Brussels, 29/12/2003 (Agence Europe) - At the IGC Summit in Brussels various leaders, particularly of Spain, Poland, France and Germany, raised issues of personal and national prestige rather than substance, comments Piero Calamia, former Italian Permanent Representative to the EU, in an article in La Lettera Diplomatica on 20 December. He said that it was the question of prestige that would make it particularly difficult to repair the Brussels split.
Calamia recognises that his is a voice in the wilderness, but commented that in his view the positions taken at the Brussels IGC on qualified majority at the Council were not so very different. The double majority system proposed by the European Convention and Romano Prodi introduces an 'explicit' population size criterion, he noted, adding that the voting system foreseen in the Nice Treaty (and in previous texts, from the Treaty of Rome onwards) implicitly includes population whereby 70% is required to adopt a decision by qualified majority voting, which is a non-negligible but certainly not insurmountable difference with regard to the 60% proposed by the European Convention since it can be reduced step by step. Calamia said that during the fierce debate on vote weighting, many people failed to notice that the European Union still decides unanimously on very significant political issues and it has practically been decided that even in the future Constitution, unanimity will apply to tax, social security and justice. Calamia said this puts the scale of disagreement about double majority into perspective, adding that this would give the Irish Presidency a particular point on which to try to relaunch and conclude negotiations.