The dynamics of European integration: a constitutional analysis of the Amsterdam treaty

Research question: how to explain the choice of European voting rules? For more than forty years, the dynamics of European integration have promoted a voluntary and peaceful cooperation throughout Western Europe. The integration process, characterised by a stepwise but continuous Treaty reform, has considerably widened the former European Communities' scale of jurisdiction by transferring competencies for many policy areas from the national to the European level (Konig, 1996: 553). Today's EU has also increased its scope by enlarging its membership from six to fifteen countries with a population of more than 320 million people. In terms of scale and scope, the dynamic feature of European integration, compared to other transnational processes, is its continuous intergovernmental rule-making (Moravcsik 1993: 473). Initiated and adopted by a growing number of member-state governments, intergovernmental conferences have established and strengthened a set of organs and complex voting rules for binding European legislation (Bednar et aI. the EU's rules. Important changes in the EU's institutional framework are necessary for guaranteeing proper functioning of European legislation, particularly in the case of further enlargement. The reform of the rules is especially concerned with two topics, the extension of majority voting and the degree of parliamentary participation. The EU's growing membership, and particularly the forthcoming accession of rather dissimilar Eastern and Southern European countries, requires relaxing the unanimity voting quota in the Council of Ministers in order to decrease the danger of grid-lock in European legislation (Konig and Brauninger, 1998a). While the European Parliament (EP) already participates in the cooperation and assent procedure (1987) and the co-decision procedure (1993), these procedures are modestly applied to European legislation: only about First publ. in: The rules of integration / Gerald Schneider ...