Nice Treaty (Meaning and Explanation)

We explain what Nice's treaty was and its importance for the European Union. In addition, its history and characteristics.

The Nice treaty introduced reforms into the structure of the European Union.

What was Nice's treaty?

The Nice Treaty It was a treaty signed by the Member States of the European Union in 2001. Its objective was to reform the institutional structure of the European Union to adapt it to the incorporation of twelve new members (mainly from Central and Eastern Europe) that would take place in 2004 and 2005, with the consequent extension of the European Union of fifteen to twenty -seven Member States.

The Nice Treaty modified the European Union Treaty (or Maastricht Treaty) of 1992 and the constituent treaties of European communities. Among its reforms were The expansion of the number of deputies and the powers of the European Parliamentand the extension to new areas of the voting system by qualified majority of the Council of the European Union.

The Nice Treaty, written after long discussions at the Nice Summit (France) in December 2000 and signed on February 26, 2001, was ratified by the Member States and entered into force on February 1, 2003.

The Treaty of Lisbon, which was signed in 2007 and is the current constitutional basis of the European Union, was presented as part of the reform process initiated with the treaties of Amsterdam (1997) and Nice (2001).

The historical context

The European Union

The imminent incorporation of new members demanded reforms in the EU.

The European Union (EU) It is a community of European countries that was formed in 1993when the European Union Treaty entered into force (also called Maastricht Treaty).

In 1995 it was made up of fifteen states, but several countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which had been part of the communist bloc until the fall of “popular democracies”, also requested their adherence to the European Union.

In 1999, the Amsterdam Treaty entered into force, which introduced modifications to the Maastricht Treaty, but the institutional reforms necessary for the imminent expansion of the European Union were mostly disounds. For this reason, an Intergovernmental Conference (CIG) of the European Union member countries was held in 2000 with the aim of putting the basis for expansion.

Twelve East and Mediterranean countries had already started negotiations: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania and Slovakia. To these was added Turkey, whose candidacy was admitted to the European Council of Helsinki, in December 1999, although the negotiations were postponed until the Turkish government fulfilled the criteria for the protection of minorities and respect for human rights.

The Nice Summit

The Nice Summit agenda, held between December 7 and 9, 2000, had the following main points:

To prevent the future European Union of 27 or 28 members from being blocked, it was considered necessary to reduce the number of decisions that needed the unanimity of all members for approval. The Commission proposed that the general norm be the qualified majority system (that is, the system by which approval depends on a certain percentage of positive votes).
The need to reduce the number of commissioners (members of the European Commission) in relation to the number of states that would become part of the European Union after the extension.
It was proposed to discuss a reform of the weighting of the vote of each country (that is, the unequal value of the votes of each state), because the extension raised the possibility of taking into account the demographic weight of the countries (mainly that of Germany, which had a much higher population).
The proclamation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (which had been written in October 2000) was projected.

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The debate prior to the summit suggested that some clashes were going to be produced among the representatives of the different states:

Germany. I would try to get more votes in the European Union Council (also called the Council of Ministers or, simply, advice), because it had more population than the rest of the Member States (82 million inhabitants)
France. Despite having 59 million inhabitants, he would refuse to break the balance of power in which the European Union had been sustained since its origins.
Netherlands. They aspired to get more votes, for their number of inhabitants (15 million), than Belgium (10 million).
Belgium. The Belgian government refused to lose the balance of power with its northern neighbor.

The obligatory reduction of the number of commissioners below the number of member states of the future expanded European Union led to the “large countries” (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain) to suggest that “small countries” could be left without a fixed commissioner in the commission. The “small countries” refused to this possibility.

The Commission tried to reduce the power of council with the objective of ending “the culture of the veto” (that is, the possibility of the ministers of the Member States, who integrated the Council, to veto decisions).

National governments, represented in the Council, refused to lose their veto power in great matters (such as taxation, immigration, cohesion and social security).

What established the Nice Treaty?

The Nice treaty extended the number and powers of Parliament.

According to some observers, in the debate that took place at the Nice summit among the representatives of the member countries The national interest prevailed and a European vision was missing. However, the tradition of the European Union was maintained and an agreement was reached.

These were the main agreements collected in the Nice Treaty, which introduced reforms in the European Union Treaty and the constituent treaties of the European communities:

A new voting votes

The controversy between “large” and “small” countries was resolved by the distribution of votes in the Council with the agreement of a new voting of votes for the currently members countries and for those who would be integrated into the future.

The new system awarded 29 votes to the “Four Great” (Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy), so it maintained parity between France and Germany despite the demographic imbalance. Spain obtained 27 votes, like Poland (which entered in 2004). The other countries obtained progressively minor votes until they reached Malta (another of the countries that entered in 2004), which obtained only 3 votes.

The roads to block decisions of the advice

A system of majorities and minorities was established that enabled three different ways to block any decision of the Council:

When the European Union had 27 members, the total votes in the Council would be 345. The threshold of the qualified majority was set in 255 votes (that is, 73.91 %) and a locking minority was established (the amount of votes that can block a decision) in 91 votes. This meant that three “large” countries (with 29 votes each) and one “small” could reach 91 votes and block any decision.
A proposal could never be approved by qualified majority when there was a simple majority of states that would oppose.
The “demographic verification clause” was established: to achieve a majority, the states that support the proposal would be at least 62 % of the total population of the European Union. This formula gave greater weight to Germany, the most populous country in the European Union, because with the support of two other “large” countries would reach the demographic proportion and could block any decision. Each of the other “large” countries would need the support of the four “large” to reach the blockade.
Since 2014, when Lisbon Treaty reforms began to apply on this issue, the qualified majority in the Council is composed of 55 % of the states (15 of the current 27 members) provided that their populations represent at least 65 % of the total population of the European Union. To block a decision, the vote of at least four member countries that represent 35 % or more of the total population of the European Union is necessary.

