This lunchtime I visited a standing exhibition in the UN headquarters building entitled ‘Ayiti Kanpe’ (Creole for ‘Haiti Standing’). The exhibits took me back to Hungen and Bruges (see past posts). There were pictures of January’s devastation, and awful statistics to confirm the ghastliness of it all (I’ll cite just one; 75% of schools were destroyed). The exhibition nevertheless carries a message of hope. The UN, which suffered so much itself (over one hundred dead), is busy helping the country back onto its feet. At the end of the exhibition is a mural with all of the UN workers killed in the earthquake and in the middle, staring out ruggedly, is my former student, Jan Olaf Hausotter. I still find it hard to believe that he was sitting in my Brussels office, wearing his usual big grin, just eight days before the catastrophe. The UN has set up an archive, well worth a visit, here. Postscript: the same evening, on my flight back to Europe, I opened my complementary copy of the Financial Times and read ‘Hurricanes set to blow away fragile Haiti progress.’ Bruno Lemarquis, UN Development Programme Director for Haiti, is quoted as saying ‘It’s a race against time, and time is not in our favour.’ Was there ever an unluckier people than the Haitians?

Over the years, a large number of governments have given gifts of various sorts to the UN and many of these are displayed throughout the building. Wandering around in a break, I therefore came across a 1970 gift from Turkey, which is a copper reproduction of the oldest known peace treaty. It was signed between Hattusilis, the King of the Hittites, and Ramses II, the King of Egypt. Its provisions include eternal friendship, lasting peace, territorial integrity, non-aggression, extradition and mutual help. And all this in 1269 BC. It makes you think.

This morning we were addressed by the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon. Putting such issues as poverty and food and water scarcity in a global context, he insisted that economic and social councils and similar bodies have a crucial role to play: ‘I have rules and regulations and protocol restraining me constantly,’ he said, ‘but you can speak out. You can challenge your leaders and politicians. Strengthen your roles and enhance participatory governance.’

After all that paradise it was time to get down to work. The meeting that brought me here is the administrative board meeting and annual general assembly of the International Association of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions (which goes under its French acronym of AICESIS). The meeting is being held at the UN’s headquarters, in parallel with a session of the UN’s ECOSOC. After the board meeting the assembly kicked off with speeches from ECOSOC’s President, Hamidon Ali, and the UN’s Deputy Secretary General, Philippe Douste-Blazy, and then we got down to work, debating such themes as the role of our institutions and organisations in the light of economic, social and environmental trends and developing concepts of world governance. Two events occurred in parallel with our meeting. One was a visit of Queen Elizabeth II, triggering tight security. The other, more prosaically, was the World Cup semi-final between Uruguay and the Netherlands. The South African mission has offered the UN a giant screen to view matches for the duration of the competition, and in our conference room we could hear the cheers greeting each goal! Hats off to the winners, of course, but it does seem a shame to have an all-European final.

The city is sweltering under a record-breaking heat wave at the moment. Since July4th fell on a Sunday, today is a national holiday and New York is a ghost town. I took a train out of Grand Central to meet another friend, Adrian. He and I first met in 1976, at Oxford, as fellow PPE-ists. During the week he heads up the Lincoln Jazz Center and he has a house at Cold Spring, an hour away up the Hudson River. The train runs alongside the mighty river (so wide, so placid) and I marvelled at the fact that such beautiful and wild countryside could exist so near to the city. Adrian took me to his slice of paradise, half way up a mountain. We swam in a lake and, later, a friend took us out on the river. There are bears and coyotes in the forest and turkey vultures in the air and as dusk drew its gauze over the wilderness a deer came to graze in the orchard beneath us and, well, every day has left me with indelible memories. As the train trundled back to Grand Central it occurred to me that age has one great advantage; friendships become old friendships…

In the afternoon I met up with another friend, Kate, who is a New Yorker born and bred and who knows her city better than most. She has already written an excellent book about how the city works on a daily basis and now she is about to publish another about New York’s skyscrapers. Kate got a bunch of her friends in to pier 52 to watch Macy’s July 4 firework display on the Hudson. Celebratory events don’t get more American than this. It was brilliant fun and completely over the top; tugboats playing water hoses in the colours of the American flag, flypasts by F16 jets and NYPD helicopters, and then seven barges sending an extraordinary pyrotechnical display up into a still shimmering night sky for a long, long time, whilst behind us the great city towered proudly. Great stuff!

