This afternoon I chaired a meeting of the EESC’s IT Steering Committee. I remember a time when IT in the office was pretty much restricted to the telephone and a snazzy new typewriter that had primitive editing capacity. Now IT is everywhere, from planning to legislation, from document production to electronic archiving and electronic data bases, from the intranet and the extranet to the internet. And IT is constantly developing, constantly becoming yet more sophisticated. And as we use it more, so we develop further applications. A good example of this phenomenon is the way that a move to less paper in our management board meetings led very rapidly to the development of an intranet-based site for all management board documents. At the same time, IT is expensive, requires careful investment and development decisions, and generally requires long lead times and planning. Hence the need for governance and hence the need for the IT Steering Committee, which brings together the ‘clients’ – consultative works, the sessions service, the members’ service, communication, etc – and the ‘suppliers’ – our ever-efficient IT team. My secret weapon – Super Bernard (a member of the SG’s team) – had expertly prepared the agenda and the meeting went very well.

Before we left Le Coq this morning I walked back through its sleepy streets to N° 5 Shakespearelaan, and stood for a while before the shuttered house in my picture, Le Savoyarde. In March 1933, after completing a two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Albert Einstein, accompanied by his wife, Elsa, took a ship back across the Atlantic to Antwerp. On 30 January of the same year Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of a coalition government of the NSDAP-DNVP Party. The SA and SS led torchlight parades through Berlin’s streets.  During their voyage the Einsteins were informed that their cottage had been raided by the Nazis and that his personal sailboat had been confiscated. Upon landing in Antwerp on 28 March, he immediately went to the German consulate where he turned in his passport and formally renounced his German citizenship. Not knowing quite what to do or where to go, the Einsteins rented the left part of the villa La Savoyarde in Le Coq. They would later be joined there by their daughters-in-law and his assistant, Walther Mayer and secretary, Helen Dukas. As a celebrity of the time, Einstein was soon receiving visits from diplomats, politicians, statesmen, journalists, authors and artists. One of the latter was James Ensor, with whom Einstein became good friends. In early April, Einstein learned that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities. A month later, Einstein’s works were among those targeted by Nazi book burnings, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed, “Jewish intellectualism is dead.” Einstein also learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets, with a “$5,000 bounty on his head.” One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, “not yet hanged”. On 9 September 1933, rightly judging that the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous – and, of course, fearing assassination by a fanatic, Einstein left Le Coq incognito for England. He sailed for the United States in October of the same year. He took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, that required his presence for six months each year. He was still undecided on his future (he had offers from European universities, including Oxford), but in 1935 he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and applied for US citizenship. There are plenty of pictures of Einstein in Le Coq, many of them quite moving for, even when he was smiling his eyes were, it seemed to me, sad.

We have come to Le Coq/Den Haan for a short weekend break. Of all the Belgian seaside resorts, Le Coq is perhaps the least spoilt. Certainly there are no high rise buildings. The town sports a lovely collection of belle epoque architecture and the dunes stretch away unspoilt towards Ostend. Today we walked some ten kilometres along the beach to Ostend, visited the modern art museum (an architecturally interesting conversion of a 1930s grand surface and which has an extraordinarily rich collection of Leon Spillaerts) and the Fort Napoleon (an Ensor painting of the Fort hangs in the art museum), then walked back along the beach to Le Coq. There was a time when I visited Ostend frequently. In the time before cheap flights you could get the Jetfoil from Ostend to London (in the beginning all the way up the Thames to the Tower of London, though the service was soon re-routed to Dover). The Jetfoil hugged the Belgian coast then zipped across the Channel at its narrowest point. That part of the trip could at times be very sportif, with the pilot zig-zagging around the bigger waves when there was a big swell. Here’s a clip of the Jetfoil leaving Ostend. A Jetfoil plies the Lago di Como and it always reminds me of the cross-Channel version, long since abandoned, alas (the boats are reportedly now plying routes off Kobe, in Japan). Before the Jetfoil, and overlapping with it, there were the overnight ferries to Dover. As a young student in Italy, making my way back up to London, the ferry crossing represented the penultimate stage of the trip. I fondly remember the ‘English breakfasts’ in the ship’s restaurant and the first ‘good’ cup of tea. The Channel Tunnel put paid to most of the ferries and the Jetfoils. Later, as young professionals in Brussels, we would nip up to Ostend of a weekend to get fresh fish at the fish market on the quay – still there, though much reduced. Afterwards, we would go to what was surely one of the more atmospheric places in Belgium – the brasserie at the end of the estacade (the stockade). When the seas were very high and the waves were crashing over the barrier and spray was battering the windows there was no better place to be munching moules et frites. Well, it has been a while since we were last there and we were deeply saddened to see that a protective barrier has been built out to sea (see my picture), so that the estacade is no longer the last point between you and the British coast and the brasserie has fallen into disrepair. All things must pass…

