The Nice summit, held in December 2000, was presented as a conference of enlargement to the East, and for the adoption of the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Charter did not increase the rights of EU citizens but simply codified existing rights or at least some of them. In fact existing rights in most member states are superior to what appears in the Charter.
The Charter, however, had less to do with any real guarantee of fundamental rights and more to do with the process of discussion towards an EU constitution. It was also a sop to alleviate the impact of unpalatable decisions the summit was about to take. These decisions involved the other agenda at Nice - the one behind the headlines. This was the question of who would be the real decision makers in the EU after enlargement. If EU structures were not changed enlargement would automatically shift the balance of power towards the smaller countries by diluting the influence of the big countries. This was unacceptable to the big countries, and multinational capital, who had long wanted a major shift in the other direction.
But there was another important development at Nice as well, a new type of antiglobalisation protest. Seattle had now happened, a year and a half before. Meetings of world or European leaders were now the target for major anti-capitalist protests. This had just been the case at the G8 meeting in Prague. Nice was no exception. There was a huge mobilisation by the European trade union movement (initiated by the ETUC) calling for a different Europe and another demonstration by anti-capitalist protesters the following day, which was attacked by police with CS gas and stun grenades. Thirteen countries were presented at Nice as being in the process of negotiation for candidate membership - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Rumania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Turkey - ten from former Eastern Block countries - potentially expanding the EU from 15 to 28 member states. If achieved this would create an EU stretching from Ireland in the west to Bulgaria in the east, and from Sweden in the north to Malta in the south. It would be the biggest single trading block in the world, with a population of nearly 500 million - twice that
of the USA.
Nice, therefore, opened up a critical period for the EU which will stretch until the summer of 2004 when the first round of applicant states are due to join. A 'Super Summit' will then be held at which there will be a 'deeper and wider' discussion on the future of the EU. This process is broadly on course, with as at least six of the applicant countries likely to achieve some kind of membership at that time.
The agenda of the big countries was successfully achieved at Nice, and the democracy of the EU further eroded. This came partly through the extension of Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) in the Council of Ministers into 29 new areas. This included trade in services which has opened the door to the deregulation of services throughout the EU within the framework of the WTO and GAT, allowing bids for local services with to be made with no local restrictions or preferences. It also opens up trade in intellectual property rights, including the wider privatisation of natural resources, including human genes, through the patenting process.
The summit also agreed a radical reallocation of votes on the Council of Ministers between the member states, to become effective once the process of enlargement starts. Under this the big four - Germany, France, Italy and the UK - get 30 votes each and Spain 28. After that Holland gets 12, Greece, Belgium and Portugal 11, Sweden and Austria 9, Denmark, Finland and Ireland 7, and Luxembourg, four. Consequently any four of the biggest five can out vote the rest.
Of the applicant countries, Poland will join the big league with 28 votes. Of the rest Rumania will get 13, the Czech Republic and Hungary 11, Slovakia 7, Lithuania 5, and Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Cyprus 4 and Malta with 3. These changes tripled the votes of the big countries and means that after expansion the big six will be able to out-vote the other 21.
These changes in voting allocation go alongside a change to the 'qualified' part of the voting - that part which is weighted according to population. Now a vote on the Council of Ministers would have to represent 62% of the EU's population before it is valid. This gives powers to the big countries beyond their voting allocations. It means that any three of them could block a proposal by the rest of the 27. It was the introduction of this rule which persuaded Germany to drop its demand for a premium (extra weighting) on account of its 82 million population.
The weight of the big countries was also increased by changes in the allocation of Commissioners. After 2007 the size of the Commission will be capped at 20 and not all countries will have a commissioner again. It will be the smaller countries which lose out. The allocation of seats in the European Parliament was also changed towards the big powers. Germany gets 99 seats and the other big powers 74. The rest are on a scale down to Malta with five.
All this caused bitter conflict at the summit. 'Stitched up' was the term some of the smaller countries then used about it. The Portuguese Prime Minister called it an 'institutional coup d'etat'. The comments of Wim Kok, the Dutch PM, were said to have
been unprintable. Costas Simitis, the then Greek PM, accused France (who as the Presidency drafted the proposals) of trying to create a 'directorate of the big countries" - which was exactly what France was trying to do, with the full support of the other big powers of course.
The other issue at Nice was militarisation. The proposed European Rapid Reaction Force was not on the formal agenda, but it was dealt with just the same. The decision was taken to make 100,000 (army, navy, air force and special forces) available (along with 400 aircraft and 100 ships) by the member states to be used under the direction of the EU. Germany, Britain and France will provide the bulk of the personnel and equipment involved. The significance of this was not in the initial size of the force, but in the principal it established of an EU army.
Relations between the EU Rapid Reaction Force and NATO are complicated by the fact that not all members of the EU are members of NATO (Austria, Finland, Ireland and Sweden are not), and not all European members of NATO are members of the EU. Six are not - including Turkey which has the second biggest army in NATO. Ultimately, however, militarisation is an inevitable process, since it is difficult to have a capitalist super-state without an army, and therefore the ability to wage war in defence of its own interests.
Despite the ETUC mobilisation at Nice it is committed to the project of the EU, as such, and lacks any real independent perspective to oppose the attacks emanating from the structures of the EU. Increasing pressure from below, against the neo-liberal policies of the EU, had forced them to mobilise for Nice and then again for Brussels in 2001. They remain, however, wedded to social partnership ideas at both the European and national level: although when set against John Monks and the British TUC they are a more radical brand.