Europasionaria

I’ve been a long-time fan of Moo mini cards. I have business cards, which my employer gives me. That’s great in a business context. But when I’m having a chat with someone nice in a non-professional context, I just want to give them my personal contact details, not my work email address. So for about two years now I’ve had Moo mini cards, on which I’ve put my Twitter user name, personal email address and blog URL. They are twice as small as normal business cards, can be customised the way you like, include pictures of yours, etc. All cool stuff.

A couple of days ago I ordered a refill. And then, thanks to Mashable, I found out that you can get Moo cards for free thanks to a partnership with Facebook. You might have heard of the new Facebook timeline. Your front page features one of your favourite pictures with a thumbnail of your profile picture on top of it. Moo offers you 50 free business cards with on one side your Facebook timeline cover picture and on the other side, your favourite quote and other contact details. Pretty cool stuff. I’ve ordered it, just because it’s fun and innovative. Check it out quickly if you want to do the same.

Disclaimer: I was not paid by Moo to write this article

22 July 2011. I’m in Brussels. Tweets of Norwegian friends inform me that a bomb has exploded in the centre of Oslo. Another tweet from them later informs me that there’s also been a shooting at the Norwegian Labour party youth conference.  At this stage, we still don’t know what happened exactly. As I watch the news giving more details about the events, I feel a mix of anger and despair. I know this feeling too well.

25 July 1995. I’m in Paris. I hear there have been bombs in the busiest metro station of Paris. My family and I are aghast. My aunt commutes through this station to go to work. She was fine. Since then, seeing armed soldiers in the Parisian metro’s corridors has become usual. But I never got used to it.

11 September 2001. I’m in a car with my father somewhere between Grenoble and Paris. He’s just helped me find an apartment in Grenoble where I’m about to move. It’s around 2pm. We hear on the radio that a plane has crashed in one of the Twin towers in New York. Analysts say that’s when the 21^st century really started, just as WWI was the real beginning of the 20^th century.

11 March 2004. I’m living in Amsterdam in a shared flat with 12 other people. 8 of them are Spanish. I look at their mortified faces as they watch the Spanish national television relate the bomb attacks in trains close to Madrid.

7 July 2005. I’m still in Amsterdam. It’s early. I get out of bed, turn on the TV and soon realise there’s been bomb attacks in the London Tube. My boyfriend is still asleep. One of my best friends lives in London.

We all remember where we were during these events. I always get the same weird confused sensation: a mix of incomprehension, helplessness and pessimism for the future of humanity. I try to avoid anger. Violence begets violence. And violence is never a solution.

Once in a while, someone will say something that’s so self-evidently true, and so unexpected, that you’ll spend the rest of your life working through its implications.

Read in the Guardian

Some of you may have noticed that my blog was offline for 3 weeks. You didn’t? No worries, me neither… at first. Readers noticed it for me. At first I thought it was a tiny server problem, usually solved by my host in no time. Then I realised it was a little more complicated than that.

I receive dozens of emails a day, mostly from websites I registered for ages ago – I’m an information junkie. Sorting all these subscriptions would take forever. I’ve tried at times but it always ends up the same: I give up as I find it impossible to retrieve a username and password I created centuries ago. Seriously, aren’t you tired of having as many usernames and passwords as websites you have subscribed too?

Anyway… I was being my usual self, scanning through the dozens of (spam) emails I receive daily, trying to spot the personal emails I don’t want to miss… and something bad happened. I didn’t spot the multiple reminders to renew my domain name subscription, which were sent by the service provider. On May 31 my subscription was cancelled without my noticing and my blog was therefore inaccessible.

Offline © Michael Coghlan/Flickr

I panicked. I got angry. I felt deprived. Months of hard blogging work taken down in a minute… It was as if bits of my soul had been stolen. I tried to pay for my domain name subscription again but I didn’t even have the right to! I imagined my domain name being bought by a stranger who would then ask me to pay a lot of money to get it back… alright that would probably not happen to my obscure blog. Yet, I felt helpless.

I sent an email, filling up the online form on the website of the domain name provider -whose name I will not mention as I am not fond of revenge blogging. They replied within 48 hours as advertised on their website. However it took almost 2 weeks to have my blog back online, and several panicked reminders I sent to a robot machine in the meantime, all left unanswered, leaving me questioning the future of part of my identity: my blogger name.

All back to normal then? Not really… it seems all the rankings of my blogposts have been messed up – for the non bloggers of this world: the more a blogpost is quoted and shared, the higher it gets in search engine results. So still, a year of hard work seems to have been lost in this unfortunate event. Was this really worth a slight delay in the renewal of a 20-euro yearly subscription? I was wrong in being late to renew my subscription but the consequences of it seem really inhumane to me.

Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses.

Last year on May 9, I wrote about the origins of my passion for Europe. I originated it in the story of my family, partly through that of my grandfather -born during World War I- who fought during World War II. In his last speech to the European Parliament in 1995, François Mitterrand said: “A twist of fate had me born during World War I and fight for World War II.”

