About the European Union

I have been working for the European institutions for over twenty-five years. Last year, rather quaintly, I was even given my European public service medal for it, a surprisingly heavy gong which looks like gold-foil wrapped chocolate and is routinely given to staff after twenty years’ loyal service.

It’s good to work, albeit in a humble and minor capacity, for European integration, a cause in which I believe. This over-riding purpose gives a dimension to what I’m paid to do that helps offset some of the more humdrum aspects of routine.

When people, especially my compatriots, complain about “Europe” they all too often fail to see the bigger picture, which put most simply is that the European Union has given this previously war-torn continent over half a century of peace and prosperity.
This is something easily taken for granted, but which in fact has to be worked at laboriously. The minutiae of European integration are mind-numbing and the whole thing moves forward at the speed of a glacier, so that when you’re on it, not much may appear to be happening. This is fine as it must not be forgotten that the enterprise is consensual and involves gradually changing mentalities from the narrowly national to the broadly European in outlook, all of which takes time. Thanks to European policies and legislation I have nonetheless seen major changes in my everyday life during the last decades.

I have not lived in my country of origin, England, for as long as I’ve been working here and have, therefore, gone totally native. I make no apologies for regarding myself as a European who was brought up in England, rather than as an Englishman.
For all its insularity England and later Britain has always been an important part of European history and culture, interacting in events and movements on the continent. Brits, although they ape the Americans and think they speak the same language, actually have more in common with their European neighbours on the mainland in terms of their cultural heritage, outlook on life and expectations of the state.
It’s funny but so often I have to be on the defensive explaining the benefits of the EU to some people in Britain, things which seem obvious to those of us here on the continent. Partly that”s because of consistent disinformation on the part of the British media. Partly it’s also because successive United Kingdom governments have chosen, for example, not to participate in the single currency (euro) and border-free area (Schengen) thereby depriving those who live there of the ease with which the rest of us move about Europe and make cross-border purchases.

You may think that last bit sounded reductively economic. In fact the economic is where you start and the founding fathers of Europe knew what they were doing in starting with the Coal and Steel Community and then moving on to the Economic Community in the 1950’s. It’s above all by doing business with each other that peoples first come into contact with each other on a mutually beneficial basis which requires peace and trust. Subsequently they become so dependent on each other for their livelihoods that the very idea of going to war with each other becomes absurd.
I believe that the Roman Empire and related spread of the Latin vernacular was a long-term success not because its military might forced the peoples in its provinces to espouse its ways but because they saw it as a way to improve their lives and get on in the world. “What have the Romans done for us ?” goes the sketch in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, “All right, apart from the roads, the schools, the sewers..” and so on. That scene can be seen parodied on YouTube as “What has the European Union done for us”, in an attempt to persuade the knee-jerk anti-Europeans that benefits are real and that most people, politicians and countries are in the EU because they want to be.

So what are the benefits of the European Union ?

The Economic Community, as it grew out of the Customs Union, used to be known as the Common Market, and the Single Market remains at the heart of the project. If you look at what is on the shelves of your local supermarket compared to what there was a few decades ago, you must acknowledge that it has delivered greater consumer choice.
By availing itself of the economies of scale of a very large market, Europe has produced world beating champions of industry. In the process some names have come and gone, but the overall result has been greater wealth creation.
A later major adjunct to the single market has been the single currency. You can read my positive views on the Euro in “About the Euro” (May 2010).

For the single market to work, a vast rule-book has had to be created to ensure common standards for safety, labelling and compatibility (etc) of products to make them acceptable across borders. This is one area where the EU gave itself a bad name in the 1980’s by trying to standardize too many things, since then the approach is rather to ensure that a few essential requirements are met. The Commission has for example abolished many of the rules on fruit and vegetable standards: yes, bent cucumbers are again ok.
The Commission is, on the other hand, pushing mobile phone manufacturers to develop a single charger good for all models, which would be welcome. By the way, on the subject of telephony, the Commission, in its capacity as competition watchdog on the single market, has successfully forced operators to reduce roaming charges as they did not reflect the real cost of international calls.
The single market has also been used as a pretext for imposing such things as minimum environmental standards and working conditions throughout the EU to avoid companies getting an unfair advantage by locating to where local rules are lax and cheaper to respect. Generally this had led to a levelling upwards which has worked in favour of citizens rather than business.

