THE LATEST
A Europe that Acts: Effective Decision-making on Enlargement in a New Geopolitical Era
The current debate on decision-making in EU enlargement is framed too often in binary terms: either unanimity or qualified majority voting. This black-and-white framing overlooks the fact that a wide spectrum of intermediate solutions exists. A new policy paper by Think Europe, Balkan Center for Constructive Policies – Solution, Institut für Europäische Politik, supported by the ERSTE Foundation argues that unanimity has come to pervade virtually every procedural step of the accession process, far exceeding what the Treaties actually require and what the negotiating frameworks themselves originally envisaged — making accession slow, unpredictable, and increasingly disconnected from the reform performance of candidate countries. The paper maps four models for introducing qualified majority voting at intermediary stages – Full QMV, Consensus Like QMV, Dutch QMV, and QMV Lite – showing that meaningful reform is possible within the existing Treaty architecture, and that moving to QMV does not relinquish control over the two most important political decisions in the process: no country can become a candidate, and no country will ever become a member state, without all EU member states agreeing.
- Analysis, Featured
The current debate on decision-making in EU enlargement is framed too often in binary terms: either unanimity or qualified majority voting. This black-and-white framing overlooks the fact that a wide spectrum of intermediate solutions exists. A new policy paper by Think Europe, Balkan Center for Constructive Policies – Solution, Institut für Europäische Politik, supported by the ERSTE Foundation argues that unanimity has come to pervade virtually every procedural step of the accession process, far exceeding what the Treaties actually require and what the negotiating frameworks themselves originally envisaged — making accession slow, unpredictable, and increasingly disconnected from the reform performance of candidate countries. The paper maps four models for introducing qualified majority voting at intermediary stages – Full QMV, Consensus Like QMV, Dutch QMV, and QMV Lite – showing that meaningful reform is possible within the existing Treaty architecture, and that moving to QMV does not relinquish control over the two most important political decisions in the process: no country can become a candidate, and no country will ever become a member state, without all EU member states agreeing.