Alana loves the EU

First of all, I apologize for being such a terrible slacker recently in regard to updating my blog, but I have been out having incredible adventures and I figure it is far more important to be living these adventures than recording them, thus, the lack of blogging.  But now, I write.

This post details my trip to Brussels, which is now good four weeks ago, but thing after thing, including a visit from my parents which will be the subject of my next blog post, and being quite sick, prevented me from writing until now.

Beginning on March 6th, I embarked on a week-long trip to Brussels with my European Politics class.  This class is our “long field study” and serves to bring to life much of what we have been learning in the classroom about the European Union.  All of the different DIS programs go to various destinations around Europe, wherever there is relevant academic content (and sometimes, I’m convinced, just because a certain city is a nice city and the academic content can be stretched enough). 

The entire week in Brussels, from start to finish, was informative, exciting, and a whole heck of a lot of fun.  The DIS study tours are really well organized by the DIS interns and we are treated very nicely. 

It was a short and painless hour and a half flight early Sunday morning and bam! We were in Brussels.  We checked into our hotel, which is called Maison du Dragon, and is a hotel run by Chinese staff, distinctly Chinese in nature, and serving authentic Chinese breakfast every morning along with traditional European food.

One of the first sights we saw in Brussels, and what remained my favorite sight throughout everything we saw, was the grand market place.  It is a plaza with lots of outdoor cafes and bars surrounded on every side by gorgeous buildings.  On one side is the Brussels city hall, which looks like a grand palace, the Brussels city museum on the other side, a beautiful spire and many old guild houses.  We got beautiful sunny weather all week and this square absolutely came alive in the warm weather.  This square (see picture below) is what I pictured Europe to be like and although I love Copenhagen, that it just not what Copenhagen looks like, so I enjoyed getting to see a place that looked so different.

The Grand Market Place in Brussels

Our first afternoon was filled with a tour of comic book art around the city since apparently Brussels is known for their comic book art.  Such comics as Tin Tin and the Smurfs originate from Belgium.

We were also treated to our first (of what would be many) Belgian waffles for lunch on Sunday.  The waffles really are as incredible as they are made out to be.  The one we were served was merely topped with powdered sugar and a dab of whip cream, but it was this simplicity that was its beauty.  The waffle itself was warm, chewy, delectably easy to cut and melted in my mouth.  Needles to say, Belgian waffle number one was a success and I vowed to consume as many more as possible on this trip.

Bright and early Monday morning we went to visit NATO and talked to representatives from the US mission to NATO.  We got an extremely candid and honest picture of what NATO has done in the past and why NATO’s role in the world is uncertain going into the future.  We also heard from an intern who is working at NATO and were encouraged to take the Foreign Service exam.  After NATO, we headed to the Danish embassy and talked to the Danish Ambassador to Belgium, who spent many years previously as the Danish ambassador to the EU.  He talked to us about the European Union External Action Service that is coming into being now and what this will look like in the future.

On Tuesday, we visited the European Commission and talked to a man who works in the Danish Commissioner’s office.  Connie Hedegaard is the Danish commissioner and she is the commissioner for climate action.

At the European Commission

In order to really give us a picture of how actors within the European Union “play the game”, as my professor Jacob says, we were split into groups of 3 and 4 and sent to interview staff to the permanent representatives for various countries.  The permanent reps, for those of you not fully versed in your EU structures and institutions, are ambassadors to the EU from each country who compose one part of the council of ministers, under the ministers themselves.  My group spoke to the first secretary to the Danish perm rep who talked to us about the power of being a good negotiator and how Denmark is preparing to hold the rotating presidency in the council of ministers in 2012.

On Tuesday afternoon we made a trip to the European Parliament.  The parliament chamber is beautiful and HUGE - all 736 members have to fit. Imagine the chaos of our house of representatives but almost doubled! The MEPs sit according to their political party groupings, which span nationalities.  Some MEPs are independent and are not part of a party group but these are very few since the party groups are afforded many resources and funding that are hard to be an effective member of parliament without. There are also translation booths that surround the walls of the chamber.  There are translators for all 23 languages represented within the EU, although they admit to sometimes not being able to find a translator all the time for some of the less spoken languages, such as Gaelic or Maltese.  It struck me how slow this process might make things, always having to translate what each parliamentarian has said on the floor from their native language into each of these languages.  It is not a surprise that many living in Europe perceive the EU, especially the parliament, to be little more than a traveling circus, consuming resources, moving slowly and bureaucratically and getting little accomplished.  However, it also struck me that despite many of these things being true, the EU as a whole has been extremely effective in achieving its number one goal: to ensure peace in Europe since the second world war.  And to have a truly international organization, such as this one, this is the kind of bureaucracy it takes.  The EU has no real precedent and other regions of the world have not been able to achieve anything really like it.  Despite all of its problems, it is really quite an astounding institution.

