EU and the Lisbon Treaty, Part 2: The Coming Institutional Changes

The Lisbon Treaty introduces institutional changes that will increase the European Union’s federal powers and reduce the number of policy issues for which member states will retain a veto. The changes almost guarantee tensions between members favoring a strong union and those wary of losing sovereignty on key issues of national interest.

The main change brought by the Lisbon Treaty — which will take effect immediately upon ratification — is that several policy issues will be subject to qualified majority voting (QMV) rather than the unanimous vote now required. The QMV is a voting mechanism used by the Council, the highest decision-making body in the European Union. The list of issues that can no longer be vetoed by a single country includes immigration, financing foreign policy and security initiatives, and energy (To see the complete list included in the European Commission’s official document on the voting change, click on the link above.)

The treaty includes a passerelle clause that expands an existing procedure by which even more policy issues — including essentially everything that does not have military implications — could be shifted from unanimity voting to QMV. In short, the Lisbon Treaty allows the European Union to amend its constitution with very little fuss once the heads of government reach an agreement. If the leaders of all 27 member states agree to shift taxation matters to QMV, for example, they will be able to do so without an intergovernmental conference or more referendums in individual countries — essentially, without another treaty that could take years to negotiate and ratify.

Although national parliaments would have six months to lodge a complaint against such a voting shift, the fact that most heads of government in Europe are leaders of respective parliaments would make such complaints unlikely.

Although it might seem nearly impossible to get all 27 EU members to give up sovereignty on an issue, they have agreed on this through the Lisbon Treaty. Furthermore, governments rise and fall; if the European Council (which represents all 27 heads of government) wants to make a raft of voting changes, it can wait for a particularly pro-European constellation of governments to emerge.

However, STRATFOR does not expect France and Germany to immediately force legislation upon the union’s smaller member states. The European Union traditionally has favored incremental changes that avoid pushing any member state to its limit on an important issue. Therefore, Paris and Berlin will likely wait to move any new issues from unanimity voting to QMV, and will seek to limit the number of controversial measures that are passed without a veto.

The Lisbon Treaty also amends the QMV procedure. The current Nice Treaty QMV — under which votes are distributed in a way that over-represents small and medium-sized member states — will be used until 2014. Then, there will be a transition period until 2017, during which member states can call upon the Nice Treaty QMV. The delay in adopting the Lisbon procedure is meant to appease the states that are threatened by QMV and are wary of a powerful union dominated by the large member countries.

The key change in the QMV procedure under Lisbon is that a member state’s population will determine its voting share. The approval of legislation under the Lisbon QMV procedure will require the support of 15 out of 27 states that collectively represent 65 percent of the union’s population. More importantly, to block legislation, the Lisbon Treaty requires that four countries representing more than 35 percent of the EU population must oppose it. This gives populous member states that tend to work together on strengthening the European Union — such as Germany, France and Italy — an advantage. The ability to secure a blocking minority will be a vital negotiation strategy, as most EU decisions are made in negotiations before voting takes place. Other countries would have to take the blocking minority into consideration and ask for the proposal to be redrafted to the blocking countries’ liking if they wanted it to pass.

The Lisbon Treaty introduces two positions that should increase the union’s internal coherence and visibility on the world stage: the president of the European Council (unofficially referred to as the president of the European Union), and the high representative of the union for foreign affairs and security policy (unofficially referred to as the foreign minister of the European Union). U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once asked, “If I want to call Europe, who do I call?” The EU members in favor of a strong union hope that the two positions will answer that question and give the union greater force internationally, but it is not certain that they will overcome resistance from those member states that are skeptical or even suspicious of a strong union.

Of the two new posts, the foreign minister will be the most important. The foreign minister will carry out EU foreign policy on behalf of the European Council, which will continue to decide on foreign and defense policy matters through unanimity. This person will have the 10-year track record of Javier Solana — Europe’s unofficial foreign minister — to build on and will also have a diplomatic corps (called the External Action Service) with which to build a bureaucracy independent of the European Commission. Therefore, while the foreign minister will technically still be part of the Commission as its vice president, he or she will also stand apart from it. This will allow Berlin and Paris to slowly remove foreign affairs from the European Commission’s purview.

The presidential position has thus far received the most attention, but the position is poorly endowed with institutional powers. Member states like Poland and even the European Commission have already come out against the post, arguing that the president will have to stick to the literal reading of the treaty, which only allows him to chair the European Council. However, the president’s two-and-a-half-year mandate will replace the main functions of the current six-month rotating member state presidency, which allows every country in the union its time in the spotlight (though the six-month presidency will remain, as more of a consultative role). This means that smaller countries like the Czech Republic and Denmark will no longer get to set the agenda for the European Council — a change that powerful states like France will welcome.

In part three of this series, STRATFOR will look at how the new decision-making rules of the Lisbon Treaty could affect the balance of power within the European Union.