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The Council of the European Union is one of the fundamental bodies of the community structure and it is essential for the decision-making process of the community itself. The Council has a legislative, but also an executive function. It has a legislative function as far as concerns all the norms, in particular the ones concerning the market within the European Union, while it has a coordinating and executive function as far as concerns the activities relative to the” second pillar”, that is foreign and common security policy and also to the “third pillar”, justice and home affairs. The Council is made up of one representative for each Member State; at the moment 25 Countries participate in it. Since May, there have been 27 countries, because Romania and Bulgaria- having signed the accession treaty- can participate in the Council as observers and, in 2007, they will become full member states. The configuration of the Council varies depending on what subjects are on the agenda; for example, we have the Council for Agriculture – a very important Council, since it manages about 50% of the community budget - we have the Council of Industry, that deals with the industrial matters of the European Union; the Council for Energy, the Council for Telecommunications, the Council for the Economic and Financial Affairs, that is the Council that you often hear of, the ECOFIN Council, that decides whether the Maastricht standards have been met (that is, 3%, Deficit GDP ratio and 60%, Public Debt GDP ratio). All these different Councils are coordinated by the Council of General Affairs that gives cohesion to all the different activities and that prepares the decisions for the higher body that is the European Council. The decisions of the Council are prepared by a diplomatic body, the permanent Representative Committee, composed of the ambassadors representing the single member states and whose task is to facilitate the actions of the Council. In fact, as you can easily guess, several norms are discussed within the Council and therefore it would be impossible for the Council to take any decisions if there wasn’t a prior appropriate decision from the permanent Representative Committee. But how does the Council vote? In some cases the Council votes unanimously, but only for the most delicate matters, such as foreign affairs and security, where the heart of the different nations’ sovereignty is involved. The Council votes unanimously also as far as concerns justice and home affairs matters, but in many subject areas, the so-called first pillar areas, the ones pertaining to agriculture, common commercial policy and the great internal market, the Council votes by a qualified majority system. Up to now, the qualified majority has been a weighed majority. This means that every member state has the weighting of its votes. Up to the Treaty of Nice, the biggest states had 10 votes; now, thanks to this Treaty, the biggest states have 29 votes, 27 for Spain, 14 for Romania and Bulgaria, and so on. A decision is taken when 71-72% of the votes is reached within the Council. This means that a certain decision can be blocked with 90 votes, that is to say that three big States and one small State can block the adoption of a decision. As you can see, it is a very complex and difficult process to understand for the citizens and that is why the constitutional Treaty has introduced some amendments, which we are going to talk about in the following lessons. But above all the Treaty has introduced the so-called “double majority” system, a system that simplifies the decision-making process and that allows the citizens to understand what the democratic legitimacy is.
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