This evening I drove down to a place near Spa to pick up N° 2 sprog from his camp. The trip gave me the chance to ‘read’ the first part of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower. It’s an extraordinary story and very well told (the CD version I ‘read’ was well narrated by George Guidal). Philbrick starts with the separatists in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire who would become the Pilgrims. Rightly fearing persecution, they went into exile in the Netherlands, ending up at Leiden. Once there installed, and enjoying religious freedom, the community began to fight among itself. The vision, of the whole community travelling to a new land, was intended to encourage collegiality, though in the end only a part of the community left. The Pilgrims’ initial journey began in Delfshaven, in the Netherlands, and not with the Mayflower, but another boat, the Speedwell. Unbeknown to them, though, the Dutch were afraid that they would manage to colonise Manhattan first and skullduggery was afoot. The Speedwell was supposed to accompany the later-acquired Mayflower. The two ships first set out from Southampton, but the Speedwell developed a leak and so they had to dock at Dartmouth for repairs. They set out from there a second time and, when the Speedwell once more sprang a leak, they turned back, this time to Plymouth. For a third time they set off, this time all aboard the now crowded Mayflower, with their provisions depleted, and with winter setting in. It was subsequently discovered that there was nothing wrong with the Speedwell. Its crew had deliberately over-sailed it so that the mast would act as a lever and force the planks in the hull apart. I look forward to ‘reading’ the rest, but what a story already!

This week’s EESC plenary session took place in the European Commission’s Charlemagne building. When meetings are in session a set of vast blinds close so that there is only artificial light in the meeting room. At lunchtime on Wednesday, 14th July, it was bright and sunny. The afternoon’s session started at two-thirty and ended at close to nine. When the shutters came back up, bright sunshine flooded into the room and we blinked like troglodytes. However, as I walked back home it became clear that something pretty violent had occurred. Though the pavements were dry, gravel had been washed into piles in the middle of the street and sizeable tree branches had fallen on cars. The next day’s newspapers spoke about a mini-tornado and others about a mini-hurricane, but I think it was closer to what we would call a ‘cloudburst’ and the Italians a ‘nubifragio‘. Video footage here gives an idea. I, who had seen strictly nothing inside the hermetically sealed and artificially-lit meeting room, received three chilling eye-witness accounts. The first came from my better half, who had been walking in the Ardennes with her sister. She told of how the sky went suddenly dark and how they ran for shelter in a village. More chilling yet, N° 1 sprog was in a yacht in the middle of a lake, at summer camp. She told of how the monitors sought desperately to get 80 students and twenty yachts off the lake, to get the sails down, the boats secured and the children under shelter in a few minutes. They succeeded, although one yacht got blown away and battered. N° 2 sprog, meanwhile, was in the middle of a Belgian forest and a map-reading exercise (or ‘getting lost exercise’, as he put it), and had to navigate his way back to camp over a series of fallen trees. For me, the experience was a sort of microcosmic version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five…

This morning the plenary session was addressed by Olivier Chastel, Belgian Secretary of State for European Affairs, who presented the incoming Presidency-in-Office’s programme and priorities. His detailed presentation and his courteously detailed replies to questions put to him in the ensuing debate put the lie to the idea that the creation of the permanent Presidency of the Council of the European Union has somehow rendered the traditional rotating six-month Presidencies of the Council of Ministers less important. (This is something I have consistently argued: the Lisbon Treaty created a new office but it did not do away with the told one.) Understandably, the Secretary of State was questioned repeatedly about whether a caretaker government could run an effective Presidency. His response, reading between the lines, was that, under the current circumstances, a caretaker government was probably better able to run an effective Presidency. This was because all domestic ideological competition was put on hold and all domestic political actors were determined to help Belgium produce an effective and efficient Presidency. From the very beginning, Belgium has always punched above its weight in Europe (think Paul-Henri Spaak), and this Presidency will, I suspect, be no different from its seventeen predecessors. The EU is in Belgians’ blood, if not their DNA.

Goke Frerichs

From a managerial point of view, this was potentially an extremely heavily-charged and fraught plenary session. On the agenda were: two distinguished guests (Barnier and Chastel) and debate; presentation and debate of the outcome of the Committee’s Florence biennial conference on education to combat exclusion; thirty-five opinions, not all of them uncontroversial, for debate and adoption; and, last but not least, adoption of amendments to the Committee’s rules of procedure and to its Members’ Statute in the light of the Lisbon Treaty. The rules of procedure debate and vote was potentially the most fraught of all. Until the eve of the plenary there were still some major differences between the Groups on some provisions and to adapt its rules the Committee requires an absolute majority – 173 votes – in favour. One of the reasons why the Committee is less attractive to journalists is, I am sure, that its basic working method is quintessentially consensual and here, once again, ‘consensus broke out’. As the President of the rules of procedure panel, a former Committee President, Goke Frerichs (Employers’ Group, Germany), put it, the fact that the Committee is able to overcome internal differences and forge consensus like this is one of its undoubted strengths.

