The Treaty of Nice, signed on 26 February 2001, adapted the EU institutions to the arrival of ten new members in 2004: it reweighted votes in the Council, capped the size of the Commission and the Parliament, and extended majority voting. Irish voters first rejected it in 2001.
- Official name
- Treaty of Nice amending the Treaty on European Union, the Treaties establishing the European Communities and certain related acts
- Signed
- 26 February 2001, Nice, France
- In force
- 1 February 2003
- Signatories
- 15 states
At the end of the 1990s, the EU was negotiating with a dozen candidate countries. Its institutions had been designed for six members and then stretched to fifteen. The Amsterdam Treaty had left the key questions open: how many Commissioners, how to weigh each country’s vote in the Council, and where to extend majority voting. An intergovernmental conference opened on 14 February 2000 and concluded at the Nice European Council in December 2000. The treaty was signed on 26 February 2001 and entered into force on 1 February 2003.
What it changed
- Voting in the Council. Votes were reweighted to reflect population better, with a “demographic safety net”: a member state could ask for verification that a qualified majority represented at least 62% of the EU population.
- The Commission. From 2005, the Commission has had one member per member state, the largest countries giving up their second Commissioner. The Council, acting unanimously, could later decide to reduce the number and introduce rotation.
- Majority voting. Around 27 policies and measures moved from unanimity to qualified majority voting in the Council.
- The European Parliament. The maximum number of MEPs was raised to 732 to make room for new members, and codecision was extended to a few more areas.
At the same summit, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union was proclaimed on 7 December 2000, as a text that was not yet legally binding.
Example
The ten countries that joined on 1 May 2004, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, entered under the institutional rules agreed at Nice. Each received one Commissioner, and the reweighted Council votes applied in the enlarged Union.
Debates and limits
In Ireland, where ratification required an amendment to the Constitution approved by referendum, voters rejected the Treaty of Nice on 7 June 2001, by 529,478 votes to 453,461. A second referendum, held on 19 October 2002, approved it, allowing the treaty to enter into force.
Critics of the treaty argued that the negotiations had focused on each country’s weight in the institutions rather than on how the Union should work. Leaders themselves accepted that a wider reform was needed: at the Laeken European Council of 14 and 15 December 2001, they set up a Convention on the Future of Europe, chaired by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, which prepared the Constitutional Treaty.