This morning the European Economic and Social Committee’s ‘Enlarged Presidency’ (the President, Vice-Presidents, Group Presidents and the Secretary General) met, and this afternoon it was the turn of the so-called ‘Enlarged Enlarged Presidency’ (all of the above, plus the Section and CCMI Presidents) to meet. Hugo of New York will be happy to note the return of Howard Taft (my ‘enlarged President’) but how on earth might I illustrate an Enlarged Enlarged Presidency? Any suggestions would be most gracefully received. As to the meetings, these had intense and rich agendas and bore many positive results. I cannot reveal state secrets but I can record that there was a particularly fruitful debate on the EESC’s follow-up to European Commission President José Manuel Barroso’s call for a qualitative leap forward in the integration process. This, after all, is precisely what the EESC has been calling for in a series of opinions.

Tonight we watched another film with links back to our summer coast-to-coast trip, Stephen Spielberg’s 1971 television film, Duel. Our hotel in Flagstaff backed on to a truckers’ station and so we got to admire some of America’s freight-hauling fleet from up close, and we also rode through some of the California countryside featured in the film. We were all agreed that this film owes a lot to Hitchcock, in the way it builds tension and the way in which the everyday becomes possibly threatening and ultimately positively evil. But it is also typically Spielbergian (does that term exist?) in the way everyman is set against adversity and ultimately wins through. The version we watched this evening had been stretched out for the cinema, and it showed. (I much preferred the shorter, more taut television version I saw many moons ago.) Still, this film was, deservedly and understandably, Spielberg’s big break. Who or what is Dennis Weaver’s character (the innocent car driver) dealing with? A mad man? A macho man? Or some sort of ghost, an evil spirit? The viewer never knows and never needs to know because, in the end, Weaver wins.

We had an old friend, Peter Kennealy, to lunch today. When I started at the European University Institute (Florence) in 1981 Peter, although one year younger than me, was already a fixture in the evenings at the Bar Fiasco (the student bar), because he had gone straight to his doctoral studies from his first degree at UCL, Dublin (whereas I had made a detour via a Master’s degree at the Johns Hopkins University). He was full of glitteringly witty repartee, and so he still is. Peter combines librarianship with editorial duties and, as I know through personal experience, wields a forensically authoritative red pencil. I like to think that Peter would have more than held his own at the famous Friday lunches of Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James, et al. The riff at our table was about the disappointments of swanky, pseudo scientific restaurants, capped with Peter’s suggestion for the name of a definitively economical establishment; Leftovers.

To elegant Square Ambiorix this morning, to the annual brocante, where a friend, Jo Wood, is ‘leafleting’. Commendably, said friend (one of several) is standing as a candidate in the forthcoming Belgian local elections, hence the leaflets. Belgium is often teased for excessive levels of governance but Belgian local democracy is admirably vibrant and dynamic and very, very local. Maybe it’s to do with the scale of the country and its towns and cities. This is a country where you can frequently bump into ministers and mayors in the local supermarket and where you can take them to task and they will happily engage in debate with none of the looking-over-the-shoulder tight-lipped approach that can occur in more media-intensive societies (such as the UK, where an ill-judged comment or moment, recorded on a mobile phone, can do disproportionate damage and hence discourage open debate). The wandering brass band in my picture gave a Fellini-esque air to the proceeedings.

Berthem, once again, early this morning, in blustery conditions and under a troubled grey sky. The lanes and mud tracks were littered with green acorns and sweet chestnuts shaken loose by the gales. The beet mountains have started to reappear. The farmers scatter the shredded beet leafs back onto the fields, soon to be ploughed in, so the fields have a green-brown sheen to them. And then we came to a favourite copse that is now no more, the trees having been cut down and the best trunks tagged and stacked for purchase (picture). When I see such scenes I am immediately reminded of those First World War photographs and paintings (Paul Nash, for example) of the trenches, where heavy shelling had already destroyed the copses but not yet reduced them to mud baths. And then I remembered why. About ten years ago we were on a walking holiday near Verdun. We came to a similar scene of a recently felled copse, with mud and shattered branches all about. On closer examination, though, we realised that the clearance had revealed a segment of the battlefield, complete with barbed wire, vestiges of trenches, and occasional monuments for a fallen officer, with medals soldered onto iron crosses, and more rudimentary memorials.

