Publication: La reforma institucional en el Tratado de Amsterdam
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1998-06
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Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales
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Abstract
The Treaty of Amsterdam, given the institutional approach of its first foundation, will hardly be more than a stopping place in the European process. There has been some positive reform, especially concerning the parliamentary institutíon. The extent and simplification of codecision have been an outstanding success of the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference. However, the remaining items of institutional reform, the few that it has been possible to agree on, are not up to par. The medium and small-sized States have clung firmly to their antidemocratic privileges and to the principie of equality of States, refusing to restore the balance destroyed after the successive extensions of the system of weighting of votes in the Council and this has obstructed the creation of the reform necessary for undertaking future extensión.
Furthermore, their intransigence was cloaked with a false Europeanism as they called for the extensión of the vote by qualified majority but without remodelling the overrepresentation they have in the Council. The déficit of democracy in the European Union, the origin of which is none other than the unequal sharing of power among
the nations represented by their governments, remains and will increase with the new extensions in a strategy well studied by the medium and small States. If to this we add a future Commission with identical composition to that of the
Council, or a Court of Justice to which prívate individuáis have no facilities of direct access, the conclusión is that the process of integration, apart from grandiloquent
rhetoric, is progressively more intergovernmental. This has always been an object of International Public Law, but, if there were any doubt, after Amsterdam, it will be a case of «more than yesterday and less than tomorrow». However, not
all jusinternationalists are satisifed when we see that the system of the progressive integration of nations is heading towards regional cooperation between States. The Treaty of Amsterdam proves that the system of revisión used up until now, based on a diplomatic conference with fifteen States, has been exhausted and is increasingly non-viable for making the European Union progress towards and prepare
itself for the 21st century, but there is no other system: the Treaty of Amsterdam announces new Intergovernmental Conferences to do what was left undone in 1997, that is to say, two Intergovernmental Conferences for the price of one.