A twist of fate had it that today is Europe Day and tomorrow the thirtieth anniversary of François Mitterrand‘s election to the Presidency of the French Republic. This man has always reminded me of my grandfather. Although there was little physical resemblance, they shared a certain intellectual elegance. They both were educated men, close to the rural roots of France, and both witnessed the worst atrocities.

A twist of fate had me born during the first European elections by universal suffrage. Two years later, François Mitterrand became “le Président”. He was still President when I was 15. I grew up with him. So much that it was unconceivable for me that another man could be President. Today I’m more interested in European politics than French politics. Still there’s something I’m missing on both scenes. National discourses and European discourses alike lack vision. Where are the charismatic figures à la Mitterrand? Where are the visionaries able to rouse the masses enthusiasm? Who is able today to shift mindsets with a mere speech?

A twist of fate also had the last WWI veteran die a few days ago. The rejection of war, the quest for peace built the European integration. My generation hasn’t lived during wartime. Reminding that we owe the longest period of peace our continent has known to the European construction is not enough to rouse young adults’ enthusiasm for the European project. We need a new vision and visionaries to lift and carry it along. What will be the European project of the 21^st century? Blog out!

I’ve been quite silent on this blog in the past two months… This is because I’ve moved from one commune of Brussels, Etterbeek, to another commune of Brussels, Ixelles. In Paris the town’s districts have numbers; in Brussels they have names. Where it gets complicated is that there is a Brussels commune called Brussels. It’s Brussels, Brussels, the oldest district of the city. It’s tiny. All around it, the communes have different names. I am now a proud inhabitant of Ixelles, Brussels, where you can find some of the most beautiful Art Nouveau buildings.

9 & 11 rue Vilain XIIII © Fonk/Twitter

Finding a place in Brussels is not that difficult … but a move is a BIG DEAL. You’ve got to find boxes, kind friends to carry them, a moving van, a driver, sign all kinds of paper at the bank, cancel your Internet subscription – which took me half an hour over the phone, find a new Internet provider – it took me a month to get the connection active, terminate your current renting agreement, clean up the mess that’s kept on growing in your old place for years, buy furniture, assemble your furniture, tell the various organisations and institutions that still like to send you post mail that you’ve moved, go register at your new commune, etc, etc, etc… as my favourite online cartoon Hyperbole and a Half put it, you kind of feel like that every day for two months: “I did three things yesterday! Now I’m supposed to keep doing things? It’s like the things never end!”

To make a long story short, I’ve been busy preparing my move for a month, and I’ve been Internet-less since then. Tough for a blogger. The good news is: I should finally get the Internet tomorrow. Hurrayyy!

Or is it the opposite? Last week with fellow Blogging Portal editor Ronny Patz, we became the first bloggers to be granted an accreditation from the Council. Actually, it was also the first time bloggers got press accreditation to a European institution.

A blogger tweeting with a press accreditation. Welcome to 21st century communication!

We covered the Competitiveness Council for 2 days – well actually Ronny covered 2 days, I could only cover the second morning. This happened thanks to the spokespeople of the Hungarian presidency aka Kovács & Kováts, whom we’ve met a few times since the beginning of the year to discuss the activities they could do online. Trust was built throughout these initial meetings. And with a little push from our two supporters, we got offered accreditations as a pilot project. This time only Ronny and I could go. Well yes, the other bloggers are either not Brussels-based or had day commitments they couldn’t get away from.

The spokespeople of the Hungarian presidency have reached out to the Blogging Portal editors to start a discussion on how to use online media to talk about the Council’s work. It has to be said that they got in touch with us long before the controversy around the Hungarian media law started, and that these people are not entitled to speak about it as of course, it’s a national matter and their mandate is to talk about EU matters.

After long debates within the Blogging Portal editor team, we decided to go and see what they wanted to talk about with us.

A small delegation of us went and met them a week ago. We had a great meeting, truly fun and inspiring. After 2 hours of open-hearted conversation, Gergely Polner, our host, stood up and I realised he was wearing trainers, something that was quite in contradiction with the classic suit and tie outfit he was wearing. Yes diplomats wear trainers too… because they are people too, just like the rest of us. Something most commentators of public life often forget.

Gergely Polner and Marton Hajdu have decided to open up a blog to share their experience as spokespeople of the EU presidency. It’s called Kovács & Kováts as a reference to the Tintin characters of Thomson and Thompson, Dupond and Dupont in French. The challenge: telling their own experience of the Council using the voice of people and not only that of institution representatives. Their initiative is truly innovative. Older generations of diplomats might consider it a “faux pas”, as Kovács & Kováts put it on their blog. Indeed, diplomats just as any other civil servants are not supposed to express their personal views on things. So how can they open a blog where articles are by definition personal? It is quite a challenge, indeed. But, actually in today’s world there’s not really another way. So long live their blog and let it show the way to future Council presidency spokespeople.