This is one of the major issues as to why the reform process of the Nice Treaty was necessary, and why the post-Amsterdam status quo would not do. For it is widely accepted that as the EU enlarges it will become increasingly difficult for unanimous decisions to be taken, perhaps even to become impossible at some point due to the conflicting interests of so many different Member States, and although the Treaty of Amsterdam recognised this problem, it did not succeed in transferring enough policy areas to qualified majority voting.
This basically means that no one country has a veto over the issue in question. The Treaty of Nice proposes that decisions in a number of new areas will be made by QMV. These areas include commercial policy and some aspects of free movement of people. However, decisions in a number of other important areas - such as a common EU foreign and security policy, as well as direct taxation - will still require unanimity.
The qualified majority voting (QMV) among the fifteen member states is sixty two out of the total of eighty-seven weighted votes. The weighting of the votes is dependant upon the size of the member states, for example, the "major" states like Britain, France, Italy and Germany have ten votes each, whereas Luxembourg has four votes and the rest lie in between these numbers. A law can never be passed that goes against three of the major states as a decision can be stopped by twenty six votes (Pinder,J. 2001, p38). The Amsterdam Treaty did amend QMV, however, just not enough. The Treaty of Nice extended QMV even further, to the extent that it would cover the majority of all legislative acts. As mentioned previously, the prospect of enlargement begs the question, how will the Union function with so many players? A way of combating this problem is to reduce the unanimity procedure, as the Nice Treaty does, more so then the Amsterdam Treaty ever did. The Treaty of Nice comes less than two years after the entry into force of its predecessor, the Treaty of Amsterdam (1 May 1999), at a time when its effects have not yet been completely established.
