Reasons to vote No 2 - No to the loss of veto

BY ROBBIE MacGABHANN

One of the very first provisions of the Nice Treaty includes proposals for taking decisions by majority voting, or what is called in EU speak a ``qualified majority''. The selling point' of this idea, if indeed that's the right term, is that there will be no simple majorities of 50% plus one. In the provisions of the Nice Treaty it proposes that after 2005 in order to win a vote you need the support of 71.31% of the EU council, or 169 out of 237 votes.

On paper this seems like a significant majority. Nothing to worry about here, only the extremes in the political spectrum are going to be caught out and those seeking a majority will have to build a consensus around their polices in order to win such a wide majority. Well that might be a nice comfort blanket to convince yourself that the EU isn't all that bad, but it overlooks one small problem.

The qualified majority system of decision making has the power to disenfranchise whole countries. Under the proposed system Luxembourg (4 votes), Denmark (7 votes), Finland (7 votes), Ireland (7 votes), Austria (10 votes), Sweden (10 votes), and either one of the Netherlands (13 votes) or Greece (12 votes) or Belgium (12 votes) or Portugal (12 votes) could oppose an EU decision and still be overruled.

Qualified majority voting really means that we are creating an EU where seven states can be overruled by the other eight.

Why? Well it seems simply because the other eight are larger states, with more economic power, more wealth, and in the most cases greater armies than the smaller ones. The issue of armies is an important one, because security and foreign policy will be driven in many circumstances by the qualified majority system.

Decision-making on intervening in a security and foreign policy area is still taken by consensus. However once this decision is taken all subsequent ones are done by using qualified majorities. This means that the Dublin Government could embark on supporting a humanitarian mission in the former Yugoslavia and then find themselves in a conflict situation.

One of the important issues is the cost of these conflicts. The smaller EU states spend considerably less public sector funds on defence than the British, French or Germans. These states have economies that benefit from selling weapons and therefore have an interest in long conflicts. Smaller states clearly do not share these interests.

The recent dispute in Macedonia saw intervention by EU diplomats without any clear policy being discussed within the EU as to how we as a group of 15 states actually proposed to resolve this dispute or even to ask the more pertinent question of did we want to be involved at all.

The Nice Treaty proposes using qualified voting in 30 new areas, including arenas where the EU is negotiating internationally on behalf of the 15 states. This means we could be signed up to international trading agreements where Irish interests are being damaged and have absolutely no say in stopping these trade treaties etc being implemented.

What is being damaged in this treaty is the principle on which the EU was originally based, the right to say no, the right to veto decisions that were against a particular state's interests. The EU is moving away from being a collection of different size but equal states into one where the larger states increasingly call the shots, just one more reason to vote no to Nice.