All of today was devoted to the Lisbon Treaty. Early in the morning the enlarged Presidency (President, Vice Presidents, Group Presidents and the SG) met and debated a discussion paper penned by the President himself and then this paper was presented and debated in an extraordinary meeting of the Bureau devoted entirely to this theme. The EESC is therefore the first EU institution to have reacted, following the very positive result in the Irish referendum on Friday and Saturday. Of course, the Treaty is not yet entirely ratified, let alone implemented, but it now seems like a matter of time. In a sense, as I wrote in a post last Saturday, the way in which the referendum was won is grist to the Committee’s mill. Civil society organisations played a vital role (as they did, incidentally, in the ‘Nice II’ result). Through the process that started with the Convention and mutated through the Constitutional Treaty to the Lisbon Treaty, a number of revolutionary concepts have survived. One of these is participatory democracy and the obligation on all of the institutions to enter into a structured dialogue with civil society organisations. Hence the debates today. The Committee doesn’t claim an exclusive role in this context, but it obviously will – or should – play an important role. Making sure that it does was what today’s debates were about.

Where the climbing began

This evening I had a meal with three friends, all contemporaries from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies Bologna Center, who happened to be in town for a day or two. We studied in Bologna together thirty years ago this year. We can’t pretend we look exactly the same, but inwardly I am sure that none of us feels particularly different from the way we felt back then (how it pains me to say the word ‘back’!). Certainly, if somebody had told us then, as we ate on our 500 lire university mensa meals, how we would all be transformed, we would not have believed it. And yet there we sat: a top flight lawyer, two ambassadors and a secretary general. Not bad; not bad.

I had my writers’ group this evening. I always look forward to these meetings. In the first place, my fellow writers have become good friends, and it’s always good to see one’s friends. In the second place, these meetings are a complete change of scenery, not just in terms of content and environment (the back room of an Ixelles pub, as it happens) but also in terms of democracy, meaning that I have no special responsibilities and can just be part of the group, which is great. In the third place, though, the quality is high and the intellectual discipline strong. Both were in evidence this evening. I was ‘up’ and had submitted a draft of the sixth chapter of my magnum opus. Because of the composition of the group, the critiques come from different angles but everybody had dilligently read and conscientiously commented on some 5,000 words. Sebastian, the other author ‘up’ this evening, tabled the last part of a wonderfully atmospheric novella he has just completed. Again, the group’s members had diligently read and commented on 5,000 words of text. That’s 10,000 words’ worth of reading and criticism in one week! In the last place, we grab a bite to eat afterwards and let our hair down and that’s also great fun. Below is my exercise this week, based on what I learnt whilst in Joensuu a few weeks back.

Continue reading

Writing in this morning’s Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway states that ‘Leadership jobs are now so hellish, involve so much travel, so much aggro and so much public failure, that one might think the only sensible response is to swallow handfuls of pills.’ Well, I know my job is not quite at the sort of level she had in mind but, nevertheless, I beg to differ. Pace Anthony Powell’s Widmerpool, most leaders do not get to the top by chance. And it is certainly not luck that allows them to stay. As they rise, or as they stay, they either develop strategies to deal with the stresses and strains or they positively thrive on the pressure. Stamina and resistance to stress are two essential elements in any modern leader’s toolkit. Maybe Kellaway is referring to those who reach the top ill-equipped…

A firm favourite for thirty-minute viewing in this family is After You’ve Gone, a cleverly written ‘sit com’ about a divorced man with two children who battles constantly with his former mother-in-law. The latter is a monstrous dragon, but she has her moments and the writers give her some wonderful punch lines. We watched an episode this evening. And the mother-in-law character came out with a marvellous line about the EU. My better half said ‘bet that’ll be in your blog tomorrow,’ so here it is: ‘How far do they need to enlarge the European Union before I can find someone to mend my thermostat?’

