The European Commission has drawn up plans to remove the national veto from most stages of European Union accession talks, according to two internal draft documents.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is expected to present the long-delayed strategy on October 6, ahead of the European Council summit on October 15-16. The blueprint would be the biggest change to the internal workings of the EU in decades and would not require amending the Lisbon Treaty.
The drafts propose using the treaties’ passerelle clauses, bridging provisions that allow voting rules in a given policy area to be switched permanently from unanimity to qualified majority voting. The Commission wrote in the paper that the risk of decisions being delayed or blocked would inevitably grow as the Union took in more members.
Under the plan, unanimity would still be needed at the very start and the very end of a candidate’s membership bid. The many intermediate stages in between, which involve scores of separate unanimous decisions, would pass by majority instead.
The Commission also wants qualified majority voting applied to a wider range of policies, including sanctions, human rights, defence and security and tax evasion. Under that threshold, 15 of the 27 member states representing 65 per cent of the bloc’s population can carry a decision.
Governments wary of surrendering their veto would be offered an “emergency brake” that a capital could pull when it considered its “vital national interests” to be at stake. The catch for Brussels is that scrapping unanimity itself requires unanimity, which hands every government a chance to refuse.
A second proposal would end the guarantee that each member state sends a commissioner to Brussels. The College would be capped at two-thirds of the number of member states, meaning nine of the current 27 countries would go without a representative at any one time.
The package is presented as preparation for a Union of more than 30 members, with Montenegro and Albania closest to joining and Ukraine, Moldova and North Macedonia further back. Brussels Signal has reported that the 2030 enlargement target is political rather than contractual, with no treaty enforcing it.
Smaller and more sovereigntist governments have argued for years that unanimity is what stops them being outvoted by the larger capitals. Poland has previously ruled out any move to majority voting in foreign and security policy, and around nine states grouped together against earlier attempts.
The text is a communication, which sets out a strategic approach but carries no legal force. The decisions themselves would fall to the European Council, where the governments being asked to surrender their vetoes hold the pen.