The following anecdote does not reflect well on me, I am afraid. When I was an Oxford undergraduate I became gradually aware of important intellectual personalities around me, particularly in my college, and even if they weren’t teaching me. I recognised them by their tics and their traits and gradually got to know some of them personally. But, much to my regret, I never got to know Ronald Dworkin, who died a few days ago, personally, despite the fact that I was studying philosophy and he was a legal philosopher and a fellow of my college and we did meet occasionally. On the other hand, I did know all about him. In the first place, he was, with his unfeasibly large spectacles and floppy hair (see the picture), distinctive and immediately recognisable. In the second place, he was the first person I ever met who thought nothing of teaching in Europe and America at the same time. In a period (the mid-1970s) when trans-Atlantic travel was still considered fairly exotic, Dworkin was effectively commuting between New York, Yale and Harvard and London and Oxford. In the third place, in 1977 he published the seminal Taking Rights Seriously which was said to have put him up there alongside the likes of John Rawls and Robert Nozick and turned this already exotic creature into a sort of demi-god. In retrospect, the 1970s was a decade of the sweeping treatise and the grand title, starting with Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), revving up with Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), ratcheting up further with Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, and racketing along with Taking Rights Seriously and Bull’s contemporaneous The Anarchical Society. Extraordinarily, Taking Rights Seriously was Dworkin’s first book. Many more would follow from the pen of a man who was surely one of the intellectual giants of his age.

This afternoon I was given the pleasure and the privilege of welcoming the participants in a symposium, hosted by the EESC,  about cultural freedom in Europe. The symposium was part of a broader project bringing together the EESC, the Committee of the Regions, the Brussels branch of the Goethe Institute and the Sint Lukas Gallery (Brussels). Other partners included the EU’s culture programme and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. The previous evening the Committee had launched an exhibition on the same theme. This exhibition is in turn part of a broader project, Europe (to the power of) n, a trans-regional art project undertaken by eleven institutions in different European countries. Before handing over to the symposium’s chair, Dr Berthold Franke, I stressed the importance of Europe’s cultural diversity to its very essence. The EU’s ongoing success as a process was not down to some gradual homogenisation of its different cultures but, rather, a celebration of that diversity and the encouragement of mutual understanding. Indeed, I concluded, the European Union’s institutions could be described as being houses of mutual understanding. Where better, then, to hold a symposium on the theme of cultural freedom?

The European Economic and Social Committee is a venerable institution, one of five founder institutions in the Union (together with the Parliament, the Council, the Commission and the Court).  Today the Committee’s Bureau, which first met in 1958, held its 600th meeting. It was mostly a pretty routine affair, preparing the work of the next two days’ plenary session. But it suddenly occurred to me, as I listened to the debates and thought about that 600 figure, that I am roughly the same age as the Committee (born, like the Committee itself, in 1957). It was a little strange to think that whilst I had been a wailing babe this very same organ had been similarly meeting, preparing the work of the Committee and of its plenary session. The same, of course, held true of the Union’s other most venerable institutions. I am fond of saying that the Union is ‘only’ a little over fifty years old but it has come an awful long way in that half century. Some of that achievement at least is down to the slow, patient, preparatory work of the Union’s institutions and bodies, quietly but effectively building Europe.

Tonight we at last got around to seeing Stephen Spielberg’s 2012 historical drama, Lincoln, with Daniel Day-Lewis turning in another towering performance as the great man. The story focuses on Lincoln’s January 1865 efforts to get the 13th amendment through Congress, thus formally, constitutionally, abolishing slavery. Lincoln was aware that his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was made under his authority as Commander-in-Chief. It was not a law passed in Congress, it didn’t apply to the five slave states that were not in rebellion and, once war was over, it risked being discarded by the Courts. At the same time, if the war was over and the slave states returned to the Union, the amendment would not pass. Therefore, Lincoln concluded, the issue of slavery had to be settled before the end of the war and to do that Lincoln needed the votes of Democratic congressmen – and he got them. We see Lincoln (and William Seward, played by David Strathairn) juggling low politics for high ideals, and both encouraging (for Francis Preston Blair) and hiding (for the Radical Republicans) exploratory peace talks, whilst Thaddeus Stevens (brilliantly played by Tommy Lee Jones) finally moderates his language about racial equality in favour of the greater goal. Lincoln’s later assassination is thrown in to tug our heartstrings and remind us that he paid the highest price. The power of this portrayal of Lincoln is its gritty plausibility, including the stresses in the Lincoln household (Sally Field turns in a strong performance as the long-suffering Mary Todd Lincoln), but also Lincoln’s inner sense of destiny. In a European Voice editorial, Tim King has compared the way a potentially shameful and horribly bloody civil war was transformed, via a collective memory of history, into a redemptive narrative, whereas Europeans have been unable to turn the Second World War into a single generally agreed myth (despite the ultimate redemption of the Nobel Peace Prize). American politicians can, and do, plug into such a shared narrative but, King concludes,  “Anyone who wishes to do the same on the European stage must struggle with the conundrum that if there is a shared European identity, it is not accompanied by a shared European memory.”

