Az Európai Unió átalakítása a bővítés jegyében

Abstract

The reform of the Union's institutional framework is especially important with regard to parliamentary integration and further enlargement. It is feared that a wide enlargement will dilute the Union's legislative activity, though present members have in fact made further enlargements dependent on the Union's ability to reform the institutional framework in order to maintain efficiency. Today's member states are looking for procedural settings to increase decision probability for European legislation but with (slight) parliamentary integration and without raising the risk of their exclusion by weighting their involvement in decision making. The 1997 Amsterdam Draft Treaty offers two options on how to redistribute the inclusiveness of member states: first, a re-weighting of Council of Ministers votes with the prevailing 71,2% threshold; second unchanged Council of Ministers votes and 71,2% threshold with the additional provision that at least 60% of the Union's total population be represented. Both options have been rejedted, and we show the reasons for their failure.In this paper, we apply our concept of inclusiveness which is particularly relevant to the topics of enlargement and parliamentary integration, to analyze the options for reforming the Union. Inclusiveness expresses the decision probability on the system level and the risk of being excluded on the individual level. However, diverging goals of European institutional politics have to be decided: functional and parliamentary integration as well as the preservation of (in) equality between member states, threatened by further enlargements. Applying our concept to the inter-institutional interaction of the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament in the standard and the codecision procedure, our findings on former enlargements and both Amsterdam options show the continuous decrease of legislative decision probability since the mid-80s. Moreover, we also outline that member states have been and will be affected differently by former and potential enlargements. In response, we present an efficient way of conducting institutional politics on which all member states can agree consensually. In addition to the Amsterdam proposals we show a scenario of how to reduce the gridlock danger in a further enlarged Union.