Excuse me, could you please tell me the way to...

At a dinner party this evening we got onto the subject, for a while, of fateful errors and opportunistic assassinations. Perhaps the most fateful was Leopold Loyka’s 28 June 1914 error in taking a wrong turning in Sarajevo. He was Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur and had already saved the Archduke’s life that day by swerving to avoid an assassin’s bomb. Commendably, the Archduke insisted on visiting some soldiers injured in the ensuing explosion. In Wiki’s words, the hospital  ‘was off the planned route and Lojka had not been informed of the change in plans and was not familiar with the new route. Consequently, as he was driving away from the hospital to head out of Sarajevo, Lojka took a wrong turn down a backstreet. Realising his mistake, Lojka began to reverse out. However, it so happened that Black Hand assassin Gavrilo Princip was sitting in a café on the street just as Ferdinand’s car began to pull into it. Princip seized his chance and ran out of the café with his pistol. Spotting him, Lojka attempted to reverse faster, but his foot missed the accelerator pedal. As a consequence, Princip shot and killed the Archduke and his wife.’  The rest, as we know, was ghastly history. Of course, you have already to be of murderous intent to benefit from such coincidences. We started to cite other such potential ‘accidents’. I recalled a personal experience where I was once mistakenly invited to meet the Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street in the cabinet room in the mistaken assumption that I was an ‘angry farmer’ (this was during the BSE crisis). I still remember the surprised expression on John Major’s face and the crestfallen expression on some poor secretary’s face as she realised that I was not, in fact, the leader of the ‘angry farmers’. In 1985 an American friend, seeing a scrum around one of the entrances to the European Commission’s Berlaymont building, got closer to see what was going on. He was grabbed and shoved into a lift by security guards. Pushed out of the lift, he was given a glass of champagne and, backing away, bumped into somebody. He turned around to excuse himself to find himself facing Pope Giovanni Paolo II…

An enlarged President...

Once again, today the EESC’s enlarged Presidency – the President, the two Vice-Presidents, the three Group Presidents, together with the SG – met to discuss a series of political and budgetary issues. In the morning the enlarged Presidency alone met but at the working lunch and in the afternoon it was joined by the Presidents of the Sections and the Consultative Committee on Industrial Change, together forming what the house likes to call the ‘enlarged enlarged Presidency’. Until now I have used the image of Howard Taft to illustrate posts about the enlarged Presidency, but how on earth do I illustrate the enlarged enlarged Presidency? Anyway, for the record, the day’s meetings went very well.

Ines Ayala Sender, MEP

The annual discharge procedure for the European institutions is getting under way. Today I enjoyed an amicable working lunch at the European Parliament with Spanish S&D MEP Ines Ayala Sender, who is rapporteur for the discharge procedure for the Committee’s 2010 budget (the procedure is always delayed by two years). The EESC seeks to run a tight ship. In addition to our internal audit function and strict financial verification we are subject, like all of the institutions, to external audits and random checks by the European Court of Auditors. We practice complete openness and transparency with the EU’s budgetary control mechanisms and we seek always to be a ‘learning organisation’. We always follow up on recommendations from the European Parliament in the discharge context and we draft our annual financial report in such a way that the Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee can see exactly what we have done. In regard to the 2009 discharge procedure, the Parliament made two recommendations and the Committee has followed both of them up. The lunch went well and I hope that, as in previous years, the Parliament will vote the Committee discharge.

The prospect of Croatian accession to the European Union in July 2013 comes ever closer. This morning I chaired the third meeting of the EESC’s Croatian Accession task force. We plan for the smoothest possible integration of our Croatian observers and, as of July 2013, our nine new Croatian members. That includes making sure that translators are in place in good time to translate essential documents (Rules of Procedure, for example) and thus, because translation is a Joint Service, also necessitates close cooperation with our sister advisory body, the Committee of the Regions. We considered the transition from the current Joint Consultative Committee (which will stand down). We also considered more esoteric issues such as whether the Committee’s structures need to be changed (probably only slightly, we think). All is on course for the happy arrival of our nine new members from what will be the European Union’s twenty-eighth member state.

On 27 December 2011 the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions were officially informed that, following the final external audits, they had been awarded with the European Eco-Management and Audit Scheme and ISO 14001 certifications. The auditors found that our joint Environmental Management System fully complies with the EMAS regulation and that there are no outstanding non-conformities. Among particularly positive points highlighted by the auditors were the active involvement of staff, the strong support by management and the Committees’ determination to continue awareness campaigns addressing both working and private life. This afternoon my CoR counterpart, Gerhard Stahl, and I participated in our first EMAS Steering Committee meeting since the good news was received, for it doesn’t stop there. We are determined to keep ‘greening’ our Committees. Nevertheless, both Committees’ administrations deserve a big pat on the back; after a lot of hard work, we’ve done it!