A sonic boom once heard in my London school playground was a part of my Cold War experience. Older boys told us ‘the war’ had started. The boom was certainly impressive. Every so often a newspaper article provides a chance glance into a world it is probably better not to know too much about. Yesterday morning the good people of Liège were treated to a sonic boom. This morning an article in La Libre Belgique explained that two Belgian F16 fighter planes had raced full speed (hence the boom) – or, as La Libre put it, ‘les F16 belges ont volé plein pot’ – to intercept an Embraer ERJ145, flying from Vienna to Luxembourg because air traffic controllers had lost touch with the crew aboard for almost ten minutes. The pilot, who (I like to think) had probably been munching a sandwich, or finishing a cup of tea, came back on the radio a few moments later and the alert was over. The F16s returned to base. But the article informed its readers that the Belgian Air Force is on standby for such interceptions twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In extremis, the pilots would be prepared to shoot down an aircraft, if considered a sufficient threat. This has never happened, it reported, not even when a Soviet MIG-23, abandoned by its crew, traversed Belgian air space on autopilot from East to West, before running out of fuel and crashing near Courtrai. That was on 4 July 1989. One person died on the ground. I don’t remember the MIG crash at all, but it must have been one of the more bizarre Cold War incidents.

On 4 February it was finally confirmed that the skeleton found under a Leicester car park belonged to Richard Plantagenet, Richard III, the monster and child slayer of popular mythology and Shakespearian lore. What fascinated me in all the reports was the way the scientists had been able to reconstruct Richard III’s death (the last English king to die in battle and the only one since Harold at Hastings in 1066). The accounts echo what was already known about the 22 August 1485 Battle of Bosworth Field, for whatever else he might have been, Richard III was a brave and audacious fighter. Though his troops ostensibly outnumbered those of Henry Tudor, he was the victim of several strategic betrayals and the death of his good friend John Howard had demoralised him and, more importantly, his troops. Sensing impending disaster, Richard decided on a brave initiative which almost succeeded. He rode straight at the heart of the enemy’s troops. His reasoning was almost certainly that they would not be expecting such a rapier lightning attack and that if he could get to Henry and kill him there would no longer be any point to the battle. He very nearly made it, unhorsing a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry’s standard bearer and getting to within a sword’s length of Henry himself before he was surrounded and massacred by his own treacherous troops. He had been riding a white courser but was unhorsed by a stretch of marshy land. Had this not occurred, he might just have succeeded. As The Economist put it: ‘Unhorsed in the mêlée, fighting like fury with his helmet off, he was killed either by a sword-thrust right through his brain, or by a halberd-blow that sliced off the back of his skull. More dagger blows to his head were inflicted once he was dead, and as a parting shot a knife was plunged in his buttocks as his naked body, slung over a saddle, was carried from the field.’

I have been asked to write a short review of events in the year 1989 for a publication. What a truly historical year it was! Here is the first paragraph of my review: “1989 was the year Sky television launched, Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web and the Nintendo Game Boy first went on sale. This was the year of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. The French celebrated the 200th anniversary of their Revolution, the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize and Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest. P.K. Botha met Nelson Mandela for the first time and F.W. de Klerk became the seventh and last President of apartheid South Africa. After nine years of military occupation the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. This was the year of Tiananmen Square, culminating in the 4 June massacre. Above all, this was the year of the European revolutions; the year of Hungary downing border fences, of Boris Yeltsin winning a Supreme Soviet seat, of Solidarity’s win in free Polish elections, of the human chain in the Baltic states, of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the brutal end of the Ceausescu regime in Romania. This was the year Gunter Schabowski accidentally stated in a live broadcast press conference that new rules for travelling from East to West Germany would be put into effect ‘immediately’ and the Berlin Wall fell in the blink of an eye. At the 2-3 December Malta Summit George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev declared that the Cold War was over.”