Another area where the EU has moved on is the Common Agricultural Policy. It was originally conceived in the 1950’s with the purpose of feeding countries whose agriculture had been seriously damaged in the war. It was so successful that by the 1970’s farming was over-producing mountains and lakes of subsidized food we could not consume ourselves and which were then often dumped on the world market to the detriment of dveloping countries’ agriculture.
The CAP has since then been undergoing constant reform eliminating its worst excesses and wastefulness, along the way reducing its share in EU spending from two thirds to one third. I admit that is still pretty big and the managing of it accounts for a lot of the meetings I work in. However, I have to say in its defence that all developed countries bolster their agriculture for two sound reasons: firstly, it would be foolish to abandon your own capacity to feed yourself even if you can buy food cheaper elsewhere, because the world is an uncertain place and nothing is more essential to a society than food; secondly, it would be foolish to abandon economic activity and land management in the vast rural areas of our countries.

These days, the EU spends about another third of its budget on various forms of regional and “cohesion” policy in a redistributive act that seeks to improve prosperity in its less-favoured areas, often through infrastructure projects (most obviously roads) but also by investing in human capital. Ireland has been a success story in this respect, moving from being one of the poorest members (per capita) when it joined to being one of the richest today.
More generally the EU invests in research and development to improve the lot of all its members.

The four initial economic freedoms of movement enshrined in the Treaty of Rome include not just those of goods, services and capital but also that of people. Doubtless originally conceived as free movement of labour, it has over time developed into a right for EU citizens to reside in any EU country they choose as long as they are not a financial burden on the host state. With that comes the practical ease of moving around a border-free area in the Schengen passport union and even the concept of EU citizenship, including the right to vote and stand in municipal and European elections in the country of residence.
The Erasmus programme for EU student exchanges is a practical example of promoting a sense of European citizenship, creating a new generation at ease with the idea of horizons broader than the merely national.
Generally, I would like to think that any European Union sponsored event which brings together people of different nationalities but similar background helps foster a feeling of shared European identity much more than any piece of legislation could.

As job-seeking people move more freely across borders so too does the criminal element and the EU has been at pains to enhance coordination in the vast area of justice and home affairs to keep up with that, which I’m afraid will also mean making sure that the speeding fines you pick up in other EU countries follow you back home.

On the world stage, the EU enables a lot of individually not so important countries to act together internationally and to be seen collectively to be a big player. As an individual it’s when you travel to another continent (Asia, Africa) that you start to realize that Europe isn’t just a figment of some political theorist’s imagination and that we do have a shared European identity. So maybe it should not come as a surprise to us, who are so often obsessed by our differences and immersed in internecine squabbles, that we are actually pereceived by the rest of the world as a monolithic bloc.
This is partciulalry true in the area of trade where it is always the EU and not the individual member states that engage in negotiations in WTO and elsewhere. Europe as a zone of limited natural resources but of great inventive and manufacturing capacity has for centuries gained from trade. The EU has always been a strong advocate of free trade and notwithstanding certain restrictions we do practise the lowest rates of customs duties in the world and have the biggest export and import volumes. According to economic theory, which is most often borne out in practice, free trade allows countries to make the most of the comparative advantage they enjoy in certain areas thereby enabling them to earn more. Trade not aid is the true motor of develoment.
Having said that the EU also supplements its members’ official direct aid, making us collectively the world’s biggest donor.

In terms of a Common Foreign Policy, the EU is still fumbling, notwithstanding the Lisbon Treaty’s attempts to raise its profile. Its members’ interests simply don’t always coincide and fudge is often what comes out as a common position. There are those who argue that you can’t have a common foreign policy without a common defence. I don’t hold with that myself. It’s part of our European identity that we are more interested in the carrot than the stick, conciliation rather than confrontation. At least on the continent, the challenge internally has been to supplant war with peacuful co-existence and that is externally the not so clear-cut message we seek to project to others.
Even so, we cut a more convincing figure as a union than as individual members.

These are just some of the benefits that come from EU membership. The nature of EU integration is that it is a work in progress: “the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” (to quote the first article in the Treaty).
Its benefits are much greater than can be construed in terms of whether a member state is in financial terms a net contributor or beneficiary, of what after all remains only a very small part of its GDP. Germany, for example, may be the biggest net contributor, but German industry benefits immeasurably from the single market.

However, as I hope you will have been convinced by my brief enumeration, the EU is far more than an economic union: it is a political project that seeks to promote and protect the peace and prosperity of the peoples of Europe.

About work

I’ve just spent another boring day at work.

That’s ok, it is in the nature of work, as properly understood, to be potentially boring a lot of the time.
The French for work “travail” (we need only think of its English etymological equivalent “travail”) comes from the Latin “trepalium”, an instrument of torture. Work, by antithesis, is not pleasure: it’s something you do for pay even if you don’t particularly enjoy it; because you have to, because you need the money, because that’s all you’ve found to do that pays. Don’t get me wrong, it is possible to take pleasure in your work some of the time, but almost by definition, not all of the time.

The whole point of work is that it forces us to overcome our natural laziness and disinclination to do something we can usefully do, but would prefer not to. Day after day (five days a week at any rate) we assert mind over body, knuckle down to it and get on with it, with a superficial appearance of professional readiness and a smile. It’s one of life’s many little miracles and surely a cause for some personal satisfaction that we manage to show up at all.

