The reform treaty – an undone deal?

Poland’s EU partners are struggling to understand its interpretation of a deal on voting rights in the Council of Ministers. Simon Taylor reports.

Ioaninna is a small Greek town on the western shore of Lake Pavmotis. It has given its name to a little used device in the EU’s legal toolbox which has taken on a new lease of life after playing a crucial part in assuaging Polish fears about German dominance in the European Union. But a disagreement between Polish Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczynski and other EU leaders over the rules for using the device is threatening to dismantle the carefully crafted compromise on a new treaty that was reached in the early hours of 23 June.

• Old Ioannina

The ‘Ioaninna compromise’ was invented in 1994, just before the enlargement of the EU to 15 members with the addition of Austria, Sweden and Finland. It takes its name from the city which hosted an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers and was formally approved at the EU summit that followed in Corfu in June 1994. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso points out that he and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana are the only EU politicians still serving who were present at the birth of the compromise. The compromise was designed to assuage fears that member states’ power would be further diluted in a Union of 15 members. It allowed countries which did not have quite enough votes to form a blocking minority (between 23 and 25 when 26 were needed) to ask the Council of Ministers to carry on working to find a deal with broader support (with only 19 votes against). This agreement had to be reached "within a reasonable time" to stop member states in a minority position blocking decisions indefinitely.

Sightings of Ioaninna have been remarkably rare. The Spanish tried to use it once but it was rejected and UK farm minister Douglas Hogg sought to trigger Ioannina for a decision at the height of the BSE crisis in the late 1990s but again unsuccessfully.

• Revised Ioannina

Despite its rarity, the Ioaninna compromise shot back to the top of the agenda at the June summit when a revised version emerged as a crucial element in convincing the reluctant Polish government to sign up to a new system of voting in the Council of Ministers, the double majority. This paved the way for an agreement on the outlines of a new treaty to replace the rejected constitution.

The Polish delegation had gone into the summit insisting they were prepared to die for the square-root voting system which mitigates the population advantage of the largest member states like Germany. Moving to a system where the backing of 65% of the population is needed for decisions, Germany, with 82 million citizens, will have a clear advantage in votes.

But after rejecting an initial proposal which did not address its concerns on the voting system and after a threat from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to launch a treaty-drafting inter-governmental conference (IGC) without Poland’s agreement, the Polish government accepted a deal which included delaying the introduction of the double majority voting system until 2014 at the earliest and possibly as late as 2017.

The constitution negotiated in 2004 had included a revised form of the Ioaninna compromise where 75% of member states or member states representing 75% of the EU’s population could request the Council to continue working to find agreement with broader support. Again, the constitution says that this should be done "within a reasonable time" and "without prejudicing obligatory time limits laid down by EU law". As EU decision-making rules generally set a three-month deadline for the Council to reach a decision on a Commission proposal or Parliament opinion, this could effectively mean that decisions under Ioannina cannot be delayed by more than three months.

The mechanism was included in the draft constitution at the suggestion of the Polish government. But it was not discussed at the June summit until the early hours of Saturday morning.

Although a first proposal for a deal presented by the German EU presidency on Friday afternoon (22 June) included the Ioannina compromise, it was only around 3.30 am that the Poles raised the subject, asking for further changes to the compromise in their favour. It was decided that the thresholds for triggering the mechanism should be lowered to 55% of the population and 55% of the member states from 2017.

• Polish misunderstandings

Less than a week later Jarosław Kaczynski threatened to unravel the whole deal by saying that under the revised Ioaninna compromise countries could block decisions for two years. This prompted firm rebukes from Portuguese Prime Minister José Socrates and Commission President Barroso who said that there had been a "misunderstanding" and that no member state wanted to reopen the issues agreed at the summit.

Senior officials who were present at the final stages of the negotiations say that the figure of two years was never mentioned to the Poles. Jean-Pierre Jouyet, French secretary of state for European affairs, said this week: "Everything that was said [at the summit] was written down and what was written down was perfectly in line with what was said. I don’t see any reason for reopening [the subject]."

If the Poles are serious about being given the right to delay decisions for two years, they will face strong resistance in the negotiations, which will start next week (23-24 June) to turn the draft mandate from the June summit into a treaty text.

• Blocking tool or psychological reassurance?

Senior politicians are confident that the revised Ioaninna compromise will not be used to block EU decisions once the new treaty is ratified.

German Socialist MEP Jo Leinen, who drafted the European Parliament report on the IGC mandate, says that Ioaninna will not lead to "deadlock". "It’s intended to be an exception rather than the rule," he says. Leinen points out that the mechanism has "never been used" despite being around since 1994 because in the Council of Ministers "they have always tried to form a consensus and not infringe on sensitive interests".

Leinen’s view is shared by German centre-right MEP Elmar Brok, one of those who will represent the Parliament on the IGC. "Ioaninna is not another form of blocking instrument, it’s an instrument for rethinking for a reasonable length of time," he says.

When the proposal was made to revise the Ioaninna compromise at the summit and lower the thresholds for triggering its use, it was intended to reassure the Poles further that their fears of having decisions imposed on them in the Council were misplaced. But the expectation was that it would never actually be used or only very rarely. One senior diplomat said after the summit that the measure was meant to "provide psychological reassurance and build confidence" in the run-up to the move to double majority voting.

The reality is that decisions in Council are rarely put to the vote and efforts are being made to ensure the widest possible consensus for agreements, as Leinen points out.

The hope therefore is that Ioaninna should remain more famous as a tourist destination than as a means to block EU decision-making.

Poland’s EU partners are struggling to understand its interpretation of a deal on voting rights in the Council of Ministers. Simon Taylor reports.