Brexit will deepen the fault lines within the EU over mobility. CEPS Commentary, 12 July 2016

Much has been made of the divide that opened up in 2015 between eastern and western member states as a result of acrimonious discussions on how to handle the refugee crisis and distribute asylum applicants across the EU. Against the prevailing political sentiment in certain member state capitals, Germany and France pushed through a plan devised by the European Commission to relocate 120,000 refugees, by a qualified majority vote in the Council. Rather than creating an east/west divide, however, the vote split the group of (relatively) new Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) of the EU into two factions: Romania, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary voted against the plan, whereas several other CEECs, namely Poland, Bulgaria and the Baltic states, joined the controversial motion on the side of the other (northern, southern and western) member states. Finland abstained. Few member states have shifted their positions in the meantime. If anything, in fact, they have coalesced among the Visegrad 4, following a change of government in Poland; and they have hardened, as a result of new proposals by the Commission to fine member states that refuse to accept refugees. With Hungary’s referendum on the Commission’s relocation scheme scheduled for October 2nd, tensions are set to intensify even further.

Bridging qualified majority and unanimity decision-making in the EU. IHS Political Science Series No. 132, February 2013

The EU has tried to bridge decision making by qualified majority and unanimity over the years by expanding qualified majorities (consensus) or by making unanimities easier to achieve. I call this decision-making procedure q-“unanimity” and trace its history from the Luxembourg compromise to the Lisbon Treaty, and to more recent agreements. I analyze the most recent and explicit mechanism of this bridging (article 31 (2) of the Lisbon Treaty) and identify one specific means by which the transformation of qualified majorities to unanimities is achieved: the reduction of precision or scope of the decision, so that different behaviors can be covered by it. I provide empirical evidence of such a mechanism by analyzing legislative decisions. Finally, I argue that this bridging is a ubiquitous feature of EU institutions, used in Treaties as well as in legislative decision-making.