EU’s decision-making machine overloaded by too many choices

Date: 26/10/1995

When it comes to decision-making procedures, the EU offers an unbeatable choice. So unbeatable that insiders are unable to say with any certainty how many different procedures exist and outsiders do not try.

Brick upon brick of checks and balances has been added over the years, leaving the Union with a teetering structure which is difficult to negotiate and almost impossible to understand.

Draft reports on proposals for directives on important matters make their way from institution to institution and back again. Some come out the other end, others are sent to limbo pending unanimous decisions.

At the moment, many legislative proposals must be agreed unanimously by the Council of Ministers before becoming law. Given the difficulty of persuading 15 separate countries to shelve their differences, it is hardly surprising that some never see the light of day.

To help things along, governments and institutions often give way on certain points in exchange for concessions on unrelated issues. That oils the machine, but not sufficiently. The Council is too often paralysed by the intransigence of a single steely member state.

Unanimity was never supposed to be used as often as it is. A more or less complete switch-over from that voting system to qualified majority voting (QMV) was due in 1966, but was blocked by the then French President Charles de Gaulle.

Determined not to be out-voted on the financing of the Common Agricultural Policy, in June 1965 he embarked on a one-country boycott of the Council of Ministers (the so-called “empty chair policy”) which lasted six months.

He finally agreed to come back into the Council's bosom, but only after persuading his partners to sign the Luxembourg Compromise.

That effectively gave each member state the right to veto legislation when its “vital national interest” was at stake. Had governments stuck to the letter of that agreement, the impact on the EU's decision-making process might not have been great. In practice, however, unanimity was extended to a wide range of policy areas.

Exceptionally, the UK was out-voted in May 1982 when it tried to block a farm price agreement as leverage in an unrelated dispute over the budget.

However, it was not until 1987, with the entry into force of the Single European Act, that majority voting became more widely used.

Faced with the prospect of a single market failing to get off the ground, member states agreed then that most of the 300-odd legislative proposals needed to turn the single market into a reality should be agreed by QMV. That, together with the Maastricht Treaty which further extended QMV, broke the log jam.

There is a growing feeling, however, that QMV needs to become the norm, with unanimity reserved only for sensitive issues such as foreign and security policy and taxation, if a Union of 20 or more nations is to avoid paralysis.

It offers a way out of deadlock situations by allowing a majority to push through legislation and also by spurring member states to seek compromises to avoid isolation.

But its extension raises certain concerns: notably, that as the bloc expands and QMV is used more often the voting power of large member states will become diluted. It is entirely possible that, using majority voting, an alliance of small nations representing a minority of the EU's population could pass legislative measures.

Germany, among others, wants voting in the Council to be reformed at the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) so that decisions reflect more accurately the size of individual populations.

Another burning issue is democratic control. As member states' power to veto wanes, so too will the influence of national parliaments. Their role currently varies widely depending on the member state in question. The Danish parliament, for example, virtually determines ministers' stances before they come to Brussels and must be consulted before agreements can be finalised. The French parliament, on the other hand, brings almost no influence to bear on EU decision-makers. But what power they do have is likely to diminish in coming years.

Hoping to consolidate gains made during the Maastricht negotiations, the European Parliament is arguing its legislative role must be beefed up to guarantee democratic control in the Union. It wants the co-operation procedure scrapped and the co-decision procedure, which more or less puts it on an equal legislative footing with the Council, extended to cover all QMV areas.

Parliament has been building its power-base treaty by treaty and hopes to continue that trend next year. Originally, it had a largely consultative role, but that changed in 1987 when the co-operation procedure (which gave MEPs greater bargaining power) and the assent procedure (which allowed them to block international agreements) were introduced.

The Maastricht Treaty upgraded the co-operation procedure, bringing in co-decision which gives parliament the ultimate right to reject certain legislation.

Despite these changes, however, the assembly is still not on an equal footing with the Council.

While most member states favour an extension of co-decision, one - the UK - is firmly against any such hand-over of national power. Given that treaty changes need to be agreed unanimously, the UK's opposition is sure to cause problems.

It is increasingly likely, however, that the EU may spin out negotiations over Europe's future until after the general election in the hope that a more pro-European Labour government might win.

Whatever the fate of calls for less unanimous decision-making and more QMV, the negotiators at next year's Intergovernmental Conference will also have to answer growing demands for the 20 or so different decision-making procedures which currently exist to be drastically pruned.

There is widespread support for the idea of having just three procedures - consultation, co-decision and assent - both to improve efficiency and to boost democracy by making the system much easier for ordinary European citizens to understand.