Jens Nymand Christensen

Today I had a working lunch with an old friend and colleague, Jens Nymand Christensen, who is a director in the European Commission’s Secretariat General with responsibility for relations with the European Economic and Social Committee. In addition to the Treaty’s provisions, relations between the two institutions have been governed by a Protocol of Cooperation, first signed in 2001, and updated in 2005 and 2007. With the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions on participatory democracy now being more fully implemented (particularly regarding the European Citizens Initiative), and with the Committee eager to play to the full its role as an institutional intermediary between civil society organisations and the EU’s institutions in the more general context of participatory democracy, it is high time that the Protocol were updated and so negotiations have been under way between the two administrations (a similar negotiation process is taking place with the Committee of the Regions). The negotiations are far advanced and lunch today provided a possibility to address the few outstanding points. It was also an opportunity to catch up with a good friend and on Commission gossip!

Shortly after reading a reader’s letter in this morning’s Financial Times about dropping the €500 note (did you know that 20 per cent of the notes, equivalent to €60 bn, are estimated to be in circulation in Spain?) I did a little shopping and couldn’t help but notice (and pick up!) quite a few 1 and 2 cent coins left on the ground and also note some customers waving away their small change. Of course, in Finland business and banks employ ‘Swedish rounding’ and, although they remain legal tender, the government has decided to remove 1 and 2 cent coins from circulation. Curious, this; a currency that simultaneously has denominations too big and, apparently, too small. This got me thinking about other situations I had witnessed where people were indifferent to coins on the ground. I could remember two. The first was Italy in the late 1970s. Five and ten lire coins were still theoretically in circulation but rare. The Standa supermarket chain regularly used teabags and sweets as substitutes for small change and a lady friend swears she was once given a tampon in her change in a chemists’ shop. Occasionally, I would see those tiny coins in the street where, presumably, they had been thrown, being considered practically worthless. The second was in the mid-1980s in East Berlin, at Friedrichstrasse station, where day visitors to the East would return through the checkpoint. It was illegal to take Ost marks out of the DDR. I ignored that edict, risked the wrath of the border police and now have my souvenir coins, but most people spent as much as they possibly could and then threw what remained on the ground, pfennigs and marks. It was a very strange sensation to watch people literally throwing away their money and I shall never forget the dull chink of the cheap aluminium alloy coins as they hit the tarmac.

My first day back at work included a long catch-up session with my President, Staffan Nilsson. I never tire of pointing out that the particular authenticity of the European Economic and Social Committee is derived from the fact that its members do not spend most of their time in Brussels but, rather, live and work in the ‘real world’. In Staffan’s case, he is a dairy farmer, with thirty head of cattle back home. As usual, his skull bore bruises from where he had bumped himself on the bonnet of his tractor (which is forever breaking down). He told me about the effects of a great windstorm that affected northern Sweden on the night between Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Fallen trees led to a general powercut. This meant that he couldn’t milk the cows. Ultimately, power was restored, but not before Staffan had scoured the region for an emergency generator. Of course, we didn’t only talk about Staffan’s travails on the farm but having heard this particular story it was obvious to me why Dacian Ciolos, the European Commissioner with responsibility for Agriculture, insists on frequent visits to the EESC, for the Committee’s members genuinely know what they are talking about.

That air of innocence...

I have just read sadly of the death of the artist and illustrator, Ronald Searle. The obituaries testify to a long, rich and prolific life that also included the horrors of war and the Burmese death railway (I have a book of his sketches, secretly done at the time, of that ghastly experience). Forget St Trinians; my older brother and I were weaned on a series of essential books for schoolboys in the early 1960s – the wonderful 1066 and All That, and Down With Skool!: A Guide to School Life for Tiny Pupils and Their Parents; How to be Topp: A Guide to Sukcess for Tiny Pupils, Including All There is to Kno About Space; Whizz for Atomms: A Guide to Survival in the 20th Century for Fellow Pupils, their Doting Maters, Pompous Paters and Any Others who are Interested; and Back in the Jug Agane, the last four all written by Geoffrey Willans and all brilliantly illustrated by Searle. They described a world that was still, just, relevant to us. There were still china inkpots in the schooldesks, though I only remember filling them once. When they and quill pens and blotters went, so did the warfare of inkblots (rolled-up bits of blotting paper, soaked in ink) launched with wooden rulers (another disappeared species). Gaze at Searle’s noble Nigel Molesworth in the illustration, ‘the curse of St Custard’s’ and the ‘gorila of 3b’  and reflect solemnly on his observation that, ‘as any fule kno’; ‘History started badly and hav been geting steadily worse.’

Today, our last day in Italy, we explored the northern bank of the floodplain at the mouth of the Adda river, agricultural land that also serves as a nature reserve. Shortly after we had set off we spotted an oval shape high in the sky over the northern Alps. Having the binoculars with us for the birds, we checked the shape out and realised that it was a hot air balloon. Back home, I did some research on the internet and found that there are several companies offering such trips. Now that must be an extraordinary experience! The websites make it seem a banal affair but the internet also tells me that the very first hot air balloon flight over the Alps occurred as recently as 21 August 1972, piloted by Donald A. Cameron. (You can read his account of the adventure here). The balloon that flew over us was far too high to photograph so I am posting a picture of me looking suitably pensive instead.