CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN REFORM
briefing note
THE EU CONSTITUTIONAL TREATY: THE STATE OF PLAY AHEAD OF THE SUMMIT By Aurore Wanlin European leaders gather in Brussels on 17-19 June for a ‘make or break’ summit on the EU’s new constitutional treaty. The last time they tried, at the EU summit in December 2003, they failed to agree on the details of the document. And despite the impressive work of the Irish presidency, a successful outcome in Brussels is far from certain. EU foreign ministers remained divided on several key issues during their last meeting on 24 May. The British government has hardened its overall stance since Prime Minister Tony Blair promised a referendum on the treaty. The UK is especially concerned about the legal implications of the Charter of Fundamental Rights that forms part of the new treaty, and about proposed extensions of majority voting. Poland is also taking a tough stance, not least because a domestic political crisis has reduced the government’s room for manoeuvre. France and Germany, among other countries, are trying to preserve the main proposals of the Convention. Three key issues could block a deal:
1. THE SIZE OF THE COMMISSION At present, every country has one commissioner while the bigger member-states have two. Successive rounds of enlargement have swelled the size of the Commission, threatening to make it unwieldy. The Nice treaty therefore foresees a move to a smaller Commission after the next round of enlargement, when the EU will have 27 member-states or more. France and Germany, supported by Belgium and the UK, want a similar clause in the constitutional treaty. But Denmark, Austria and Greece, backed by several of the new member-states, are defending the principle of one commissioner per member-state. The Irish presidency has suggested that only 18 of the EU member-states should send a commissioner from 2014 onwards. The idea is based on a rotation scheme that would leave EU countries without their ‘own’ commissioner in only one out of three Commission terms – a compromise that may well be acceptable to both camps.
2. COUNCIL VOTING WEIGHTS The Convention, which prepared the draft constitutional treaty in 2003, recommended that the EU should scrap the complicated system of qualified majority voting that it now uses for most decisions. Instead, the Convention has proposed a simpler ‘double majority’ system, under which a measure would pass if it was supported by at least half of the member-states provided these countries represent 60 per cent of the EU’s population. Poland and Spain are the main opponents of the new system. They initially insisted on keeping the fiendishly complicated ‘triple majority’ system agreed in Nice under which both countries got an unduly high share of votes. New governments in both Spain and Poland
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