This morning I joined a number of colleagues in an introductory tour of the Committee’s new, high-tech ‘dispatching centre’. When we moved into the Jacques Delors building in 2004 we inherited several separate security systems governing our six buildings. Now we have one coherent, coordinated command centre, staffed 24/7. Building this ops. room has represented a considerable investment but the savings in terms of financial savings and efficiency gains make it very worthwhile. It goes together with a series of other actions designed to raise the overall level of safety and security for our members and our staff. In my picture a guard sits before the screens that show the views from a series of cameras giving a complete panorama of the perimeters of all of the Committees’ buildings. The screens have a sort of eerie beauty to them.

This evening I accompanied the President, Staffan Nilsson, and the Vice-President with responsibility for communication, Anna Maria Darmanin, in welcoming to the Committee the Heads of the European Commission’s representations in the member states. The Committee would never have the ambition, let alone the resources, to set up its own offices in the member states and yet it attaches a great deal of importance to the concept of ‘going local’ or, rather, in the case of our members, who do not spend most of their time in Brussels, on ‘staying local’. The Committee has therefore sought close cooperation with the European Commission in order to ensure close cooperation and, where appropriate, involvement of representatives of organised civil society in activities based in the member states. As the picture illustrates, the Commission is an enthusiastically willing partner. For, like the Committee, the Commission long ago realised that when it comes to communication matters the EU institutions are all playing in the same team.

This morning, continuing my series of meetings with the Committee’s various directorates, I met colleagues from the General Affairs Directorate. The catch-all title hides a multiplicity of vital tasks and roles for the committee, from the sessions office through protocol, archives, the Quaestors, relations with civil society and our liaison group, relations with the other institutions and the network of national economic and social councils, the legal service, and the conferences and interpretation unit. As the Director, Maria Echevarria, nicely put it, these are services like water and electricity. You only realise how much you rely upon them when they are no longer there. I told the colleagues that in all sincerity I am a lucky Secretary General, for the ‘machine’ not only works but works very well – even when there are sudden power cuts! The rubbish picture looks a bit inquisitorial but actually it was a very positive meeting.

Pay attention at the back!

Tonight was parents-teachers’ evening for N° 2 sprog and so I found myself  back in the classroom. I am full of admiration for the way in which the teachers remember the names of all of their many pupils and mostly make the links with the right parents and keep their cool. In between teachers, as it were, I thought of my father who, many moons ago, had gone through the same thing. When he died I came across an envelope full of his notes about me. I had better stop there!

This evening I gave a closing speech at an information session for all our newcomers – staff and stagiaires starting work at the Committee. For the occasion I invited along Carlo Luyckx, who is Director of the Brussels-Europe Liaison Office. Brussels values greatly the presence of the European institutions and does a huge amount to try and make us as welcome as possible. This includes, an innovative  survival guide that Carlo distributed to the participants in the seminar. In return, I believe, we owe it to the cause of European integration and to our Belgian hosts to behave at all times in an appropriate and respectful manner. We are all, I argued, members of the European Union’s communication team. The way we behave in and out of the office can confirm or destroy prejudices.

This afternoon I attended a hearing organised by the EESC’s Section for Economic and Monetary Union and Economic and Social Cohesion (‘ECO’, in our shorthand), chaired by Michael Smyth (United Kingdom, Various Interests), which hosted European Commission Vice-President with responsibility for competition, Joaquin Almunia. the Vice-President presented a study prepared by the Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition on the effects of the temporary State aid rules adopted to face the financial and economic crisis. By imposing conditions on bank rescues, “the Commission has reduced the amount of taxpayers’ money that has gone to financial institutions and has addressed the moral-hazard issue”, he argued. In order to approve bank bailouts, the Commission demands that banks remunerate and eventually repay the public support they receive; that they take measures to address distortions of competition towards their unaided competitors; that they restructure their business so that they can return to long-term viability without the need for more government support; and that shareholders and hybrid-capital holders bear a fair share of the burden. The public support to banks does not seem to have had significant lasting effects on the competitive structure. Mr Almunia also noted, highlighting the findings of the report. “First, Europe’s banks have not retrenched behind national borders; second, overall the restructuring of the banking sector did not accelerate the concentration trend that had been observed since 2001 […]. Finally, the public interventions have not affected the market performance of non-aided banks which, in fact, have performed a lot better than aided banks.” You can read the Commissioner’s speech in full here.

