It’s interesting, exciting and nice to see any writing project come to fruition.  One of my fellow writers’ group members, Loretta Stanley, is about to produce a play that she has written over the past two years and which, we, the writers group, have accompanied from its early beginnings through to a fairly final draft.  Edith is a challenging and fascinating treatment of the last period of the life of Edith Cavell. Gordon Brown wrote about her in his recent work on Courage, but the standard presentation of Cavell as an unconditional First World War heroine does not stand up to closer scrutiny and it is the ambiguities in Cavell’s behaviour that Loretta cleverly explores by bring her back as a ghost and confronting her with similar situations in the modern world. It’ll be on at the Warehouse Studio Theatre (69a rue Waelhem, 1030 Schaerbeek) from 31 March to 4 April and you can order tickets from the Irish Theatre Group’s website.

To the writers’ group in the evening. My exercise this time was about some childhood bathtime recollections triggered by a simple gesture. I read it out to my kids first, who grinned in recognition of what I was describing. Everybody this evening had similar recollections. It’s funny how these collective cultural experiences lie just below the surface –  a bit like a bar of soap in the bathwater, actually.  See ‘read more’ below for the exercise. Continue reading

Malmström

We are only two months into the Czech Presidency but the way EU Presidencies now fold into one another means that all of the EU institutions are constantly preparing for future presidencies as well as working closely with the current one. Today, in this context, I accompanied our President, Mario Sepi, and the (Swedish) President of the Committee’s Various Interests Group, Staffan Nilsson, in a meeting with the Swedish European Union Affairs Minister, Cecilia Malmström. The minister was an MEP for seven years and knows her way around Brussels, so this was a straight-to-the-point sort of meeting. There clearly are ways in which the EESC will work closely with the Swedish Presidency  – not least in such priority areas as the Lisbon Strategy and the Union’s response to the conomic and financial crisis.

Kenneth Arrow

When I was studying for my Master’s at Johns Hopkins University I had to write a paper on Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem (otherwise known as ‘Arrow’s paradox’ – in the fashion of ‘Xeno’s paradox’, I suppose). Arrow, who was joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 1972 at the age of just 51, demonstrated the theorem already in his PhD thesis but went on to give it a broader audience through his Social Choice and Individual Values (1951). In a very elegant nutshell, Arrow demonstrated that democracy is impossible (you can read about his theory here). At Tim Smit’s talk (see 10 February post) I asked a question which I am (half-seriously) thinking of firming up into ‘Westlake’s impossibility theorem’. The theorem goes as follows: a) democracies are predicated on political parties seeking to gain power by aggregating a sufficient number of votes so as to win a majority; b) political parties are rational entities, which means that they will always act to maximise votes (or to minimise vote loss) for the next electoral challenge they face; c) policy choices to enhance sustainability necessarily involve benefits that will not be achieved within a single electoral cycle and costs that will be incurred within a single electoral cycle; therefore, democracy and sustainability are mutually incompatible. I rest my case. Help me out of this depressing predicament, please.

Gideon Rachman

The Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman has launched an interesting competition on his blog. Readers have to come up with a term that epitomizes the opposite of ‘globalisation’. Entries so far include ‘autarchy’, ‘immunisation’, ‘fragmentation’ and even ‘backyardisation’. My own entry, for what it’s worth, is the more prosaic ‘deglobalisation’.

Andrea's book

Recently (5 February), I published a post about the excellent book co-authored by the President of the EESC’s Group, Henri Malosse; Il faut sauver le citoyen Européen. Denis Healey once remarked about the ‘hinterland’ of politicians, his own cultural hinterlands being poetry and photography. By analogy, EU – and EESC- officials frequently have important cultural hinterlands; commited to the ’cause’, highly-qualified, polyglot, and sensitive to cultural identities, it is easy to see why so many EU officials have cultural activities outside the ‘day job’. For obvious reasons, I’m particularly interested in those who write. So here are a few of the recent publications of EESC officials. Andrea Pierucci, by day the Head of the President’s Private Office, has written, together with Giancarlo Vilella, a book entitled Il Futuro dell’Europa – Antagonismo, Innovazione e Strategie dell’Unione Europea (Pendragon). Domenico Cosmai, for a long time a translator at the Committee and now working in the General Affairs Directorate managing inter alia the work flow of documents for translation, has published a second edition of Tradurre per l’Unione Europea (Hoepli). At another level, Peter Lindvald Nielsen, Head of the EESC’s Communication Department, has published a personal account of hunting adventures with his father, Pa jagt med Peter (www.lindvald.dk). Since I can’t read Danish, I won’t pretend that I have read it, but those who have testify to its touching descriptions. Europe; endless!

