Jacques Dermagne

I had a long chat today with Jacques Dermagne, the President of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council. The French Council is currently undergoing a reform process. There’ll be equal representation of men and women, the age limit for membership will be reduced from 25 to 18, thirty-three members will be drawn from ecological and environmental organisations, citizens’ initiatives (500,000 signatures) will automatically be referred to the Council for its opinion and relations with the national parliament will be strengthened through a referral system. All of this is of great interest to the European Economic and Social Committee. Should the Lisbon Treaty be ratified and implemented, a new Treaty article will provide for the Council, on the basis of a proposal from the Commission, to take decisions concerning ‘the nature of the composition’ of the Committee at regular intervals ‘to take account of economic, social and demographic developments within the Union.’ In a sense, therefore, the Sarkozy reforms to the French Council have anticipated the sort of reforms in composition that the EESC might, in due course, reflect upon.

When we were in Joensuu the Finnish Forest Research Institute (METLA) gave the EESC a present of a chairman’s gavel, carved from local birch wood. This afternoon, Vice-President Seppo Kallio chaired the plenary and out came the gavel on its first outing. I couldn’t resist taking a picture and sharing it with you. It’s actually very useful and the ‘thump!’ it makes can be heard very clearly throughout the meeting room. Of course, it brought back fond memories of my Joensuu jaunt, which already seems so long ago…

The President’s recent trip to China and the Autonomous Region of Tibet (see previous posts) has understandably provoked a large press, some of it positive, some of it critical, but all of it interested in this development. Today’s edition of the European Voice carried a full-page analysis of what it described in its headline as a ‘whispered dialogue’. I have felt for my President, Mario Sepi, over the past few weeks, as he was sometimes apparently wilfully misquoted in critical pieces. For example, drawing on his knowledge of his own country, he warned that excessive dependence on central state funding could leave Tibet (and other areas of China for that matter) like the Italian mezzogiorno, unable to achieve economic autonomy. Some reports claimed that Sepi had spoken about the mafia, but this was completely false. I was at the press conference and followed what he said in Italian and also what the interpreter said in English. But today’s European Voice article was, to my mind, an excellent example of responsible and well-researched journalism, its criticisms nuanced and its author, Andrew Gardner, having understood that when institutions and their presidents engage in ‘soft diplomacy’ they evidently say more in private than they can do in public.

The plenary’s guest speaker this morning was former Czech Prime Minister and current Commissioner with responsibility for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities, Vladimir Spidla. He is also a fellow, if only occasional, blogger (here). This was a poignant occasion, with Spidla’s future uncertain and many questions from the floor about legacy. To his credit, Spidla took them on the chin. He cited Bismark: politicians are judged not by their intentions but by what they achieve. Nevertheless, achievements there have been. His own take on the situation (I paraphrase) was that the bottle was half-full. Indeed, whatever the composition of the next European Commission, Barroso had already made it clear that social policy would be much more heavily emphasised.

Precisely one year ago today I took up my new duties as Secretary General. It was also one year ago that I started this blog. My first observation is that I am still happily doing both. My second is that the year has gone by alarmingly fast. My third is that many of the things I wanted to do (on personnel policy, for example) are taking much longer than I had thought they would. But I’m getting there, I’m getting there…

In the evening, the President hosted a working dinner to discuss how the Committee could further build on its Programme for Europe. The Committee is already hard at work on a follow-up to the Programme in the form of a contribution to the preparations for the Copenhagen climate change summit. This follow-up resolution will be debated and adopted in our 4-5 November plenary session. But beyond this there is a larger window of opportunity beckoning for the Committee. The newly re-appointed President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, already set out his political guidelines on 3 September. These include broad strategic goals such as making a successful exit from the current crisis, leading on climate change, developing new sources of sustainable growth, advancing a ‘people’s Europe’ and opening a new era for a ‘Global Europe’. In the coming months, Barroso and his new team will have to translate these broad goals into policy proposals for the Commission’s five-year mandate and also for each year’s work programme. Now, then, is the moment for the Committee to make its voice heard. Where does organised civil society see the priorities in all of this? And that is what President Sepi had invited members and staff to discuss. It was a long day but a very productive one.