Our class at the European Parliament

The sign for "visitors groups" translated into the 23 languages of the EU

 

Tuesday evening was a treat – we were taken to Chez Leon, which is known as the place for mussels in Brussels. The plates of mussels were piping hot, deliciously sauced in garlic and butter, and never ending.  Seriously, the waitress kept appearing with more pots of mussels just when we were sure we could not eat another bite.  Yum!

Wednesday started with a visit from the US mission to the EU.   It is a very interesting job that these people have- they are members of the foreign service and count themselves among a very small group of Americans who actually understand how the EU works, because it is their job to do so.  They keep abreast of what is going on with the EU all the time and communicate this to Washington and then in return represent US in Brussels.

Wednesday evening we had our second set of interviews; this time we each interviewed a lobbyist.   Our lobbyist was from Central Denmark EU, a publicly funded lobby group that represents the mid-Jutland region, which is a region in the center of Denmark.  Lobbying is very different in Europe than its counterpart in the United States.   In Europe lobbying is a structurally built-in component of the political process.  When the European Commission puts forth a piece of legislation (this is the first step in passing legislation in the EU, as the commission is the only body that holds the right of initiative), they actively put out the legislation for opinion, comment and modification by lobby groups.  Members of the European parliament will seek out lobbyists to ask what position they should have on a particular issue as a member of a particular political party and lobbyist is not nearly as dirty a world in Europe as it is in the United States.  Politicians in the EU openly admit that they couldn’t do their jobs without lobbyists, whereas in the United States we like to pretend that our politicians should have an expert, in-depth knowledge of every area of policy and that only the bad politicians lean on interest groups.

Thursday was a day of travel, leaving Belgium and heading to The Netherlands, and so it was also a day filled with no academic visits and all “cultural” visits.  I think we all needed a bit of a break from our heavy schedule of academic visits.  What better to do with a day of travel then the two things that Belgium is known for: chocolate and beer. 

I had been looking forward to this morning visit to Planet Chocolat all week.  I had had several waffles but hadn’t gotten to taste any authentic Belgian chocolate yet and I couldn’t wait.  At Planet Chocolate visitors are able to learn a brief history of the science of chocolate making, while being fed truffles and handed steaming mugs of hot chocolate the entire time.  We then got a chance to try making some chocolate of our own.  We suited up for the chocolate-making portion of the program: aprons, hairnets for the women and triangular paper hats for the men, and little plastic booties to cover our shoes.  An expert chocolatier showed us how to make pralines and chocolate dipped orange peels, with lots of room for tasting along the way.  We were given small goody bags of the chocolate we had made and many of us supplemented this with purchases from the Planet Chocolat shore.  The chocolate really is better in Belgium, especially the milk chocolate.

Making chocolate at Planet Chocolat

 

Stuffed full of pralines, we boarded a bus headed to Holland.  Stop #1: The Hague.  We arrived in The Hague, Netherlands and visited La Trappe Brewery, one of only 7 Trappist breweries in the world.  We were given a tour of the grounds and treated to a beer tasting and a delicious dinner and ended our night in a very nice hotel in The Hague.

Our purpose in visiting The Hague, which is often considered an international judicial capital, was to visit the ICTY, the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.  Friday morning at the ICTY we got an overview of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.  The ICTY is a temporary UN project that has been trying cases of war criminals from the Balkan conflicts since 1993 and will go on doing so for many more years.  We also got to sit in on the trial of Radovan Karadžić. It was shocking to watch the trial of a man indicted for crimes such as genocide and murder.  Another high up in the Serbian army was testifying and the man whose trial it was was sitting right there, mere feet from the space for the visiting public.  There were 3 judges sitting at the front of the room and prosecutors sitting all around the courtroom, which was a horseshoe shape.  The prosecutor when we were there was asking questions in English, which were being translated to the native language of the witness, Serbian I believe, and then his answers were being translated back to English, which all the prosecutors and judges were hearing through headphones.

After the ICTY we drove about an hour and we were in Amsterdam! Every previous semester the students in our program took a 12 hour bus ride to Brussels instead of flying. An afternoon in Amsterdam was added to the program as a natural stop on the way back to Copenhagen from Belgium.

Our visit to Amsterdam was painfully short, but sweet.  We arrived and sat down to a delicious lunch (I ordered potato pancakes with smoked salmon and horseradish sauce as an appetizer and a tomato pasta dish with lamb for my main course).  We then took a canal tour, luckily it was beautiful weather, and then went for a short walk around the red light district.  Amsterdam is one of the few places in Europe that I’ve been to before, but with its beautiful canals and canal houses, bridges and bikes everywhere, it really is an amazing city.

Some friends in Amsterdam

Canals and bikes in Amsterdam

 

Our trip ended that evening as we flew back from Amsterdam to good old Copenhagen.  It really had been an amazing week, a perfect combination of interesting academic lectures, fun cultural visits and loads of unforgettable memories with friends.  The only thing that kept me from being really sad that the trip was over was that MY PARENTS WERE WAITING FOR ME WHEN I RETURNED!

Lots of fun ensued, just wait for the next blog post :)