It is difficult to believe but today marks the beginning of my fourth year as Secretary General of the European Economic and Social Committee. Just this past week a friend asked me if I was still enjoying the job and my reply was very much in the affirmative. It’s the people – the Committee’s members and its staff – that make the job enjoyable. Of course, some aspects of the work are necessarily routine: the organic cycle of Section meetings, Enlarged Presidency Meetings, Bureau meetings and plenary sessions being the most obvious example. There are longer cycles: the two-and-a-half years of each Presidency, for example, and the five years of each full mandate. But even within these cyclical, rhythmic structures there are always challenges and surprises to keep the SG on his toes. My first years have been characterised by budgetary reform, getting the establishment plan sorted and directors recruited, welcoming new members at the beginning of the 2010 mandate, making sure that the Committee was equipped to deal with the now implemented Lisbon Treaty and accompanying successive Presidents Mario Sepi and Staffan Nilsson in realising their ambitions and implementing their work programmes. In a sense the Committee has been in a (successful) quest to gain (modest) increases in resources so that it could do the more that was expected of it by the Lisbon Treaty. The next period promises to be challenging in a different way. If the Commission’s reform package goes through, there will be reductions in the work force. Priorities will have to be identified and choices will have to be made. At the same time, we’ll be welcoming the twenty-eighth member state (and twenty-third language) of the Union.

I caught the second half of The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) this evening. The story of how the young Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was radicalised by the poverty and deprivation he witnessed during a 1952 motorbike trip through Latin America with his friend, Alberto Granado, was one I was familiar with from a biography I read as a young  student. Guevara was shot when I was ten. When I started secondary school the next year the room where art was taught was plastered with silk-screen images of Che, modelled on Jim Fitzpatrick’s two-tone version of the iconic Alberto Korda photograph. Che images were what would now be called ‘radical chic’ (ironically, given what Guevara thought he was standing for). Yet I wonder how much, if anything, he would mean to a young student today. Probably not a lot. The beauty of Walter Salles biopic is that you don’t have to know ‘what happened next’ in order to enjoy this elegiac journey through the purity and idealism of youth and, coincidentally, a lot of beautiful scenery. For me, the most poignant moment in the film comes at the end when the real Alberto Granado, by then 82, is filmed gazing out and, quite clearly, remembering. Granado died in March this year, a few months shy of his ninetieth birthday.

A word about the meeting room first (picture). It was here that the 1989 Round Table talks were held (the table in question, with the original nameplates of the participants still in place, is on display elsewhere in the Palace). As far as I could see, the only thing that had changed in the room was the carpet. Otherwise, as with the banks of the Vistula earlier in the morning, I had a real sense of history. The keynote speaker was Lester Salamon, Professor and Director of the Centre for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies (Baltimore). In an interesting opening aside, he informed his audience that his mother and father came from Romania and Hungary respectively so, in a sense, he was back in the parental homelands of Eastern Europe (which reminds me of a wonderful American description of Europe given by fellow writer Cleve Moffet in a recent submission; ‘a continent of ancestors’). Salamon launched what was to be a fascinating day’s discussion. In part, the discussion was enlivened by a misapprehension, for some participants mistakenly believed that Salamon was talking from a normative point of view. But his primary theme was that, although volunteering is ‘an enormous “renewable resource” for societal problem solving’, it remains strangely unquantified. On the basis of admittedly wonky statistics, Salamond argued that ‘EU Volunteerland’ would be the most populous member state (115.9 million people) with a GDP just slightly smaller than Sweden’s (€ 282 billion). Through a UN Handbook and an ILO Manual, Salamon was hoping that the phenomenon could be better measured and thus better understood. This is perhaps of particular importance to Europe, which has the highest proportion of volunteers.

Fedak, Andor, Komoroswki, Woycicka and Jahier

To the historic Presidential Palace (one of the few buildings to have survived the war) for the start of the Various Interests Group’s special conference on a ‘Europe of active citizenship: volunteering’. This year is the European Year of Volunteering and the Various Interests Group and its President, Luca Jahier, has taken a very keen interest in the social and economic phenomenon that is volunteering. In a clear sign of the importance that the Polish Presidency attached to the event, it was not only held in a very special room at the Presidential Palace (see my next post) but was opened and addressed by the President himself, Bronislaw Komorowski. Other speakers in the opening session included Laszlo Andor, the European Commissioner with responsibility for employment, social affairs and inclusion, Jolanta Fedak, the Polish Minister for Labour and Social Policy, and Undersecretary of State Irene Woycicka. In a nice symbolic gesture, our ushers throughout the day were volunteer girl guides and boy scouts. The theme of all who spoke was that the momentum of the European Year should be maintained. As Andor put it, we should continue to dismantle the psychological, physical, cultural and legal barriers to volunteering. But the best ‘soundbite’ came from Jolonta Fedak: ‘Volunteers don’t get paid not because they are worthless but because they are priceless.’

