The Committee’s services are busy preparing for a conference on another theme dear to our President, the Europe 2020 Strategy, where he has been working closely with the EESC’s Europe 2020 Steering Committee, Joost Van Iersel. The 25 September conference, entitled Step Up for a Stronger Europe! will be a major opportunity for constructive debate on the Compact for growth and jobs, Europe 2020 strategy and on its policy levers, as well as on the involvement of civil society in the implementation of the strategy. Several high-level European and national decision-makers have confirmed their participation, as well as civil society representatives, national economic and social committees/councils, regional/local authorities and other key stakeholders who will thrash out ideas intended to help re-launch growth in the EU. The European Parliament’s President, Martin Schulz, European Commission members Michel Barnier and Laszlo Andor, and Italian European Affairs Minister, Enzo Moavero Milanesi, are among an impressive number of high level policy-makers and politicians who will participate in a closing exchange of views with the Committee’s representatives and with representatives of the network of economic and social councils in the member states.

The European Economic and Social Committee is composed of representatives of civil society organisations in the member states. In order to help bridge the gap between such member-state-based organisations and pan-European organised civil society, the Committee decided to create a Liaison Group composed in part of EESC members and in part of representatives of European civil society organisations and networks. This afternoon I attended a meeting of this Liaison Group co-chaired by the EESC’s President, Staffan Nilsson, and by the President of the European Civic Forum, Jean-Marc Roirant. On the agenda were, firstly, the follow-up to the Rio+20 Conference – the ‘road from Rio’ as Staffan Nilsson described it, secondly, the European Year of Citizens (2013), where the Group held an exchange of views with the EESC’s Vice-President for Communication, Anna Maria Darmanin, and with the Director in the Commission with specific responsibility for the year, Ylva Tiveus (an old friend), and lastly a first exchange of views on preparations for the 4th Civil Society Day in March 2013.

My sole surviving maternal aunt, an enthusiastic genealogical researcher, has been digging away at the 1903 Eldorado adventure, and has now discovered an Irish grandson of a member of the ship’s crew who has also been digging away enthusiastically and has published this recording. To recapitulate, one of my maternal great grandfathers was captain of a ship, the Eldorado, which was hired by a fur company to cross the Atlantic and head up the Hudson Bay route to replenish a fur station. The ship, with its 23 passengers (including a little girl) and 24 crew, was wrecked off Fort George. The survivors, led by Captain William Berry, made their way in small boats through high seas to a trading post at Charlton Island, and from there set off on a grueling 300 + mile journey through the interior, in temperatures reaching -30° C and below and with few provisions. They finally made it to the Ottawa River and from there to Quebec. Surreally, in the midst of the wilderness they came one day across a British Army Major who was out big game hunting. He couldn’t help them, but did tell them who had won the Americas Cup race the previous month! Such were communications at the time that the world only learnt about the wreck and their almost miraculous survival when they themselves arrived back in civilisation to recount it.

The Famennes; a beautiful September day; a Baroque church; an international but also a family gathering; a trio (flute, violin and viola); a range of music from Mozart through to Neyrinck; a garden party; a perfect host; good company… There are occasions when it is difficult to imagine how life might be better. Full marks to our musicians; Elisabeth de Merode (flute); Dejana Sekulic (violin) and Laurent Tardat (viola).

Tonight we watched Lewis Gilbert’s 1983 film, Educating Rita, starring Michael Caine, Julie Walters and Maureen Lipman, and which is basically a more complicated version of Willy Russell’s stage play of the same name. Critics considered the complications, or add-ons (mistresses, in-laws, fellow students) as unnecessary distractions from the central relationship between Caine’s drunken professor and Walters’ ambitious Liverpudlian working class student which is at the heart of the story. Caine and Walters are very good and it is perhaps true that if the plot had left out some of the extras they would have had more time to develop their relationship, in which the drunken cynic rediscovers idealism and the starry-eyed working class lass discovers that the middle class she aspires to is not all that it is made out to be. Still, Russell’s witty exchanges keep the story racketing along. (His plot also makes an explicit genuflection to Shaw’s Pygmalion when Walters talks ‘posh’ for a few minutes.) At first, we’re led to feel that Walters’ Rita is the more attractive of the two characters, but at the end she bobs about in uncertainty about where she wants to go and what she wants to be, betrayed by her own blind ambition, whereas Caine’s Frank strides off confidently to his flight to Australia and, by implication, a new, revived life.