This victory over our less attractive selves is fundamental to our social side. Notwithstanding his innate selfishness, man is a social animal. Society does not owe us a living, we have to go out and earn it. It’s worth noting that the organization in which most people work is actually in most languages called a “society” (“société”, “Gesellschaft”) and so in English when we say “company” , we should understand the word also in its more companionable sense. The workplace is a microcosm of society and in it the normal rules of human relations apply, a fact economists and bean-counters ignore at their peril. Fairness, honesty, politeness, loyalty, consideration, tolerance, gratitude and so on are all relevant virtues; it’s a world of give and take, not just take. In the long run (which is generally ignored by those addicted to quick profits) a contented workforce will be ready to go the occasional additional mile for its employer.

Work is essentially a social activity for it is at work where we interact with other human beings, while we make our productive contribution to the overall wealth of society, which has then to be divided among those who can work and those who cannot. This distribution is properly the subject of politics.

Work is something so basic and essential to the human condition that the concept has been created of “the right to work”. The Italian constitution, it may surprise you to learn, starts by stating that “Italy is a democratic Republic founded on work”.
This is in itself a profound thought as to the nature of a society, but it is also very much of the twentieth century. Contrast the US Declaration of Independence from the eighteenth century where the rights are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
This prompts me to make two points. Firstly we in the 20th and 21st centuries may have got our priorities wrong by putting work so high on our list. Secondly those in the 18thC Age of Enlightenment may have been unrealistically naive about happiness.
A century later the more pessimistic Dostoyevsky realized that man is also inclined to pursue suffering: the only explanation for some peole’s actions is that they are deliberately trying to get themselves into trouble and pain. Indeed the rounded human experience, it can be argued, demands a certain dose of suffering.
In which case, what better way to suffer than by getting paid for it. Thus remunerated suffering becomes useful, obviating the need to invent other kinds of suffering; for believe you me, idle rich people of leisure are sensitive and do suffer, but for all sorts of trivial reasons. At one and the same time then, work satisfies our basic existential demands for unpleasant experience and a source of income.

Here I would like to suggest that in our material age,
financial independence has largely replaced earlier concepts of honour. It is honourable to be seen to be earning your own living, it is shameful to be seen to be scrounging off society on the dole. Just try proposing to a young educated lady of today that she might like to become a kept woman: you’d probably get a slap in the face; and rightly so - it”s not honourable.

More importantly work is seen to confer a social identity.
These days you are not so much pigeon-holed by others on the basis of where you come from and who your parents are as by what you do. “And what do you do?” is a question I try to avoid immediately asking someone just introduced to me at a party, so as to give an opportunity for other impressions to coalesce first. The awful truth is that we really do have a tendency to categorize people on what is only part of their lives. Which is why in turn having a job is extremely important to people. We also tend to categorize others with quite a dose of snobbery. However, if we can step back from all that social stereo-typing for a moment, we have to admit that pretty well all jobs, however great or humble in the common perception, are useful to society. Actually right now I’d probably think more highly of a plumber than a trader in stocks and bonds.

Not everybody feels good about their job. In his enjoyable and thoughtful book “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, Alain De Botton spends quite some time guiding the reader through the extreme division of labour in the modern economy in order to make the point that many individual jobs are strangely disconnected from a meaningful context. His example of the manufacture of chocolate biscuits is very amusing.
He writes “When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.” In many jobs sadly that is not immediately obvious.
In my own work as an interpreter I can see through the booth window the expression of understanding or bafflement on the delegate’s face and sometimes even expressions of gratitude that I have facilitated understanding. Many workers, however, are denied that immediate response, in the words of Marx describing 19thC industrial manufacturing processes they have become “alienated”. In these circumstances it is difficult to feel job satisfaction. If I had to work in a distant room off an AV feed and couldn’t see my delegates through the window, I would also feel alienated. Likewise, a craftsman who turns out a chair by hand feels some satisfaction at the production of a well made lasting object, whereas the factory assembly line worker screwing some widget into an endless series of incomplete machines does not.
While everyone craves to have a job to give some meaning to their life, in practice the nature of many jobs is that they provide little satisfaction and self-fulfilment.

What about my own working life?

When I was young I lived a relatively charmed life coming to proper full-time paid employment only at the late age of 24. I was a student for a long time and between a combination of saving out of grants and scholarship money, parental generosity, voluntary work and taking up invitations, I never had to work for money during my long vacations. I should also explain that I had no particular desire to acquire material possessions so I felt no need to take paid work to save up for anything and was happy living from hand to mouth. During this time I did also have two posts as a language assistant in schools in France and Germany, but the teaching duties were minimal and so too correspondingly the money to live off, but it didn’t seem to matter. I have always had a knack of living within my means, affording what I want but not wanting what I can’t afford. It’s not that I’m frugal or mean, it’s just that I have the Yorkshireman’s natural aversion to extravagance.