Jillian van Turnhout

The plenary also debated and adopted an exploratory opinion drafted by Jillian van Turnhout (Irish, Various Interests Group) on alcohol-related harm in European society. An ‘initiative’ opinion, like Lars Nyberg’s (see previous post) is one that the Committee adopts of its own initiative because it feels strongly that civil society organisations have something to say on a matter. An exploratory opinion, on the other hand, is an opinion asked of the Committee by another institution or the Presidency – in this case, the Swedish Presidency – because there is a possibility of legislation and the institution/Presidency wants to know what civil society organisations think on the matter before going further. Van Turnhout’s opinion made for sobering reading (pardon the pun). Harmful alcohol use is the third biggest cause of early illness and death in the EU. Excessive alcohol consumption is responsible for approximately 195,000 deaths a year due to accidents, liver diseases, cancers and the like. Van Turnhout, who is Chief Executive of the Irish Childrens’ Rights Alliance, placed particular emphasis on protecting children. Research shows that almost 9 million children in the EU are adversely affected in some way by alcohol. Because of this, the opinion calls for a reduction in the exposure of children to alcohol marketing as well as more effective regulation of the availability and distribution of alcohol, as self regulation in this area is not enough. And if you go into most corner shops in the EU you’ll see the truth of that.

Lars Nyberg

As well as set-piece debates with guest speakers, the plenary session also saw the debate and adoption of a number of significant opinions. One of these was an ‘initiative’ opinion drafted by a Swedish Employees’ Group member, Lars Nyberg, on the Larosière Group’s recommendations (on the future of European regulation and supervision of financial markets). The Committee’s opinion endorses Larosière’s main recommendations but widens the analysis from a relatively technical angle to include all of the economy and makes additional recommendations in that context.  For example, the Committee argues that membership of the three spearate authorities for banks, investment funds and securities markets should not be limited to bankers but should include representatives from broader civil society, from consumers (customers) through to trades unions. It wants new financial products to be assessed by a monetary authority before they are marketed. It argues that auditors should play a more important role; in particular, effective auditing could have curtailed the spread of risky instruments. Perhaps most controversially, the Committee’s opinion opts for a Tobin-type tax on financial transactions, with proceeds going to development aid.

In the afternoon the EESC’s plenary session got under way with a visit from José Manuel Barroso, newly confirmed as the next Commission President and also fresh back from Pittsburgh. He had come to participate in  a debate about employment and vocational training in the context of the current economic crisis. Other guests for the debate included Eva Uddén Sonnegard, the Swedish Secretary of State for Employment, Bruno Coquet, President of the European Committee on Employment, and the Directors of the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Aviana Maria Bulgarelli), the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Jorma Karppinen) and the OECD’s Director for Employment, John Martin. The conclusions from Pittsburgh were clear; recovery is going to take a few years yet. From the EU’s point of view, we must do what we can to maintain employment but, at the same time, we must think, in Barroso’s words, about ‘what sort of Europe we want to have when we come out of the end of the tunnel.’ Clearly, the Lisbon Strategy and its successor remain key foundations for such a vision. All speakers in the debate underlined the importance of mutual solidarity. Said Barroso; ‘we must work together or we’ll be navigating in a sea where the EU is marginalized.’ One observation that caught my ear, as it were, was made by Peter Clever (a German EESC member from the Employers’ Group) during the debate. Underlining the EU’s relative maturity this time around, he pointed out how what would previously have been a debate on the theme of ‘what are we going to do about unemployment?’ had become a debate on the theme ‘what are we going to do to stop people losing their jobs?’ Or, as Minister Sonnegard put it, ‘Social Europe begins with a job.’

Jane Morrice

I had a long chat this week with Jane Morrice, one of our Northern Irish members. We spoke about all manner of things but we also spoke about coincidences, and the meaning of these. Jane, a former journalist, kindly shared with me a written account of an extraordinary set of coincidences that she had experienced. I recounted to her one or two similar sequences that I had experienced. Indeed, so strongly did I feel about these experiences at the time that I was thinking of trying to bring out an edited collection of such accounts. That was before Paul Auster published his (disappointing, to my mind) The Red Notebook (1995). Jane’s account is so beautifully written that it has reawoken the idea in me. What makes these accounts so interesting is, first of all, that there is not one coincidence but several. Secondly, the persons concerned effectively make the chain of coincidences ‘work’ by following on from one to another where maybe somebody else would not have made associations or gone any further. Third, there are perceived meanings to these coincidence sequences or, at the least, we read meanings into them. In my own case, for example, I was instrumental, through a series of coincidences, in bringing a Canadian family back into contact with the grave of their aviator brother, who had died during the Second World War. Until I came along, the exact whereabouts of his grave had been unknown, but I couldn’t have known that. The meaning of all this, I later realised, was that I had never visited my late brother’s grave since his burial. By bringing other siblings back together I was then able to rediscover my own brother’s grave and hence confront all of the grief that had been salted away. If any of you out there have stories about significant sequences of coincidences, I’d be glad to hear about them. They are a profoundly human experience.