This morning I met and greeted one of my distinguished counterparts, Pierre Vimont, Executive Secretary General of the European External Action Service, and accompanied him to the EESC’s External Relations Section where, in a meeting chaired by the REX President, Sandy Boyle (picture), he participated in a wide-ranging exchange of views. I was struck by Pierre’s words in his opening remarks about the importance of civil society aspects of foreign relations. Anybody doubting the importance of such aspects should look to the Arab countries and the Middle East as the best illustration, he said. In that context, he also spoke about the ‘huge treasure that we have and can build on with you’. The Committee’s external relations activities are perhaps less well known than its other advisory functions, but wherever the Union has foreign or trade relations civil society aspects must also be considered and in this context, as Sandy Boyle underlined (and as was also underlined in the Committee’s recent plenary exchange of views with trade commissioner Karel De Gucht), the Committee and its members are increasingly called upon to exercise a structural role.

This morning I attended the opening session of a conference organised by the EESC’s Various Interests Group and chaired by its President, Luca Jahier, on the theme of ‘Innovative Solutions for a Sustainable Europe’. The rich agenda of this day-long meeting concentrated on the role of social enterprises in making the Europe 2020 strategy a success. Representatives of various social enterprise organisations addressed the conference and a keynote speech was delivered by Laszlo Andor, the European Commissioner with responsibility for employment, social affairs and inclusion. Other speakers included a number of the Committee’s rapporteurs of related opinions, including Giuseppe Guerini (Social Business Initiative) and Ariane Rodert (European Social Entrepreneurship Funds, Social Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise) and Miguel Cabra De Luna (Diverse Forms of Enterprise).

This morning, together with my counterpart at the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, I co-chaired the fifteenth bi-monthly meeting of the Secretaries-General of the two Committees, together with their Directors of Joint Services and Directors of Administration and Finance. This regular meeting is one part of the governance mechanism, set out in the formal cooperation agreement between the two consultative bodies, that enables us both to pool significant quantities of our resources in what we call the ‘Joint Services’. Such pooling, which enables us to achieve considerable economies for the tax payer, requires elaborate planning and coordination, particularly in areas such as human and budgetary resources. The existence of this meeting allows for thorny issues that couldn’t be boiled off at a lower level of governance to bubble their way up to us. Some we resolve, some we discuss and pass back down and some we decide to put to our political authorities. But whatever we do, we do it in a coordinated and collegial fashion. I believe that this cooperation – an undeniable success – is not just good for the taxpayer but sets an example for the other institutions about the best use of scarce resources and, above all, human capital.

I first saw him one late June evening, as I was pedalling home around eight o’clock. He had found a sheltered spot in a corner of the old Bacup building in the rue Belliard and made up his bed there. He was sitting up and reading a book. He was there every evening thereafter, and before too long he would give me a cheerful wave as I pedalled past. During the day, I noticed, there was no sign of him – he cleared everything away methodically and left no mess. After a few weeks of waving good evening to one another, I stopped one evening and gave him a bag of surplus food from one of our events. Thereafter I’d stop two or three times a week, give him some food or a little money, and have a chat. He had been staying in rent-assisted housing. He had moved to a slightly better flat but hadn’t told social security of his change of address. They had stopped his payments. He had found a friend prepared to pre-rent a flat, filled in the necessary paperwork and they had promised him that by the end of September he would again be receiving payments. In the meantime, though, he had no alternative but to sleep on the street. There was no animosity in his account of what had occurred. During the day he did odd jobs – washing up and the like – for a restaurant/bar in the Gare du Luxembourg. Although he smoked, he didn’t drink and he proudly told me that he had already saved up almost enough to pay back his friend. The weekends were the toughest, he told me, because his string of occasional visitors like me would dry up but he’d read old books and newspapers and do the Sudoko puzzles. In mid-August he was taken to hospital with heat exhaustion but otherwise he was there in his corner of the Bacup building every evening, ready with that cheerful wave. And then, last Wednesday evening, he was no longer there. This was good news. It meant he had moved back into accommodation. But I couldn’t help but feel slightly sad that he’d gone and I miss his friendly wave as I pedal past.

Today, after an early morning meeting with my President, Staffan Nilsson, I marked the end of my fourth year as Secretary General by chairing my 160th regular Monday morning management board meeting. We looked back with pride and satisfaction on two busy and highly productive weeks for the Committee and forward to further activities that increasingly, as I see it, flesh out the Lisbon Treaty’s concept of structured dialogue with organised civil society. In particular, when the Committee’s guests from the other institutions visit its plenary session or the meetings of the specialised Sections and the CCMI it seems to me that they increasingly acknowledge the fact that they also require dialogue with, and support from, organised civil society. In that context I was particularly struck by an observation made by French senator and former minister Chantal Jouanno (picture) during the Committee’s ‘Step Up for a Stronger Europe’ conference last week. She argued that Europe would be built primarily not by political parties, because they are necessarily decisive, but by organised civil society, which is by its nature cohesive and consensual.