Summer is my main opportunity to read all that research put aside during the year when I was travelling around Europe in one European Works Council meeting after another. It is a chance to think about the future. Also, in my case, it’s a chance to make sense of all the changes in Brussels. 2009 is going to be a significant year for many things European. We have already had the European Parliament elections. The outcome came as a surprise to some people who had mistakenly predicted a drift to the left. The new parliament will start to wield its power in the autumn as it crosses swords with the European Commission.

A new European Parliament means new committees. For HR professionals the only one that really counts is the employment and social affairs committee. The new chair will be Pervenche Berès, a French socialist, highly experienced MEP and former chair of the influential economic and monetary affairs committee. Her vice chairs include Elizabeth Lynne, a UK liberal democrat and vice-chair of the previous committee. She stood up and argued for continuing the UK opt-out in the working time discussions.

Aside from Lynne there are four other UK MEPs who are full members of the employment and social affairs committee. These are: Philip Bradbourn, Conservative; Derek Clark, UKIP; Jean Lambert, Green; and Stephen Hughes, lifelong UK socialist MEP and ringleader of the vote against the UK government’s position on working time.

All of the above tells us very little about how the new committee will function aside from the simple fact that with an EU of 27 member states national influence is marginalised unless you can build alliances.

Turning away from the European Parliament, there will also be a whole new European Commission from November. We do know it should be led by the current president, José Manuel Barroso. Vladimír Špidla, the Czech commissioner responsible for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities will not be reselected. So we can definitely expect a new social affairs commissioner and we can predict with a degree of certainty that he or she is unlikely to be Czech. In the medium term (2010-11), there will also be a new civil servant in charge of social affairs. Robert Verrue, a lifelong commission official appointed at the start of this year, is seen as a short-term appointment and he will slip into retirement when a new commissioner is appointed so that they have a free hand to choose a new director-general to serve alongside them for a full five-year term.

Will Baroness Ashton, shoehorned into the trade role left by Peter Mandelson, be the choice as UK commissioner for a full five-year term? Most important of all, on 2 October, Ireland will hold a second referendum on the European constitution. If that is a repeat of the first then Europe enters uncharted territory.

The failure of Europe to offer any leadership in the economic crisis has not gone unnoticed. After the recent elections there is a big question mark hanging over the future. Despite the public words of expanding the European role, the reason Barroso was unanimously supported by all member states for a second term as commission president is precisely because he fully grasps that cutting back the costly European bureaucracy is now firmly on the agenda for every EU member state, including France and Germany.