I spent most of today in an EESC management board seminar devoted entirely to the issue of resources, particularly in the light of the current period of crisis and austerity. Where resources are finite and may be shrinking we must note the priorities of our political masters and plan accordingly. There was a remarkable spirit of collegiality and understanding around the table. This was heartening and displays, I believe, the maturity of the Committee’s administration. Yes, there are challenges, but we’ll face up to them together and in a consensual and rational way. We have a weather eye on technology – which has a habit of catching up and overtaking established working practices. If we could do away with paper in meetings, for example, or if machine translation were to reach an appropriate level of excellence, how the institutions’ administrative world might look different! In the meantime… And, yes, we honoured a minute’s silence, together with the whole of Belgium, at eleven o’clock this morning. Such a ghastly affair!

I just made it this evening to the tail end of the prize-giving ceremony for the Committee’s annual video challenge, which has been a huge success this year. I was additionally happy because my personal choice (Zinnekes – If Europe was a word) won first prize. The young makers explained to me that it had cost them precisely 35 euros to make their video! The second prize winners (Ana Zamorano and Mixtel De Sousa’s Barre Barreras) were impressive also for their decision to hand their prize money to the Gugaz Lankidetzan programme (Nicaragua). The third prize-winners (Budapest team – It’s our European life) were equally deserving. What was impressive about these and many other of the entries was that they were literally the work of a group of young people with ideas and a camera. I liked ‘If Europe was a word’ in particular because the makers didn’t shy a away from the negative connations of Europe but they juxtaposed them with many positive connations also and the basic message was one of optimism and hope. The lovely picture shows our Vice-President, Anna Maria Darmanin, with all of the prize winners and jury members. Please go and see their videos here – it won’t take you long and they’re all good fun.

The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions have engaged in a unique form of interinstitutional cooperation, pooling significant quantities of their human and other resources in a series of joint services (translation, IT, logistics) in order to achieve synergies and economies of scale. By so doing, they not only save the taxpayer a considerable amount of money but through careful planning enhance the overall efficiency of their resources. Such a unique exercise between two autonomous institutions requires a set of joint governance mechanisms and this afternoon the political-level mechanism, the Political Monitoring Group, met. The PMG is jointly chaired but the Committees take it in turns to host the meetings, so the Chair today was the EESC’s Waltraud Klasnic (Employers’ Group, Austria). On the agenda were such items as activity and performance indicators, priorities and work programmes and the 2013 budget. Though the meeting was long and detailed, all went well.

I went along to La Monnaie this evening in some trepidation, warned that Stefan Herheim’s interpretation of Dvorjak’s classic opera, Rusalka, was somehow provocative. It would certainly not be to the liking of traditionalists but I found it to be a rich and intriguing evening’s entertainment. Sung, acted and played to a very high level – as always at La Monnaie – the production seemed somehow never to stop challenging its audience. Herheim’s alternative reading of the libretto is not about water elves and spirits or, rather, not only. He turns the certainties of a simple story accompanied by beautiful music into the complexities of an audience’s motivations and desires. And he cleverly turns the spotlight away from the water nymph, Rusalka, to the water gnome and spirit of the lake, acted and sung brilliantly by Willard White. As White’s tortured character watches the equally tortured Rusalka’s antics in puzzlement, so we might ask ourselves why we want to watch her suffer. If that makes it sound clinical, it’s anything but. Much of the production is a sort of street circus, with frequent James Ensor-like carnivals and grotesques and a neon-lit witty set reproducing some anonymous European city street rather than a pastoral idyll. (Rusalka’s famous aria to the moon is delivered from atop a kiosk and addressed to illuminated satellite television aerials!) Indeed, this is one of those productions that would repay several viewings.

Belgium awoke this morning to the shocking news of a ghastly coach crash in a Swiss road tunnel in which 28 people, including 22 children, had died. Such school ski trips, mostly by coach, are a Belgian tradition (replicated by the Brussels-based European schools). The whole of the country has gone into understandable shock and mourning. This morning the EESC’s President, Staffan Nilsson, and I sent our condolences and a message of human solidarity to the Belgian government and this afternoon the staff of both the EESC and the Committee of the Regions observed a minute’s silence, gathered together in one of our meeting halls. We can only guess at the immense grief and suffering of the families and friends of the victims. We are with you; that is all we can say.

A quick pedal to the Musical Instrument Museum this lunchtime for a concert, Les Nations,  given by a group of students from the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles, among them the daughter of a good friend. A mezzo-soprano, she sung some glorious Vivaldi (Motet Longe mala, umbrae, terrores – here’s another interpretation) in the second half of the concert. The first half was given over to Couperin, punctuated by readings from the letters of Montesquieu. It was all well done and a wonderfully refreshing break. (It reminded me that my parents, as penniless young lovebirds in London, had been enthusiastic lunchtime concert goers. Mental note to self – an experience to be repeated.) It is a special feeling when somebody you have known since they were a baby starts to become very good at something. Watch this space.