When ‘on mission’ I like to get up early and jog around wherever I happen to be, so this morning I jogged around a 7.5 kilometre circuit helpfully mapped out by the hotel. The route took me alongside the Vistula for several kilometres and I couldn’t help but think about what we had seen at the Uprising Museum the previous evening. By 10 September (the uprising had begun on 1 August 1944), the Soviet troops occupied much of the east bank of the river, opposite the city. Maybe the morning mist made the river, with its shoals and sandbanks, seem a little narrower, but the Soviet troops must have been literally within shouting distance of the city, and yet they stood by until, on 2 October, the Poles, by now without food or water, announced a ceasefire and then surrendered. Stalin was guilty of very many ignominious acts of commission but this must surely rank among his greatest ignominious acts of omission. In the end, an estimated 150,000 Poles had died and over eighty per cent of the city had been destroyed. It is difficult not to feel a sense of history in such a place.

EESC President Staffan Nilsson and Various Interests Group President Luca Jahier looking at orders of execution of resistance fighters

I travelled to Warsaw for a major conference being organised by the Various Interests Group of the EESC together with the Polish Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, the Chancellery of the President of Poland and the Warsaw Representation of the European Commission. There’ll be more about the conference in tomorrow’s posts. This evening our Polish hosts graciously offered a guided tour of the immensely moving Uprising Museum. On 1 August 1944, knowing that the Soviet army was fast approaching, the Polish underground resistance rose up against the Nazi occupiers, with the twin aim of liberating the city and distracting the occupying army. At first, with the element of surprise on their side, the Poles did well. But the Soviet advance halted on the eastern bank of the Vistula and the commanders of the Uprising, starved of resources and military materiel, ultimately surrendered under a Red Cross-brokered deal. In Communist times, for obvious reasons, the Poles were discouraged from discussing what had occurred, and so this freedom of information about the dastardly behaviour of Stalin and the ineffectual efforts of the Allies is still relatively fresh and, one senses, the old wounds, freshly discovered, have understandably yet to heal over. The Museum’s display includes a number of intensely moving interviews with survivors. One has stuck in my mind. It is a father’s advice to his fifteen year-old son, who has decided to help man one of the street barricades thrown up on 1 August. ‘We’ve all got to die,’ says the heartbroken father. ‘But please, son, just don’t die stupidly.’

This afternoon I flew out of Zaventum and just over two hours later disembarked at Warsaw’s Chopin airport. I shared a taxi into town with Gerfried Gruber, an Austrian member of the Bureau of the EESC’s Various Interests Group. I remarked to him how strangely close, in geographical terms, these Eastern European cities always seem – Prague, Budapest, Warsaw… – because for so much of our lives they had been so psychologically distant. Gruber agreed. He had grown up near Wiener Neustadt, some forty kilometres from the ‘Iron Curtain’, and so with the constant sense of oppressiveness and distance that the frontier, with its wire and floodlights and dog patrols, always generated. His hometown shared a sad characteristic with Warsaw, which saw some eighty-five per cent of its buildings destroyed during the second world war. In the case of Wiener Neustadt, just eight of its 4,000 buildings were left undamaged at the war’s end.

Penguins....

Early this morning I went to a downtown hotel to address a meeting of the EESC’s middle managers (or, in our speak, ‘Heads of Unit’). The Heads of Unit are, collectively, the lynchpin of the Committee’s administration, sitting between the coal face and the more strategic level of the directors. The seminar had been organised by our HR colleagues in order to give the Heads of Unit the possibility to discuss themes and topics that they thought were important for their work. These were in the main horizontal themes related to such perennial issues as drafting staff reports and dealing with colleagues considered difficult for one reason or another. Our HR Director, Gianluca Brunetti, came up with a memorable ornithological metaphor. Our Heads of Unit are, he proposed, like penguins – they all inhabit the same continent, but different parts of it, and so can be very different in appearance and habits but are nevertheless basically the same and have to perform similar functions.

This evening we watched Gillo Pontecorvo’s extraordinarily powerful Battle of Algiers. Insurgency and counter-insurgency. Systematic, very deliberate, state-sanctioned use of torture. The atmospherics of the Casbah and the authenticity of a cast playing itself. (Indeed, there is only one professional actor in the film: Jean Martin, playing the elegant and cultured Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu, the paratroop commander.) The film is frequently described as being a masterpiece and surely deserves the claim. It was also often described in the past as a sort of primer for anti-colonialist movements. But I think it still resonates today, in our post-colonial world. For what it portrays best of all is the unquenchable and ultimately irresistible thirst for freedom of peoples, wherever they may be and under whatever circumstances. The film concentrates on the methodical and successful crushing of a rebellion. Only the coda reveals the liberation that was to follow and it is summed up in the image of people swarming over a tank. The image reminds me of the observation about dictators, that they can kill as many people as they like, but their successors will, inexorably, be among the survivors.