Before I forget, I would like to give a plug for a very interesting book, The Institutions of the Enlarged European Union, Continuity and Change, edited by Edward Best, Thomas Christiansen and Pierpaolo Settembri, and not just because I have given a puff on the back of the book. The authors carried out a pretty rigorous analysis of the way the different EU institutions have adapted to enlargement. The study is timely and, in my humble opinion, provides much food for thought for European policy makers. For what the authors seem to have discovered, almost without exception, is a dangerous coupling of twin tendencies – dangerous, that is, from a democratic point of view. On the one hand, formal decision-making bodies within the institutions are enlarged to continue to provide representation for all of the member states (as an illustration of this trend, one has only to look at the current debate about the European Commission’s composition). At the same time, and to compensate for the sheer size of such bodies, informal mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the decision-making process. In other words, efficiency is gained, but at the expense of transparency. It’s a huge conundrum, especially given that we know both trends are set to continue.

To the EESC’s staff committee to explain to them the state of play with regard to the drafting of the 2010 budget (yes, the budget yet again). The exchange of views went well. Having been a representative of this and that myself in the past, I very much value the existence of the staff committee and the work that it does. I want a close and constructive relationship with the staff representatives and am determined to work hard to maintain this, so the meeting was encouraging. However, the naughty President, Alan (that’s him in the picture) , had put another, much less consensual, point on the agenda. Consquently, I was given a light grilling all over, though one bolt of lightning singed my eyebrows and left a distinct whiff of brimstone in the air. I came out of it feeling a little like one does after a sauna; it had definitely been good for me, but it didn’t necessarily feel like it all of the time!

The Council

It has been quite a budgetary week. On Monday I was in the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee and on Tuesday I spent the day in the EESC’s own Budget Group (see posts). Today, I spent an hour in the Council’s Budget Committee. The reason was a request that the Committee had put in to transfer 1 meuro out of a ‘reserve’ and onto a budgetary post so that the money could be spent. The money had been put in the reserve in the first place by the European Parliament’s Budgets Committee (and I will have to go there on the same subject next Tuesday). The Parliament had done this basically because it wanted the Committee to show that it could properly manage expenditure on this post which, since it is about our members’ allowances, is a sensitive one. A number of Member State delegations quite rightly pointed out that it was very, very early in the year for the Committee to be asking for such a transfer, particularly since, in comparative terms, it was quite large (since there is 15 meuro on the line, this transfer will represent an increase of one fifteenth). My counter-argument was that it was precisely because of the relative size of the amount involved that we needed to know we had got it as early as possible in the year so that we could indeed be sure to spend the money soundly and efficiently. The Presidency called for a vote and asked those against the request to raise their hands. Nobody did. Unanimity! The Committee had unanimously voted in favour of the transfer! This felt really good. It reminded me of those (rare!) moments at school where I knew I had done reasonably well in an exam but then, when the results came in, found I had got an A+ (OK; those moments were very rare!).

Minister Smet

Early this afternoon I, together with my fellow Secretary General for the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, hosted a visit from Pascal Smet, Minister in the Government of the Bruxelles Capitale Region for mobility, public transport, taxis and assistance to people. The visit, which was arranged by the Bulletin magazine, concerned the subject of safety of pedestrians seeking to cross the rue Belliard. Since the two Committees have staff working in six buildings situated on both sides of the rue Belliard, this was also about the safety of our staff. But it was also about the safety of the many visitors who visit the EU institutions. We pointed out the various problems to him: poorly synchronised or simply unsynchronised traffic lights; lack of barriers to prevent people from crossing at dangerous places; lack of protection for pedestrians on the (narrow) pavements; and so on. To his great credit , the minister was very receptive and made immediate, on-the-spot commitments. But he also informed us about a competition under way to completely re-do the whole of the rue Belliard (as has been done with the rue de la Loi) and, indeed, the whole of the European quarter. Like me, Smet is an avid cyclist, so I got in a bit of special bidding for a proper piste cyclable as well. All-in-all it was an encouraging and very productive half an hour.