With the Scottish vote, Brussels can heave a great big sigh of relief. CEPS Commentary, 19 September 2014

On the morning after the momentous vote in Scotland, Michael Emerson also breathes a deep sigh of relief that the nightmare scenario of secession will not unfold and expresses his hope that Brussels can now return to its own business, with its renewed leadership feeling a bit encouraged to go about their burdensome agenda with more confidence.

The relief of Vienna in vain. Assessing the Implications of Turkish EU-membership for Council of Ministers’ Decision-making. IES WORKING PAPER 1/2011

This research forecasts the implications of Turkish membership for decision-making effectiveness and dynamics within the Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU). Effectiveness is determined in this research by 'passage probability': the chance that a random proposal as put forth by the European Commission (EC) is accepted by the Council of Ministers. Dynamics are determined by means of the Shapley-Shubik Index (SSI), which plots power values of individual member states by forecasting a number of possible EU enlargement scenarios. This study falsifies earlier research by Baldwin and Widgrén.1 It finds that the implications of Turkish EU-membership for EU decision-making efficiency are ambiguous and depend on the number of other candidate states entering the EU alongside Turkey, as well as the timeslot - 2014 or 2020 - at which the accession would take place. Moreover, this study asserts that Turkish EU-accession would result in unequal- but generally negative - power changes among other EU member states, although member states with similar demographic weight will experience comparable changes. Finally, it appears that the larger a EU member state is, the more power it loses if Turkey would join the EU.