Better for you

Catching up on my reading, I came across an interesting article by Olivia Seligman in the Autumn edition of The Author about writers on the radio. Until May of this year there was an excellent children’s radio programme on BBC Radio 4 called Go4It. It went out on a Sunday evening and quite frequently I found myself listening to it as I gardened or pottered about. In her piece, Seligman bemoans the demise of such programmes, referring in her support to ‘recent neuropsychological research’ that has ‘demonstrated the difference in the activity of the brain when it is processing the spoken word as opposed to listening to music. For example, hearing a radio play (a unique invention of the 20^th century) can apparently generate frenetic cerebral activity in the listener – psychologist Aric Sigman has written on how it is far more cognitively demanding to listen to the radio that it is to be spoon-fed accompanying images by television.’ As I write this, I am listening to live commentary on the Chelsea-Liverpool match on the World Service. I could have gone to the pub but certainly the radio commentary has been generating a fair amount of frenetic cerebral activity. Given the different teams supported by the sprogs I had better skate over the result, though…

Happy - and every right to be

I try and avoid weekend work engagements. I made an exception this morning for a good friend and delivered a keynote lecture to the General Assembly of an organisation called ‘RENA’ – Rete per l’Eccellenza Nazionale (website here). The organisation brings together a large number of young Italians in a loose network designed to discuss such themes confronting modern democracies as internet campaigning and voting. The theme of my speech was, predictably, about fleshing out the concept of participatory democracy. There was a lively question and answer session afterwards, with a lot of very perceptive questions, many of them related to what I call the ‘messiness’ of participatory democracy. You cannot quantify it, and you can only qualify it subjectively. Nevertheless, when participatory democracy – the involvement of the citizen through civil society organisations – is working, you know it. I was giving my speech as the votes in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty were being counted. One of our most active Irish EESC members, Jillian van Turnhout, was at the count in Dublin and kindly agreed to text me through developments as they occurred. This gave my speech a tiny bit of excitement but not much suspense because it very rapidly became clear that the yes camp was going to win a large majority. Here was an example not only of direct democracy at work but also participatory democracy. As Commission President José Manuel Barroso said in his statement after the result, ‘I was genuinely impressed not just by the campaign of the political parties, but particularly, and I want to underline this, by the campaigns by civil society organisations.’ That’s participatory democracy for you. PS A very clever young RENA participant has since written a summary record of my speech here.

Teamwork

This morning my schedule said I had a meeting with my team. Secretaries General do not question appointments in their schedule. If appointments are there, then they have been vetted by the team and they should be attended. So I went to the meeting and found that my team had laid on a surprise breakfast to celebrate the completion (dare I say the successful completion?) of one year of my mandate. They are a great team and I am a very lucky SG to have them.

A few weeks ago, in our regular Directors’ meeting, the Deputy Director of our translation service gave us a wonderful example of the limitations of machine translation.  The European Economic and Social Committee’s motto is that it is a ‘bridge between the European Union and organised civil society.’ She showed us a Dutch version of one of our brochures where this motto had been translated, by the machine, as ‘A short circuit between the European Union and organised civil society.’ I like it!

Gerhard Stahl

I had a working lunch today with my counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl. We each bring along the head of our secretariat (Reinhold Gnan and Eleonora di Nicolantonio respectively), they having acted as ‘sherpas’ (if that’s not too pompous a term) in preparing the meeting. We discussed all manner of things but so well had our sherpas done their work that the only thing we had to chew on was the food (an apology to the caterers for this metaphor). The two of us, as I have explained in previous posts, must jointly manage our so-called ‘joint services’, including translation, logistics and IT, for example. We are proud of our revolutionary arrangement and determined to make it work. We can only do that by keeping in close touch on joint challenges and seeking always to find consensual solutions. Fortunately, since we have known each other since I was a young thing in the Commission’s Secretariat General and Gerhard was a young thing in the Parliament’s secretariat, this isn’t difficult!