The plenary session this afternoon was addressed by Michel Barnier, European Commissioner with responsibility for the Internal Market and Services, who had come, at his request, to report on the Commission’s initiatives relating to the international capital markets. Refreshingly, the first thing he did was to put his prepared speech to one side (though he was careful to praise its excellence and the good work of his staff) and then he delivered a from-the-heart spontaneous speech. To give you a flavour, here are the ‘soundbites’ I noted down. He had been ‘terribly scarred’ by the 2005 referendum result in France. He did not believe in the thesis of inevitable decline, and nor did he believe in the thesis of ‘fatalism’ – for as long as Europeans were not fatalistic. On the other hand, he warned against nostalgia. What he and his fellow Commissioners were trying to do was to instal ‘true governance’ and ‘true regulation’ and to ‘put morality and ethics back into the system’. He believed profoundly that ‘the financial markets should be put at the service of the economy and not the contrary.’ He spoke of three imperatives arising out of the crisis: we should draw the lessons, we should play collectively, and we should race our faces to the horizon. For Barnier, it was a question of ambition. Did we Europeans still want to be at the top table in twenty or thirty years time? I couldn’t note anymore because his pen ran out of ink and so I loaned him mine!

Yes, the Bureau met again today. Time does go fast. This time there was a heavy political agenda, with discussions about fleshing out Article 11 of the Lisbon Treaty (participatory democracy) and amendments to the rules of procedure (upstream of the October renewal of the Committee), but also the current budgetary situation and its consequences. Last and not least, the Bureau appointed another senior official; Jean-François Bence, a French national and longstanding Committee official, was appointed Director of Consultative Works (with particular responsibility for external relations, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and the environment, and energy and transport. This was the last such senior appointment that needed to be made. Now, at very long last, the new establishment plan for the Committee’s administration, approved unanimously by the Bureau in December 2008, is about to be fully in place. It may have taken a long time, but it feels all the better for that.

Farewell, Julien....

In a recent post I wrote about how I had met a young and very active blogger, Julien Frisch. Julien was a perceptive and at times caustic critic of the European Union’s policy and legislative processes, but he was above all a European democrat, seeking to bring light where there was shade and to encourage discussion and debate where there was little or none. What made Julien’s activity even more remarkable was that he blogged anonymously; ‘Julien Frisch’ was a pseudonym. You can read why ‘Julien’ chose to blog pseudonymously and why he decided to stop here. His act has introduced me to a new term; cyber suicide. There is literary and sci-fi potential in this. Indeed, I am sure that somebody, somewhere, has already written a story on the theme. At a dinner party in the States I was asked why I was blogging. I explained that I wanted to humanise the role of Secretary General and also the ‘Eurocracy’. It is the reason I finance this blog privately and the reason I write about much more than ‘work’. It is also the reason why, I am clear in my mind, I will in my turn commit ‘cyber suicide’ the day I am no longer Secretary General. In the meantime, though, I would like to salute ‘Julien Frisch’ for having maintained such a lively and active blog. I am sure we’ll hear more from the man behind the blog in the very near future.

Harper Lee’s classic was published fifty years ago today (a fiftieth anniversary edition is currently fifth in the list of best selling paperbacks in the UK). I read an excellent article by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie yesterday (here), extolling the book’s virtues. Ngozie Adichie writes interestingly about Harper Lee’s depiction of the three major manifestations of American tribalism: race, class and region. Mmm… I suspect other analysts would add some more categories to that list. But it is true that Harper Lee wrote with an extraordinarily broad sweep and took on social issues with great confidence. ‘Sometimes,’ Ngozie Adichie argues, ‘novels are considered “important” in the way medecine is – they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you. The best novels,’ she continues, ‘are those that are important without being like medecine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre. Harper Lee’s triumph is one of those.’ Amen

To get myself ‘in the mood’, I dug out some of my old American albums for a listen before I left for the States. There are some songs that immediately transport you back somewhere, and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ is one of those for me. It was September 1976, in a new friend’s room in the Goodhart Building, Logic Lane. ‘Born to Run’ was on the turntable and, for the first time, I read the lyrics on the cover and realised that Springsteen was, like Dylan, singing poetry. I still think that, thirty-four years on. It’s a towering piece of work. Indeed, the whole album is magnificent; a brilliant flash of America’s rich seam of romanticism: ‘In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream/At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines/Sprung from cages out on highway 9,/Chrome wheeled, fuel injected/and steppin’ out over the line/Baby this town rips the bones from your back/It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap/We gotta get out while we’re young/’Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run…’

My flight arrived at 09.20, Belgian time, and I went straight to the office and back into the brutal reality of a probable zero growth budget and its consequences. Already, in New York, my President and I discussed strategy and tactics. Back in Brussels, I relayed our considerations to the Vice-President with responsibility for the budget, Seppo Kallio, and the man, Staffan Nilsson, who, as the probable next President of the Committee, will have to preside over a Committee which was ready, willing and able to take on the role and activities prescribed for it by the Lisbon Treaty but which will get no new resources to do them. Even as we were discussing matters the Parliament, Council and Commission were negotiating an inter-institutional agreement about the new post-Lisbon budgetary procedure which, predictably, made no mention of the other institutions. The situation will be discussed next week by the enlarged Presidency and subsequently by the EESC’s Bureau. Watch this space!