My transition to regular work was fairly smooth in that suddenly I found myself doing for real what I had been training and practising for, only it took up more hours in the week, leaving me feeling more tired and with less free time but with a healthier bank balance.

On Bertrand Russell’s definition of real work as “altering the position of matter in relation to the surface of the earth”, I have hardly done a day of it for pay in my whole life (though plenty for free for family and friends). I did once do a day of garlic harvesting in the South of France, which left me with a stiff back and blistered hands; so I didn’t think much of it. Since I have not needed to, I have not repeated the experience. The supposedly praiseworthy nobility of manual labour is an invention of those who would get others to do it without doing it themselves.

As a conference interpreter, I count myself lucky in having a good job with shortish hours and highish pay which is varied in terms of human contact and content, even at times interesting and enjoyable. I can be directly useful in helping people understand each other.
I work for the European institutions, whose greater purpose is to promote peace and prosperity on our continent. While that purpose may not be immediately apparent in the minutiae of negotiating and implementing legislation, it is nonetheless present even if only by dint of constantly bringing people together from different countries. I can believe in the ultimate usefulness of my work in a much broader context.
There are also occasionally genuine opportunities to travel, that is without having to rush back immediately, thereby enabling me to venture beyond the airport, hotel and meeting room.
Another big plus point is that when a meeting is over, that really is the end of the day’s work, leaving the body free to engage in other activities which it needs to after sitting in a box all day and also the mind, that is if it is not suffering from overload and feeling like an evening off. Yes, some days I do come home feeling like a zombie.

For as I tell students aspiring to interpreting as a career, it’s just a job and like any other job it has its good days and its bad days. To be honest, a lot of it can be stultifying: there’s a limit to the amount of mileage to be had out of customs procedures or pesticide residues. Still, it’s what I do for pay and with a bit of patience a more interesting meeting comes around and the colleagues are generally good company, so on the whole I enjoy it and stick with it, partly I guess because by now there’s not much else I know how to do.
I suspect this is largely the nature of most people’s work and their attitude towards it.

Therein lies the trap, for to quote Paul Simon:

“We work in our jobs, collect our pay,
Believe we’re gliding down the highway,
When in fact we’re slip sliding away”.

Work accounts for most of the days in our week, most of the weeks in our year, most of the years in our life.
The sad reality of many jobs is that they just don’t leave much time and energy for much else once the daily logistical business of merely existing has been attended to.
The great absurdity of the progress of mechanization and automation throughout human history is that it has not as it should have done led to a significant reduction in working hours for all, thereby allowing a greater quality and enjoyment of life, but rather an increase in the numbers of unemployed. We live in an economy where many patently work too much and others not at all. It’s quite absurd. Russell pointed this out already in the 1930’s and things have not changed.

Those in work cling desperately to their jobs as they need the money and their work has come to define who they are, almost to the exclusion of anything else, while the unemployed feel they have lost a meaningful rôle in society. Both categories would benefit from a more equitable share-out of the limited amount of work there is. (For if work is in theory limitless, tell me how come in practice so many people are unemployed?)
However, economists pour scorn on these notions and it is true that the bold French socialist experiment of the 35 hour week was not successful in creating more jobs. At the end of the day, most people are also just not prepared to take the concommitant pay cut for shorter hours and to down-size their life-style. In short they are trapped in the organized materialism that makes our economies go round.
I am very fortunate in that I am able to put some of my ideas into practice: every summer I manage to take a month of unpaid leave; I earn less but have a better life.

This “all or nothing” illogical distribution of work among the willing also applies to our overall working life. All of a sudden full-time workers are expected to stop at retirement age and enter a world of more leisure than they know what to do with, instead of progressively reducing the amount they do to phase in a new life-style. Nonetheless, many do become understandably fed up of the relentless daily grind and seek early retirement, often actively encouraged to do so by their employer so that they can be replaced by someone younger, not yet burned out and on a lower wage. However, not every job requires brute force and speed and in fact vast amounts of experience and, dare I say it, wisdom are squandered in this way. The natural way of things would be for older workers gradually to do less and still make a small but quality contribution until quite late in life.
I hope that when the time comes my employer will still be offering a scheme of pre-retiremnt part-time work.

Some of the points in this essay, you may say, are easily made from my position of a well-paid, not too time-consuming, secure job. I accept that. However, I do believe things could be organized much better than they are and I know the reason they are not is quite simply our society’s preference for brute economics over human well-being.

Work is a useful part of life but in the end it is better to work to live than to live to work.