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The Treaty of Nice

The Sharing of Power and the Institutional Balance
in the European Union-A Continental Perspective *

Xénophon A. Yataganas **

• Abstract
• Introduction
  • Successive Intergovernmental Conferences
    Amsterdam's unfinished business
    Nice
• A. The environment and the players
  • 1. Background and agenda
  • 2. Preparatory work and technical progress
  • 3. The main issues
    • a) Qualified-majority voting and the co-decision procedure
    • b) Weighting of votes in the Council
    • c) The composition of the Commission
    • d) The composition of the European Parliament
    • e) Closer cooperation
  • 4. The Institutions' positions
    • a) The Commission
    • b) The European Parliament
    • c) The European Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance
    • d) The other Institutions
  • 5. The positions of the Member States and applicant countries
• B. The new Treaty
  • 1. Extension of the co-decision procedure and qualified-majority voting
  • 2. Weighting of votes in the Council
  • 3. Composition of the Commission and it's political accountability
  • 4. Composition of the other Institutions
  • 5. The future of the European Union's court system
  • 6. Closer cooperation and flexibility
  • 7. The Charter of Fundamental Rights
  • 8. Other issues
• Conclusions
  • Can the new structure accommodate the next enlargement?
    The European institutional architecture: Will it ever be completed?
    Towards another Intergovernmental Conference
• Abbreviations
• References

* A draft of this paper was presented to the Jean Monnet Seminar on the European Union, NAFTA and the WTO: Advanced Issues in Law and Policy, at Harvard Law School, the 22d of February 2001. I thank Professor J.H.H.Weiler and the participants to the Seminar for their very useful criticism and comments.

** Legal Advisor in the Legal Service of the European Commission. Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. The views expressed in this article are strictly personal. I am indebted to the European Commission and to the WCFIA for their financial and intellectual support. Special thanks to my colleague Pieter Van Nuffel, Head of the Commission's Task Force to the IGC for reading the draft and making several very helpful comments and to my research assistant Leonid Peisakhin, Harvard College student, for helping me to summarize the positions presented during the negotiation procedure. I also wish to thank Donald Halstead, the WCFIA Fellows Program editor, for working with me on this paper.

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© Xénophon A. Yataganas 2001