and he's got a ticket...

Two more light-hearted articles caught my eye in the press this week. One was a Guardian editorial  praising Casper, a commuting cat. Casper used to commute on the N° 3 bus in Plymouth, queueing patiently at the bus stop for a ride into town and back again. Sadly, he was run over by a car and the regular passengers on the bus are in mourning. On a more scientific note, last Saturday’s Financial Times carried an article about Moscow’s 35,000 stray dogs. Some 500 of these live in the metro stations and about twenty of those have learned how to ride the trains. According to Andrei Neuronov, a specialist in animal behaviour, ‘They orient themselves in a number of ways. They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals.’ Whereas most of Moscow’s stray dogs are slowly regressing to their genetic origins in the wolf family, these clever dogs seem to be going the other way.

This was another Bureau and Plenary Session week for the EESC. Both meetings went smoothly. Apart from the adoption of a number of important opinions, the political highlight of the session was the visit of the Spanish State Secretary for EU affairs, Mr Diego Lopez Garrido. His rich opening speech and detailed responses in the debate illustrated well why the ‘traditional’ rotating presidencies of the Council of the European Union continue to matter and indeed will continue to matter. Like its Swedish predecessor, one of the Spanish Presidency’s primary concerns is the exit strategy from the current crisis, and there Mr Lopez Garrido and his colleagues will, he stressed, be looking to the Committee for inspiration and support. As previous posts have illustrated, the Committee and its President, Mario Sepi, have been highly active in advising the EU about ways of avoiding the worst and sharing the best in terms of tactics and strategies. The situation at the moment is one of the glass being both half-full and half-empty. Yes, there are some absolutely ghastly unemployment statistics and there is a lot of very real suffering out there, but much worse has so far been avoided. Now, we must stick to our guns and make sure that our workforces and our societies more generally are well-placed to take advantage of the upturn when it comes.

You need a strategic communication policy

There is an interesting op ed article in today’s Financial Times about the Afghanistan conflict by Alastair Campbell. He’s a controversial figure, and some would surely accuse him of being daring or even worse for publishing such an article on such a subject so soon after his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, but he nevertheless makes a compelling case. His basic argument is that whilst soldiers can win wars, ‘failure in the battle for hearts and minds can lose them.’ He draws three lessons from the Iraq conflict: first, take strategic communications seriously; second, ‘in a multinational alliance, you have to internationalise communications so that key aims can be communicated across… political systems’; third, ‘there is a need for a constant focus on the strategy and security reason for (the war)’ – ‘the arguments have to be put out there consistently’. Campbell is writing about Afghanistan but I can’t help but feel that his arguments apply just as much to the European Union. In that context, has anybody seen the EU’s communication policy? It was there all right, but it seems suddenly to have disappeared. Wherever it has gone, the need for it surely remains as strong as ever.

We saw Guy Ritchie’s version of Sherlock Holmes this afternoon, with Robert Downie Jr and Jude Law pairing up to play Holmes and Watson. It’s a great romp with a lot of good gags. Robert Maillet’s Dredger must be the best comic giant bruiser since Richard Kiel’s Jaws in the James Bond films (hammers bounce off of him). Poetic licence is taken with a London that has more to do with Disney than with Conan Doyle (Tower Bridge is within a short dash of the Palace of Westminster, for example), but somehow none of that matters. I was convinced Downie Jr’s English accent was dubbed, but it’s all his own work. With a sequel planned and the Iron Man sequel already in the can, Downie Jr is in the clover and, on the strength of these performances, he deserves to be. For the Holmes sequel we will meet Professor Moriarty (who keeps to the shadows in the first film), rumoured to be a role for Brad Pitt…. Could be good, could be good.