the beginning of so many dreams

This morning, Independence Day, I made three pilgrimages: Ground Zero, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. In describing Ground Zero it is difficult to avoid banalities and clichés. It is a vast, livid scar, though the miracle is that more of the buildings that pressed up against the World Trade Center were not damaged or destroyed. And now they are re-building, and that simple act – slow as it may have been to get under way – is a vivid symbol of New York’s and America’s indomitable spirit. Across the water, Liberty stands sentinel as she has done for so long (since 1876). An inspirational symbol, she is also a brilliant act of engineering and, arguably, one of the two most recognisable structures of the modern world; Gustav Eifel’s engineering company had a hand in both of them. Last but surely not least, I visited Ellis Island, gateway for millions of immigrants to the United States. This was not just tourism. One of the characters in my work-in-progress is supposed to have passed this way, so I had notebook in hand as I made my way around. It has been dolled up now, but the permanent exhibition is very well done and the buildings are still very atmospheric.

This morning I got an early train out of Penn Station to visit a friend who lives in Jamestown (Rhode Island). Leonard is a friend from Bologna days – we first met in 1979 – and he lives in a truly beautiful part of the world. In a whistle-stop tour of paradise, I swam in the Ocean, ate delicious clam chowder at a Newport beach club, visited an ancient club house, the Reading Room, saw the Redwood Library where Henry James wrote some of his novels and toured a series of magnificent country houses (Marble House, The Elms and, most famous of all, The Breakers). As if that wasn’t enough, Leonard took me to a polo match. He’d have been playing himself, but for a broken rib, but I met his ponies (serious players have five or six) and learnt the basics of the game. (It must be the only sport that discriminates totally against left-handers.) As to the match itself, it was a friendly but, still, the pace and the skills of the horses and their riders were exciting. There are large and thriving expat communities there and I kept catching English and Scottish and Irish accents on the wind. Then all too soon it was back to Kingston and the train to New York. The train follows the coast line for a long time. A lot of it is unspoilt and I could imagine those first settlers building their settlements in the early 1600s and thanking their lucky stars. Not for nothing is the capital of Rhode Island called Providence.

Only 90,000 pipes on the ceiling...

Next week I’m attending a meeting at the UN with an EESC delegation (more about that in another post) so I flew out this Friday morning to New York. I have a number of friends here that I haven’t seen for yonks and decided to make a weekend of it. First off this evening was a Dutch friend, Hugo, from EUI days. He took me to Keens Steak House. This was originally a gentlemen’s smoking den. The ceiling is covered with replicas of old clay pipes, but they also have some original pipes in glass cases,  including those of Buffalo Bill Cody, Teddy Roosevelt and John Barrymore. Albert Einstein, Adlai Stevenson and George McArthur were among a long list of occasional distinguished puffers. There’s no puffing anymore, but the food and company were great. My route home took me past the Empire State and the Chrysler Building. The latter is as beautiful as the former is boring, particularly at night.

a blocking minority

Those of you who come to this site regularly may be wondering what has happened. Where has he gone? Why has he stopped posting? Well, as I put it on Facebook, I have spent a lot of time and effort ‘resisting the slashers’ – sadly, without much success. On 1 December last year the Lisbon Treaty was at last implemented. Although it would create fresh responsibilities and tasks for all of the EU institutions, it was agreed by the budgetary authority that, in the context of their initial draft 2010 budgets, none of them should seek to budget for these new tasks and responsibilities, and this for the perfectly good reason that it would be of supreme political clumsiness to seem to be second-guessing how the Irish people would vote in their referendum on the Treaty. Unfortunately, just as the Treaty was finally ratified and implemented, the economic and financial crisis started to bite, and some member states started to engage in fiscal retrenchment and cut back their public sectors. As I have written in previous posts, it was not an ideal moment to be asking for fresh human and financial resources. At the same time, though, should and could the institutions simply forget their new obligations under Lisbon? The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions took their lead from the European Parliament, which also happens to be a twin arm of the budgetary authority. Having debated the pros and cons, the EP decided to table an amending budget for 2010. There ensued passionate and agonised debates within the EU’s two consultative bodies but, in the end, they felt they had little option but to follow suit. In the first place, they demonstrably had new tasks and roles. In the second place, what would it say for their commitment to the Treaty’s new provisions in areas such as subsidiarity and participatory democracy? So the two committees put in rigorously and conservatively costed bids for amending budgets for 2010 that were intentionally modest – the minimum necessary, was the spirit (rather than the maximum possible). They were comforted in their decisions when the EP’s bid was approved in its entirety. The member states, it seemed, had accepted the argument that, had the Lisbon Treaty already been ratified in the first half of 2009, the EP (like the two Committees) would have budgeted accordingly.

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