The composition of the European Parliament

He European Parliament became 732 seatsinstead of the 626 I had at that time. Germany would continue to have 99 deputies, while France, the United Kingdom and Italy would go from 87 to 72, Spain would go from 64 to 50 (the same number that would correspond to Poland when it was incorporated in 2004), and the descending progression would continue until reaching Malta with 5 deputies.

The seats in Parliament should serve to compensate for disparities in the distribution of votes in the Council. This composition was applied in the 2004 parliamentary elections (once the European Union was extended to 25 members), although with some differences in distribution (for example, France, the United Kingdom and Italy achieved 78 deputies each). The 2007 Lisbon Treaty extended the number of deputies to a maximum of 750 plus a president.

The number of commissioners

It was decided that, in 2005, The countries that until then had two “commissioners” or members of the European Commission (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain) would have only one.

When the European Union had 27 member states, the definitive number of commissioners would have to be decided unanimously (which should be less than 27 and function according to an equal rotation system). Anyway, the criterion of a commissioner for each Member State was maintained.

The designation of the President

The powers of the president of the Commission were reinforcedthat thereafter would be designated by qualified majority (no longer unanimously) in the European Council and whose appointment should be submitted to the approval of the European Parliament. In the 2007 Lisbon Treaty it was specified that the European Council must propose the candidate for President to Parliament to designate it.

The extension of the use of the qualified majority

The number of issues in which decisions should be made by qualified majority was increased. However, in critical matters for various countries, the right of veto was maintained (such as cohesion policies for Spain, taxation for the United Kingdom or asylum and immigration for Germany).

The “forced cooperation” mechanism

The “reinforced cooperation” mechanism was simplified that had been incorporated into the treatise of Amsterdam (1997) and that opened the possibility that some countries moved faster in matters related to integration (even if the European Union as a whole did not participate in that cooperation and its deadlines).

However, limits were given to this capacity: at least eight member countries that opted for a “reinforced cooperation” should be (with the 2007 Lisbon treaty, the number became nine) and the community policies, the issues related to the Schengen Treaty, everything that negatively affect the internal market and the issues of defense and manufacture of armament were excluded from this mechanism.

The Nice Treaty was signed on February 26, 2001. Anyway, he could only go into force when he was ratified by each Member State.

The problems of the ratification of the Nice Treaty

For the Nice treaty to enter into force, it was necessary to have the ratification of all member states. The treaty was ratified by the parliaments of all states with the exception of Irelandwhere he underwent a referendum.

With a low electoral participation, and despite a campaign in its favor by the most important political parties, 53.87 % of Irish voters rejected the treaty in June 2001. This seemed to suggest a certain distance between institutional dynamics, which pointed to a greater European unity, and public opinion, which seemed to reject it.

Nice Treaty to the Laeken Declaration

At the Summit of Nice (2000) it was agreed Convene a new conference to address a series of pending issues. It was about continuing the process of adapting the European Union institutions to the imminent expansion and extending participation.

Meanwhile, the signature of the Nice Treaty, which took place in February 2001, was overshadowed by the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York, which radically transformed the international scenario.

The European Union reacted with a deepening of the road to integration. In December 2001, The European Council gathered in Laeken (Belgium) adopted a statement on the future of the European Unionknown as LaEken's statement, which was published as an annex to the Nice Treaty. This statement raised four challenges that should be treated in a next European convention:

The need for a more precise delimitation of competencies of the European Union and of the Member States.
The need for more democracy, transparency and efficacy In the European Union.
The need for simplification of the instruments of the European Union.
The need to elaborate a European Constitution That simplify the provisions of the pre -existing treaties and integrate, with legal status, the letter of fundamental rights of the European Union.

An old claim of European circles was thus approved: the drafting of a European Union Constitution. The European Convention began in February 2002.

After long debates, In July 2003, the Convention presented a constitutional treaty project that had to be considered by an Intergovernmental Conference (CIG) initiated in October 2003, integrated by both the Member States and those who were about to integrate.

The expansion of the European Union and the Constitutional Treaty

In December 2002, at the Copenhagen Summit, the European Council agreed to expand the European Union to 25 countries with the entry of 10 states (most of them from the old communist bloc). Thus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus became members of the European Union on May 1, 2004.

The terrorist attacks in Madrid of March 11, 2004 and the entry of the ten new member countries (which was conceived as a “European reunification”) reinforced the impulse in search of greater integration and an agreement on the future Constitution.

The consensus was reached in June and The constitutional treaty was signed in October 2004. However, the ratification process did not pass and the European Constitution did not come into force. Meanwhile, In 2005 they joined the European Union Bulgaria and Romania, and in 2013 Croatia did (the United Kingdom abandoned it in 2020). It is currently composed of 27 states.

Many of the reforms introduced in the constitutional treaty, which modified previous treaty provisions (such as the Nice Treaty), They were included in the Treaty of Lisbon, signed in 2007 and in force since 2009.

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References

Fernández Navarrete, D. (2022). History of the European Union: from the origins to post-overxit. Autonomous University of Madrid Editions.
Gabel, MJ (2022). European Union. Britannica Encyclopedia. https://www.britannica.com/
European Parliament (SF). Nice treaty. Official Portal of the European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/
European Union (SF). Principles, countries, history. Official Portal of the European Union. https://european-union.europa.eu/