Yesterday evening we went to the Cultural Centre in Mechelen to listen to a Bl!ndman production based around the secret masses of William Byrd. We are great fans of Bl!ndman, with a quartet of saxophones producing softer versions of music originally intended for organs or horns. Mechelen’s Cultural Centre, a converted church, was the perfect location for this latest production of Eric Sleichim, a mixture of those saxophones, polyphony, and more modern elements (including turntables and the voice of a Dutch author, Mayke Nas. We had the privilege of meeting Sleichim afterwards and he enthusiastically explained how the polyphonies of the music produce additional resonances – in effect, additional voices – that were at the origin of the belief in angelic voices. This was indeed heavenly music.

At a dinner party this evening I met a vociferous proponent of a case I have been arguing for some time now. For a long period the essential, inspiring ‘narrative’ of the European integration process was peace and prosperity. As various Western Balkan countries knock at the door that surely is what it is still all about. Nevertheless, the success of the integration process has made us blasé about our achievements and younger generations, who never knew Europe’s conflicts and divisions, take everything for granted. Now, with the effective sidelining of the Europeans at Copenhagen we suddenly find ourselves searching our souls and wondering about the EU’s existential raison d’être. Will what we have collectively achieved turn out to have been a passing phenomenon and are we now already in a decadent slide into world irrelevance? As Tony Barber put it recently in the Financial Times, will Europe become a sort of open-air museum inhabited by pensioners, unemployed youth, restive immigrants and chocolatiers’? (12 January 2010) Like my vociferous host this evening, I believe a more noble fate could await our continent, if we have the true strength of our convictions. It is tied up also in the existential crises that other organisations – the UN most notably, but also NATO and the Council of Europe – have been undergoing. It is easy to forget that many of Europe’s original federalists (William Beveridge among them) had a vision of world governance and saw the European experiment as a sort of pilot project. Put simply, the EU has shown that there is another way of doing things. That if mutual confidence and respect is gradually built up, if peoples trust in courageous visonaries, if generations of hardworking technocrats are prepared to dig in the trenches, then nation states can maybe begin to pool sovereignty and accept majority decisions. Like trade, regional integration is better than no integration at all. It is time to export the European model more vociferously, to use our notorious ‘soft power’ to encourage other parts of the world, specially those riven by territorial conflicts, to look to our example and follow. The issues we increasingly face – water, food, energy, climate change – are global in nature and require a global response. It may take a long time but surely global governance should be about more than the Chinese and Americans sitting down in a classic ‘smoke-filled room’ to broker last-minute face-saving deals. Other guests were not so sure. After all, wasn’t the EU vision preceded by a cataclysm and Europe re-built on the ashes of its previous stupidities? There’s no time for the gradualism of the Monnet method. And wasn’t European integration based first on a sectoral approach? All of those points are valid, but I don’t believe they undermine the basic argument. Collectively, the world owes countries like Haiti a better future than their ghastly past.

'...and you are all promoted with immediate effect...'

I have been back at work now since 4 January and my feet have not touched the ground. There has been a whirlwind of important meetings – directors (twice), Budget Group, Enlarged Presidency among them – and a large number of internal but equally important meetings on resource and coordination issues. In the midst of that there have been conciliation meetings with the trades unions, job interviews, health scares for much-loved colleagues and, worst of all, the ghastly Haitian earthquake where President, Secretary General, Staff Committee and colleagues have all together reacted fast to express human solidarity and organise collections and contributions for aid. (I called the UN in New York earlier today. Staff volunteers are manning the phones 24/24. My former student (see previous post) is not among those who are known to have survived. He is thought to have been in the building. He is currently listed as ‘missing’. The lady who spoke to me, a nice Australian lawyer, was in Asia for the tsunami and says this is far worse. The UN collectively is traumatised…) Last but by no means least, the President and I had our annual meeting with all of the staff this evening. As Secretary General, I was expected to take stock of my time as SG so far but also to look to the future. I think it went well. I am very proud of our achievements together. We have some significant challenges ahead, but a recent staff satisfaction survey showed that no less than 87 per cent of our staff are satisfied or very satisfied with their working environment. And our President, Mario Sepi, confirmed that the cordial relationship between members and staff was constantly improving. This is a great basis for facing up to the challenges ahead.

