Weighting votes in the Council: Towards a ‘Warsaw compromise’?

One of the key obstacles to a swift agreement on how to reform the EU institutions is the belated insistence of Poland to reopen the issue of voting weights in the Council. The system unanimously agreed in the Constitutional Treaty (CT) foresaw a double majority system under which a (qualified) majority requires two elements: at least 55 % of the member states accounting for at least 65 % of the EU’s population. In 2004, the then Polish government had agreed, under considerable pressure, to this double majority formula. The new Polish government has for some time now insisted that this issue should be reconsidered. Initially it proposed that instead of the double majority the so-called ‘Penrose’, or square root formula should be used under which only one majority would be required, namely one calculated using the square root of member states ’ populations. Recently, however, the Polish government has changed its stance and is now ready to accept the principle of a double majority approach, but one in which the second majority element would not be based on a majority of the population, but rather on the square root of the population. It is widely assumed that the insistence of the Polish government on the square root approach is motivated by the desire to increase its voting power. Our figures show, however, that this will not be necessarily the case. Poland is in general unlikely to gain a lot from the square root approach because it is a ‘nearly-big ’ member state: 21 member states are smaller than Poland, and only 5 are larger. An