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1996/97
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In the previous episodes we said that the accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden and the opening of the negotiations to the 10 applicants from central, eastern and southern Europe, had risen the following issue: how to make the European institutions (that had been conceived many years before for an integrated Europe composed of 6 then 9, 10 and finally 21 countries) to work effectively and democratically. So there is a series of discussions, especially related to the voting system within the council, which is a quite complex system and so-called “weighed”, in which the vote of each country is taken into consideration also according to the relative weight of the people of each country (that’s why it is called “weighed”). In 1996, during these discussions they realised that the treaties had to be further amended and therefore, at the European conference of Turin in March '96 and then at the European conference of Florence in June 1996, a debate is opened in order to amend the treaties, especially from the point of view of the function of the council: they discuss about the power balance among the different European governments within the council, in order to broaden the power of the European Parliament. They especially wanted to assign some further tasks to the European Parliament, in the so-called “legislative co-decision process”, that is the procedure by which the parliament and the council decide together or, for better saying, they agree on the enforcement of the guidelines and regulations for the community. By so doing they could consolidate and confirm the commission’s powers and define the areas in which the European Union should intervene, wherever the single countries were not able to act effectively, according to a well-known principle already present in the Maastricht Treaty, the so-called "subsidiarity principle". These are the essential points. It is evident that there are many other items, for instance there is a big debate concerning the social policy, that is whether the European Union must intervene on the issues relative to the workers’ rights, more than the national countries already do; or some other questions relative to the European responsibility regarding security and legal matters; or the problem of making the European Union’s action more effective in the foreign policy field. In a few words, all a series of very practical discussions about the role of the Union. All these discussions occur in another traditional inter-governmental conference, which is a negotiation among democrats representing the single national governments. This discussion occurs during the Italian conference, afterwards under the Irish chairmanship and then under the Dutch one. The negotiations finally end in June 1997, with the approval of the Amsterdam Treaty. But due to all these conflicts among the different governments, they cannot achieve any agreement neither on the power balance within the council, nor on the areas in which the council should decide by majority decision, nor on the make-up of the Commission. To summarise, the governments do not agree on the essential issues concerning the function of the European institutions. That is why in the Amsterdam treaty, that was signed in Amsterdam in June 1997, all the parts relative to the institutions, council, parliament and commission’s functions, do not find any appropriate setting. Therefore the different governments decide to undersign a declaration in the margin of the treaty, in which they list the so-called "left over" of the Amsterdam treaty, that is the parts on which the governments had not been able to find an agreement and for which they postponed to another government conference the agreement on the governments’ powers within the council, the areas in which the council should use a majority vote system, the make-up of the commission and the make-up of the European parliament.
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