An interesting letter in this morning’s Observer newspaper reminded me of the MA thesis I wrote many moons ago. Barber’s letter, under the sub-title ‘Germany’s an inspiration’, reported that ‘The TUC has been urging policy-makers to look to Germany to learn from its industrial policies.’ Part of the reason for Germany’s success, Barber argues, ‘is the belief in a fair economic model, which challenges the assumption that the main motor of capitalism is greed. Employees sit on company supervisory boards, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for trade unions. Ministers in the UK would do well to consider these lessons.’ My thesis was essentially about an irony, for worker participation in management boards (Mitbestimmung, or co-determination) was introduced into the German coal and steel industry in occupied Germany by… the British, as a way of preventing a repeat of any complicity by industrialists in unsavoury political developments. The model was a big success and was gradually generalised to all larger companies. Fast forward from the 1950s to the 1970s and the European Commission, seeking to harmonise company law, tabled the Fifth Company Law Directive, which (inevitably) proposed German-style worker representation on two-tier management boards. This led the then British Labour government to establish the Bullock Committee of Inquiry into Industrial Democracy. The recommendations of the 1977 Bullock report, like the so-called ‘Vredling Directive’, faced opposition from British trades unionists and industralists alike and were never implemented. The UK slid into the ‘winter of discontent’ and in 1979 a Conservative Government was elected that was to develop very different views about the role and the place of trades unions…

This evening my neighbour at the dinner table was a descendant of the Cabot Lodges, a distinguished New England family, whose most famous member was Henry Cabot Lodge (picture). Wiki tells us that ‘The summit of Lodge’s Senate career came in 1919, when as the unofficial Senate majority leader, he tried to secure approval of the Treaty of Versailles and clear the way for American entry into the League of Nations, despite his personal reservations. Lodge made it clear that the United States Congress would have the final authority on the decision to send American armed forces on a combat or a peacekeeping mission under League auspices.’ Thus, Lodge was not opposed to the idea of the League, but he was opposed to its NATO-like Article X, which would have committed all signatories to mutual defence. The Senate was badly divided. However, in mid-November 1919 Cabot Lodge, with pro-Treaty Democrats, seemed to have almost cobbled together the two-thirds majority required for an amended Treaty. But this was rejected by President Woodrow Wilson. Former UK Foreign Affairs minister David Owen wrote a book about how leaders’ health problems affected their judgement (In Sickness and in Power). Here was a good example of that phenomenon, for on 25 September 1919 Wilson had suffered a stroke which clearly affected his judgement. Ultimately, the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles went ahead without American involvement. Cabot Lodge’s vision (including a Security Council veto) was finally embodied in the United Nations. How the world might have been different if the United States had joined the League of Nations is, of course, one of those great counterfactual essay titles…

We have just finished the third season of The Wire and the scriptwriters have once again courageously written out a strong character. This time it’s Russell ‘Stringer’ Bell, brilliantly played by Idris Elba. Stringer is intimately involved in the Baltimore drugs trade and is a ruthless gangster. But he also has Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations on his bookshelf, attends business studies courses at Baltimore City Community College and invests in property developments. His death has, from the outset, been only a matter of time, and reinforces the series’ underlying claustrophobic message. For despite all of his heinous acts, Stringer has the intelligence to see that the drugs trade is a business and that violence is bad for business. He also has the ambition and the vision to look beyond one business and to seek to recycle profits into other investment projects – money laundering, but also diversification. (One of the great moments of the series is when he realises that his chosen new business, property development, is every bit as cut throat as the one he sought to leave.) Courageous at the end, brought low by petty vengeance, his predictions vindicated, Stringer leaves a big hole to fill. The empire that, as Barksdale’s closest henchman, he did so much to defend, lies in ruins, but the drugs trade itself continues unabated.

Readers of this blog will know that I indulge in the odd scribble, so my ears pricked up today when I welcomed the new Head of our Portugese translation unit, Sonia Rocha, to the Committee for she told me with great pride about a young novelist in her unit who is already enjoying considerable success in Portugal. Her name is Ana Ferreira Pessoa and she won the national prize Branquinho da Fonseca in the young-adult fiction category (awarded in Portugal by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the national weekly newspaper Expresso). Her novel, in journal genre, is called ‘The red book of the karate girl’, and it’s going to be translated into English and probably other languages as well. As you will see from this link, she was in the national news (and was also interviewed by literary and business publications both print and online). As the Americans would say, ‘way to go!’ Well done, Ana.