To Leuven, on a beautiful Saturday, to the M museum, to see the Sol Lewitt exhibition, Colours. These twenty-four works, especially created for this exhibition and which will be effaced afterwards, are the coloured counterpart of the black-and-white exhibition of Lewitt’s works that we saw at the Pompidou Centre in Metz in May. What fascinates me about Lewitt’s work is not just its deliberately ephemeral nature but the fact that each new version of a particular work is different and therefore unique – different, because it will be drawn according to the dimensions of the wall on which it appears and because Lewitt’s instructions leave much room for subjective interpretation to the drawing teams. In effect, you can never see the same work twice. (Looking at one of the ink wash creations, with its beautiful pastel colours, I realized that Lewitt could easily have set himself up as an interior decorator!) Afterwards, we walked past Leuven’s reconstructed university library, with the names of so many New England universities and schools inscribed on its pillars (the library was burnt down in 1914, an act that shocked the world, and was reconstructed with donations, including many from American universities). This is magnum opus territority. With a fun fair in full swing in the Ladeuzeplein, it is impossible to believe that two destructive wars so recently came this way. Walking the dog around Berthem on the way back, though, the pill boxes and bunkers dotted about tell another story…

Le Cercle Municipal, Luxembourg

Sixty years ago today, in Luxembourg, in Le Cercle Municipal, the Special Council of Ministers of the European Coal and Steel Community met for the very first time.  The Chairman of the three-day meeting was German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Among the Special Council’s first decisions were the adoption of its Rules of Procedure and the creation of its Secretariat. The Special Council would not hold its second meeting until 1-2 December 1952. Unlike today’s six-monthly rotation, the chairmanship changed every three months, in alphabetical order. As his memoirs made absolutely clear, during the Paris Treaty negotiations Jean Monnet was strongly opposed to the creation of the Special Council, which he saw as dangerous intergovernmental pollution of what he thought should be a purely supranational project. He only grudgingly accepted the creation of the Special Council, like the Court, because the smaller member states, fearing Franco-German hegemony, insisted on an inter-governmental backstop and a right of appeal. If he were alive today, Monnet would be forced to recognise that the Special Council and its successor institution, the Council of Ministers (with Coreper behind it), have been indispensable and invaluable parts of the integration process.

The European Economic and Social Committee has been back to cruising speed for a few weeks now. The past two weeks have seen several Sections meet and yesterday the Transport and Energy Section held a big and well-attended conference on the reform of European railway legislation, with our President, Staffan Nilsson, welcoming European Parliament Vice-President Isabelle Durant and European Commissioner Siim Kallas to the proceedings. Our President has been particularly busy and the undoubted highlight of the week was his very positive and amicable Wednesday meeting with European Parliament President Martin Schulz (picture) to discuss ways to take the cooperation between the two institutions forward. On a general note and related to the current crisis of confidence, Schultz confirmed to Nilsson that he considered that the EESC had an important role to play in reaching out to citizens through the grassroots civil society organisations the Committee represents and though its advisory work. On the topic of the EU’s cooperation with Southern Mediterranean countries, the EESC President informed President Schultz about the next Euro-Mediterranean Summit of Economic and Social Councils and similar institutions (Amman, 17-19 October 2012), which will be tackling issues such as the role of women, social dialogue, freedom of the media, corruption and sustainable development. President Nilsson asked the support of the European Parliament for the setting up of an Assembly of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions with the status of a consultative body within the structures of the Union for the Mediterranean. The two institutions have been carrying the same messages on the Arab Spring uprisings and have been looking into the same policy areas to encourage further progress in the region: support to SMEs, free trade agreements, visa access for students and business people as well as strengthening the social dialogue and cooperation with trade unions on these matters. For his part, President Schulz invited President Nilsson and the EESC to participate in and contribute to the Mediterranean Forum of the Civil Society promoted by the EP and the Anna Lindh Foundation (4-10 April 2013).

