occasions when it is simply impossible to be ill; the show must go on. As I got to the end of my speech last night I realised that my voice was beginning to sound a little hoarse and husky but, then, that would be usual after a one-hour speech. However, by the end of the question-and-answer session my voice had gone altogether. It simply faded away, a bit like a radio when the batteries run out. And it hasn’t come back today. So I went to see the doctor and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that I have simply been speaking too much. Basically, I just have to shut up. Well, obviously, my family will be delighted but it is a novel aspect of the experience of being Secretary General for it is true, if I look back over the last fortnight, that I have had to do an awful lot of talking…

Gerhard Stahl at our new President's electoral address

Today I had one of my regular working lunches with my counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl. We are always accompanied by the Heads of our respective secretariats and we work our way through a pre-established agenda of mutual information or working points. Next week the new Presidents of the two Committees, Mercedes Bresso (Committee of the Regions) and Staffan Nilsson (EESC) are going to meet so we spent some time in discussing possible discussion topics for them. Gerhard and I together preside over a unique administrative experiment; we share a significant amount of our administrative resources in order to realise ‘synergies’ and economies of scale. We both believe that the experiment is an unqualified success and an example to other institutions. Our working lunches are part of the overall joint governance mechanisms and they work very well. The fact that we have known each other well since we were both junior officials back in the 1980s – he in the Parliament, me in the Commission – surely helps!

It was Bike Friday again this morning. The gentleman I am listening to in the picture runs a bicycle shop in the Avenue Georges Henri that also sells electric bikes. These are not just any old electric bikes, but proper bikes (he explained) that have been designed to work in tandem with a super-efficient electric motor. Sensor mechanisms and an on-board computer ensure that the person riding the bike pedals with a constant pressure. ‘That’s cheating!’ I was thinking to myself. But, then, thinking things through, one of the disincentives about riding a bike in Brussels (for some, at least) is that there is a downtown and an uptown and that some of the routes from one to the other (Boulevard du Jardin Botanique and rue des Colonies, for example) are pretty steep. Such bikes would take the sting out of long, steep climbs and so I can see why they could be a healthy compromise for older people or people with knee problems. Alas, the only thing steeper than the rue des Colonies is the price of the bikes at the moment but I am sure that this will come down over time.

This evening I gave a keynote speech at a conference to mark the beginning of the new academic year at the University Faculty of Saint Louis and the Catholic University of Louvain in the particular context of the two institutions’ joint programmes in European studies (Masters programmes). The theme of my speech was ‘Démocraties représentatives et participatives dans le traité de Lisbonne’ and I gave it to a group of about one hundred members of faculty and students in the ‘salle des examens’ of the Faculté de Saint Louis. My intention is to write up my notes and I’ll be sure to post the written-up version here in due course. I am trying to work up a number of themes that I hope to take further in my 29 November John Fitzmaurice Memorial Lecture (watch this space). The many pertinent questions from the audience afterwards demonstrated that I am on the right track, I think.

In a gesture of great symbolic importance, the first speaker to react to Staffan Nilsson’s address was European Vice-President Maros Sefcovic. The two men already know each other very well, having worked closely together on the Lisbon Strategy and having already started to cooperate closely on the Strategy’s successor, Europe 2020. Indeed, Sefcovic paid tribute to that cooperation in his address. Sefcovic explained that, in the context of participatory democracy and civil dialogue (priority themes for Staffan Nilsson and the Committee), there was reason to be optimistic that the implementing legislation for the citizens’ initiative could come into force before the end of the year. Moreover, now that the big interinstitutional dossier on the creation of the External Action Service had been resolved (agreement was announced earlier in the week in Strasbourg), the Commission could start to turn its attention more fully to other institutional aspects of the Lisbon Treaty, including the provisions of Article 11, thus fleshing out the draftsmen’s vision of what I like to call ‘compound democracy’; a mixture of representative, participatory and direct democracy. It is, as I will be explaining in a speech this evening (see subsequent post), a return to the spirit of the December 2001 Laeken Declaration. Laeken, which led to the European Convention, identified two challenges: enlargement, and the democratic deficit. The former is now, happily, a reality. There is still much work to do on the latter!

Once the ceremonies and formal addresses were out of the way, the plenary session got straight back to work, with a full day of debates on various opinions on a wide range of subjects, from financial participation by employees, through clean and efficient vehicles, to the implications of the sovereign debt crisis for European governance, international climate policy post-Copenhagen, changes and prospects for the metalworking industry, combating trafficking in human beings and the European Year for Active Ageing (2012). As usual, I always feel it is invidious to single any particular opinion when so many good opinions were adopted. But, also as usual, I nevertheless would like to single out an own-initiative opinion setting out guidelines for the renewal of the Community Method, authored by the President of the Employers’ Group, Henri Malosse, and the President of the Employees’ Group, Georges Dassis. The opinion, adopted by a very large majority, is a timely reminder of the efficiency of the Community Method, particularly in the context of making a success of the Europe2020 Strategy.  The plenary session finally drew to a close at around five-thirty in the afternoon, leaving the new President to reflect on an excellent start and a tired but proud Secretary General to reflect on two excellent weeks during which the administration really excelled in providing high quality support to its new members. There were a very few minor technical hitches but otherwise everything went, procedurally and administratively, like clockwork. I am particularly aware that, between them, the information days and the constitutive process involved the last-minute drafting of literally scores of documents which had to be 100 per cent accurate. We did it!

This morning our new President presented his work programme. Whilst he spoke, the screens in the hemicycle displayed maps of Europe from the following years: 1289, 1648, 1801, 1864, 1919, 1945 and 2010. The eloquence of these cartographic ebbs and flows echoed the sentiments of Staffan’s speech. For, as he reminded us, each of those boundary changes had involved great human suffering and destruction of people and places and goods. (It was also a strong echo of the sentiments Max Kohnstamm – see previous post – had expressed to the Committee’s March 2007 plenary session.) The overall leitmotif of Staffan Nilsson’s Presidency is ‘engaging people for a sustainable Europe’ and, under that banner, his programme addresses three main priorities; dialogue and participation; sustainability and growth; and solidarity and development. Now we must deliver!