Amsterdam and Nice Treaty
... It is my aim throughout my report highlight two of these Treaties, Amsterdam and Nice, and give evidence as to why a reform process was necessary after the Amsterdam treaty. ... I will begin by looking at the Amsterdam treaty. On June 17 1997, the political leaders of each member state of the European Union agreed on a new Treaty, the Amsterdam Treaty. The main objectives of the treaty were to create political and institutional conditions whereby the European Union could rise to meet the challenges that lay ahead, such as enlargement, the fight against terrorism and threats to public health. With regards to the Enlargement process, the Amsterdam Treaty took into account that the European Union was still operating under the same rules it had when there was only six members. At the time of the Amsterdam treaty there were fifteen members and more on the way, so renegotiation of the rules and institutions was essential if there was to be any hope of the Union functioning after enlarging. ... This is one of the major issues as to why the reform process of the Nice Treaty was necessary, and why the post-Amsterdam status quo would not do. For it is widely accepted that as the EU enlarges it will become increasingly difficult for unanimous decisions to be taken, perhaps even to become impossible at some point due to the conflicting interests of so many different Member States, and although the Treaty of Amsterdam recognised this problem, it did not succeed in transferring enough policy areas to qualified majority voting. ... The Treaty of Nice proposes that decisions in a number of new areas will be made by QMV. ... The Amsterdam Treaty did amend QMV, however, just not enough. The Treaty of Nice extended QMV even further, to the extent that it would cover the majority of all legislative acts. ... A way of combating this problem is to reduce the unanimity procedure, as the Nice Treaty does, more so then the Amsterdam Treaty ever did. The Treaty of Nice comes less than two years after the entry into force of its predecessor, the Treaty of Amsterdam (1 May 1999), at a time when its effects have not yet been completely established. At the same time, the Treaty of Nice extends the Treaty of Amsterdam in areas where the latter should have offered appropriate solutions but failed to do so. The Treaty of Amsterdam was unable to resolve the three crucial questions for the future of the enlarged Community:_ the composition of the Institutions and especially the size of the Commission, the weighting of votes in the Council and the extension of qualified-majority voting related to the co-decision procedure, which I will look at later in my report (despite significant progress made in the last area). It was therefore clear from the start that the priority of the new Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), launched on 14 February 2000, would be to deal with the issue of the unfinished business of Amsterdam.