Through its back page obituaries, the Economist magazine has invented a more literary and at times philosophical version of the genre. A good example came in the 25 August edition, with this obituary about Winnie Johnson. She would otherwise have been unknown, but on 16 June 1964 her twelve year-old son, Keith, was kidnapped, tortured, raped, strangled and then buried on Saddleworth Moor by the notorious ‘Moors Murderers’, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Her son’s body was never found, though she searched for it for as long as she could. Brady, still alive, sadistically refused to reveal its whereabouts, and now it is too late for poor Winnie. In his autobiographical work, Experience, novelist Martin Amis wrote movingly about the effects of the strange disappearance of his cousin, Lucy Partington. He was accused of co-opting her terrible story (she was abducted, tortured and murdered by Fred and Rosemary West) but anyone who has read his account can measure the self-evident sincerity of his emotions (he dedicated his novel, The Information, to her). A former member of my writers’ workshop, the novelist Alice Jolly, grew up as a neighbour to the Partington family and to this day speaks movingly about the psychological effects on a child of living next door to a mysterious absence. And then, through listening to Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise, I came across the awful story of mass ‘clown’ murderer, John Wayne Gacy. The following paragraph in the Wiki account led me to write The Fifth Body (below). ‘‘(John Wayne) Gacy stated that after he had assaulted and then released Jeffrey Rignall in March 1978, he had begun to throw his murder victims into the Des Plaines River. He confessed to having disposed a total of five bodies in this manner. However, only four bodies were recovered from the river and conclusively confirmed to be victims of Gacy. Given the gap of over four months between the dates of the murders of the first and second victims known to have been disposed in the river, it is possible that this unknown victim may have been killed between June and November 1978.’ ‘It is probably not good poetry, but I was deeply moved by that idea of somebody going missing but not being missed and never being found (though in the poem I imagine that the body might have been found and then ‘lost’)… In any case, the Economist is to be commended for having honoured the memory of a tortured mother.

Continue reading

Another of my reading companions on our US trip was The Federalist Papers. I’ll blog about them in due course, but I thought I ought also to read an ‘antidote’, and so have also been dipping into Jürgen Habermas’s The Crisis of the European Union: A Response. I don’t know why I thought Habermas’s analysis would be an antidote; his book (a collection of several articles and a long interview piece) could well have been included in The Federalist Papers. It is strange how the pace of events has changed the way in which people may regard Habermas’s argumentation. What seemed prescient or unrealistic a year ago is more-or-less reality now. Consider this passage: ‘These are fateful times. The euro zone countries are heading towards a situation in which they will have to choose between a deepening of European cooperation and relinquishing the euro. Our lame political elites, who prefer to read the tabloid headlines, must not use as an excuse that their populations are the obstacle to a deeper European unification. With a little political backbone, the crisis of the single currency can bring about what some once hoped for from a common European foreign policy, namely a cross-border awareness of a shared European destiny.’ Habermas’s implicit argument is that Monet-style slowly-slowly incremental integration has served its purpose and outlived its usefulness. Habermas does not argue for a ‘big bang’ but proposes that the crisis, in creating a sense of shared destiny, should enable the EU to make a democratic leap forward. Habermas was writing for a German audience but his arguments are not Germanocentric. Fascinatingly, he argues that the current popular disillusionment with politics is because politics ‘makes too few demands’; ‘the citizens sense that a normatively hollowed-out politics is witholding something from them. This deficit finds expression both in the turning away from organised politics and in the new enthusiasm for grassroots protest… It might nevertheless be worthwhile for one or other of the political parties to roll up its sleeves and take the fight for European unification to the marketplaces.’ His telling conclusion? ‘Renouncing ‘grand’ projects is not enough. The international community cannot shut its eyes to climate change, the worldwide risks of nuclear technology, the need to regulate financial market-driven capitalism and the implementation of human rights at the international level. And, by comparison with the scale of these problems, the task we have to perform in Europe is almost manageable.’ Well worth a read. Postscript (4 September): excerpt from a speech given by José Manuel Barroso at the University of Yale yesterday: ‘The present crisis has shown the limits of individual action by nation states. Europe and the principles of the Treaty need to be renewed. We need more integration, and the corollary of more integration has to be more democracy. This European renewal must represent a leap in quality and enable Europe to rise to the challenges of the world today by giving it the tools it needs to react more effectively and to shape and control the future.’