Last week I was visited by one of my former students at the College of Europe in Bruges. He has been working at the UN and happened to be passing through Brussels. We had an interesting discussion about the relative merits of the UN and the EU. As he saw it, one of the ‘advantages’ of the EU is that it is engaged in a frequent, if not constant, institutional reform process. This provides the organisation with a flexibility that is missing in the UN’s administration. We then discussed his current posting, a country in the Caribbean. When he arrived there, in 2007, things were looking up: stable Government, good economic indicators, security situation finally under control, both Chambers in place and, more or less, functioning. He wrote an upbeat article about the situation, published in the Fletcher Forum. Then came 2008 and no less than four consecutive hurricanes, causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage. There was a food crisis, culminating in a week of violence, the pursuant fall of the consensus Government, five months of political deadlock, the displacement of thousands of families, many deaths and an estimated cost to the country of 15% of its already meager GDP. Indeed, it is estimated that all of this threw back the country’s development by between three and five years. My former student returned to his posting, Port au Prince, last Friday. Yesterday, Haiti was devasted by a major earthquake, its worst in two centuries. Hundreds are feared dead. The headquarters of the UN mission was destroyed and, according to the BBC, a large number of UN personnel are missing. I am waiting anxiously for news of my former student and his girlfriend (also a former Bruges student and working for the UN). But this latest disaster to hit the country can only send it spiralling still further backwards. Haiti is a sort of geographic Prometheus, condemned to be repeatedly visited with human unrest and natural disasters. Under such circumstances, as my former student was explaining, the UN cannot hope to encourage progress, but only to brake the speed of its regression…

It has arrived; the Eynsford Concert Band’s latest CD, Heritage, including the recording of my poem, What Hope Saw. There’s no modest way to sound your own trumpet, but that’s enough about me, anyway. The Band have put in a very professional performance throughout and I particularly enjoyed their rendition of a series of Yiddish Dances. You can find out more about the CD and the recording experience at the Band’s website here. But on reflection what has struck me most about this experience is the selflessness, despite major investments of time and effort, of the composer, Nigel Clarke, and the conductor, John Hutchins. Though I was delighted to be involved in  the whole experience, Nigel’s piece, Heritage Suite, really didn’t need my poem to preface it. It is an accessible and witty piece of work that stands on its own two feet and one where he clearly went to considerable lengths to write for the Band and its members so that they, as well as the audience, would get maximum enjoyment out of the experience. And it was all done – the composing, the scoring, the conducting, the rehearsing, the performing, the recording – for charity!  Nigel’s piece will get its US premiere next month, performed by The University of Mississippi Wind Ensemble under the baton of Dr David Willson. I’m sure they and their audience will have fun.

The world lost a very special survivor this week but I hope that we will not forget his story. Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who has died at the ripe old age of 93, was the last hibakusha. After school, he trained as an engineer and then worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. On 6 August 1945 he was visiting Hiroshima on a business trip. At 8.15 that morning, high above the city, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb, dubbed Little Boy. When Little Boy detonated, over 80,000 people were instantly killed. Another 60,000 people died in the months that followed. The then twenty-nine year-old Yamaguchi was less than two miles from the blast but, though he was badly burned, he survived. He spent that night in an air raid shelter and the following morning set off back to his home in Nagasaki, some 180 miles away. He arrived there on 8 August. At 11 o’clock the next morning a second nuclear bomb, nicknamed Fat Boy, detonated above the city, killing some 70,000 people. In a repeat miracle, Yamaguchi, together with his wife and infant son, survived. Japan surrendered less than a week later. After the war Yamaguchi worked for the US forces in Nagasaki as a translator and went on to become a teacher. ‘I could have died on either of those two days,’ he later said. ‘Everything that followed was a bonus.’