Wait for the bang...

The week got off to a bang – literally – this evening with the opening of the EESC’s ‘Chemistry and Culture Week’ – a week of activities designed to educate and inform about the important role of chemistry in European culture. You can see Vice-President Anna Maria Darmanin interviewing the prime organising force behind the week, British member David Sears, (Employers’ Group) here. This evening we heard from Alexis Boruhns, General Manager Europe of Solvay, about the international year of chemistry, Mrs Ambassador Tombinski, who gave a simultaneously lively and learned account of the life of Maria Sklodowska-Curie (the Committee is hosting an exhibition about Curie’s life all this week), Nineta Majcen, General Secretary of the European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences, about the particular qualities of water, and we were treated to a chemistry show by Technopolis (which is where the bang came in). We were also given a lecture by Professor Doctor Gerd Wolf (Germany, Various Interests Group), one of our most learned and respected members, and he has agreed that I can post it here (see below). Written entirely by the Professor himself, it is a lyrical exposition of the theme and an excellent example of the expertise of our members.

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I am going to make myself seem slightly daft in this post. They’ve started building work behind the Residence Palace at last. It’s a good thing. The plan is gradually to turn the Chaussée de Maelbeek back into a properly inhabited space, with mixes of commercial and residential space instead of the current wasteland and carparks. In the initial plans I saw there will even be a tram line running between the Place St Josse and the Place Jourdan. Over the years a sycamore tree had grown to quite a size on the wasteland where the building has now started. It had to go. But I found the way it went well, sort of undignified for a tree of that size. Instead of sawing its branches off, they snapped them off with some piece of heavy machinery. Is there such a thing as cruelty to trees? (That reminds me of a Roald Dahl short story.)

They certainly don’t do horror films like they used to. The Hammer horror series of my youth were stereotypical vehicles with typecasted actors (most notably, Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein, Christopher Lee as Dracula). If you went often enough you could spot the recycled sets and the gore was unintentionally comic. Nowadays, it seems, actors enrich their palettes by playing in sophisticated, frequently witty, horror movies with clever scripts and intentionally comic gore. That just about sums up Zombieland (2009), which for reasons I won’t go into we watched this evening. One of the principal protagonists, Columbus, is played by Jesse Eisenberg, whose next film was The Social Network and the star of the film, though supposedly in a support role, is played by Woody Harrelson. The running gag throughout the film (which has a post-apocalyptic scenario not unlike 28 Days Later and Omega Man) is Columbus’s list of thirty-three rules (‘Beware of bathrooms,’ ‘Check the back seat,’ ‘Don’t be a hero,’ ‘When in doubt, know your way out,’ etc). Great fun. I wish they’d had this degree of sophistication back when I were a lad.

This morning I witnessed an excellent example of the phenomenon that had been debated in Group III’s Warsaw conference; namely, volunteering. Of a Saturday morning no ° 2 sprog does indoor climbing with a friend out at Brain l’Alleud. The respective parents have a roster for ferrying the boys back and forth and this morning it was my turn to pick them up. The climbing walls are in a school gym. On a Saturday morning the whole school premises are given over to sporting activities of one sort or another for children. And the whole show is run by – volunteers. At a rough estimate each works for three or four hours and there are scores of them. You don’t need to be a mathematician to see Professor Salamon’s point that this is a major, if unquantified, form of activity, oiling the wheels of our societies – or, as EESC President Staffan Nilsson put it in Warsaw, a sort of societal glue.