CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN REFORM
briefing note
THE CER GUIDE TO THE BRUSSELS SUMMIT It is six months since the European Convention, a gathering of parliamentarians, government representatives and experts, presented its draft for an EU constitutional treaty. Since November, the EU governments – the current 15, plus the ten due to join on May 1st 2004 – have been negotiating a revision of this draft, in an ‘inter-governmental conference’ (IGC). Negotiations are set to go the wire at the European Council in Brussels on December 12th and 13th. Italy, which currently holds the EU presidency, has pledged to forge an agreement by the end of the summit, so that there will be a new ‘Treaty of Rome’. But member-states remain divided on several contentious issues. There is a real risk that talks will drag on into 2004. The most difficult issues are: the allocation of votes within the Council of Ministers; the role of the yet-tobe established Council president and the rotating presidency; proposals to expand majority voting; and the number of commissioners. Even if the EU leaders could solve all these problems, a number of other issues – such as demands for a reference to Christianity in the text – could still delay a final agreement. This paper provides an overview of the key issues in the IGC negotiations.
VOTING WEIGHTS The dispute over how many votes each country should have in the Council of Ministers has dominated the IGC. Spain and Poland are determined to maintain the system of voting weights agreed in the Nice treaty three years ago, which gives them many more votes than their population size would justify. The Nice treaty set up a complicated ‘triple majority’ system under which a measure passes when three separate thresholds are satisfied: a) a simple majority of the member-states; b) that majority must include countries representing 62 per cent of the EU’s population; and c) that majority must be able to assemble weighted votes of at least 232, out of a total allocated votes amounting to 321. The largest countries – Britain, France, Germany and Italy – each has 29 votes; Spain and Poland have 27 each; and the other less populous countries all have fewer votes, with the scale ending at Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg and Slovenia, each with four, and Malta with three. The votes of the largest EU countries are not proportional to the size of their populations. Germany, for example, with 80 million people has only two votes more than Poland and Spain, which have around 40 million each. The Nice system thus gives an in-built advantage to smaller countries, and particularly to Spain and Poland. In addition, the complex Nice voting formula threatens to make the Council, the EU’s main decision-making body, less efficient and less representative of the population of the Union after enlargement. The draft constitutional treaty proposes a much simpler system that dispenses with the complex weighted voting system. For a measure to pass, the Council of Ministers would have to muster a majority of 50 per cent of the member-states, that is 13 of the 25 countries – provided that these countries represent at least 60 per cent of the EU’s total population. This is to make sure that the governments of small countries cannot outvote those governments representing most of the EU’s people. Germany in particular likes the new ‘double majority’ system since it would better reflect its large population. Other countries support it because it is fairer, more transparent and therefore better suited to address the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’.