British and Euro Dopers, pleas 'splain this to me.

Factual Questions
1

I was pointed by a friend to an article in the Telegraph about a meeting in Finland and something called “qualified majority voting” and it’s effect on the domestic policy of EU member nations. I read the whole thing and got terribly confused, and realized I didn’t really have the necessary background to understand this.

I gather that the Telegraph is a rather right-leaning publication, and therefore might be a bit alarmist on the subject of national soveriegnty. However, I found two paragraphs in the middle of the piece that I, if I were a British subject, certainly would view with alarm:

Huh?

I’m just an ignorant Yankee who doesn’t even really understand the context of this, so I have a boatload of questions.

Didn’t the EU Constitution fail?
What is the ECJ and from where does it draw its authority?
Does membership in the EU imply surrender of national soveriegnty?
What is qualified majority voting?
There’s a bit in there about there being no provision for habeau corpus in EU law. So what? Habeas corpus is a part of British law, right?
How much power does the EU parliament-thingy actually have?

Please help me out. I don’t get any of this.

2

You don’t get it?

Join the rest of the gang.

Most of us have no sodding idea what it’s all about apart from the fact it costs us plenty and what’s more we in the UK seem to get the shitty end of whatever stick they point

3

See Voting in the Council of the European Union - Wikipedia
to some degree it’s like an electoral college, designed to weight the vote to reflect (or ameliorate) the size of a members state’s population, instead of a straight 51/49% vote.
The EU establishment in Brussels hopes to implement what it sees as the ‘best’ or ‘essential’ parts of the rejected Constitution anyway, on the grounds that ‘those pesky voters gave the wrong answer’.
The ECJ was set up under the original European Coal & Steel Community treaties and exists to arbitrate disputes between member states, or states and the European Commission. Individuals cannot appeal to it.
Membership of the Common Market always implied some degree of surrender of national sovereignity, although politicians at the time hotly denied this.
habeas corpus has been so whittled away to the point that it hardly exists these days, anyway.

4

Wikipedia has this to say about Qualified Majority Voting

[quote=Wikipedia]
Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) is a voting procedure employed in the Council of the European Union for some decisions. According to the procedure, each member state has a fixed number of votes. The number allocated to each country is roughly determined by its population, but progressively weighted in favour of smaller countries.

To pass a vote by QMV, all three of the following conditions must apply:

[ul][li]the proposal must be supported by 232 out of the total of 321 votes (72.27%); [/li][li]the proposal must be backed by a majority of member states; [/li][li]the countries supporting the proposal must represent at least 62% of the total EU population.[/ul] [/li][/quote]

It sounds like QMV is roughly equivalent to the American Electoral College: Mostly based on population, but weighted so the smaller states hopefully don’t become completely irrelevant.

The article mentions that they’re trying to make it easier for the EU to pass legislation, and harder for member countries to block legislation that they don’t like. Sounds like a real mess.

5

::shrugs::

Not. got. a. clue.

6

Me neither
:: changes the subject to football ::

7

The EU Constitution did fail, but that doesn’t mean that the framework of treaties that govern the European Communities and the European Union don’t continue to funciton. Most of the work in Brussels is really work of the EC, not the EU - the two continue to exist separately, and to make things more complicated, there are really two European communities - the European Community and the European Atomic Community, but all three of them have the same membership and share the same institutions - the Commission may funciton as the Commission of the EC and in the next issue that is legally based on the European Atomic Community Treaty as the Commission of the EAC/Euratom. There used to be a third community, the European Community for Coal and Steel, which ceased to exist in 2002 when its founding treaty concluded in 1952 expired. The EC Treaty, the EAC Treaty and the EU Treaty have no date of expiry.

The ECJ ist the supreme judicial organ of the two communites and the Union. It has the power to declare national laws and national legal practice as violating Community/Union law, making the national law inapplicable, and it is often doing so. The Court of Justice, nowadays supplemented by a Court of First Instance, is located in Luyemburg and is not to be confues with the European Court of Human Rights, which is located in Strasbourg and isn’t a Community/Union organ at all but an organ of the Council of Europe, which in turn is an organization totally different from the Communities and the Union (but the two are interwoven - every EC/EAC/EU member is also a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, and the ECJ and the ECHR are cooperating in evolvng the fundamental rights jurisdiction on the European level).

It’s all very different and mostly due to historic reasons - the EU wasn’t founded instantaneously, but gradually evolved over decades, with new treaties being added to, but not replacing, the old ones.

8

Regarding qualified voting: The comparison to the American Electoral College is misleading. It’s a way of voting in the Council of the EC/EAC/EU, the main organ of those organizations staffed by representatives of the member states. The Council is very important in decision making, and in certain cases defined by the treaties, it does not use a simple one state, one vote method, but weighs the nations according to population.

9

I’m beginning to be sorry I asked.

10

It’s not a Yankee thing, either - most Europeans don’t really understand this network of Communities, Unions, Councils, Courts and whatever that have been making up the process of European unification since the foundation of the Council of Europe in 1950.

The proposed Constitution Treaty basically wanted to merge the EC Treaty and the EU Treaty into one, leaving the EAC/Euratom (Euratom is just another abbreviation for the European Atomic Community) unaffected. It would not have amended the law itself fundamentally apart from some terminological changes.

You also asked about the Parliament. Its role is weaker than that of parliaments in most jurisdiction, which is criticized a lot because the Parliament is the only organ elected by the people directly on the Community/Union level. But it has been able to expand its influence constantly. Its role in the legislative process is rather poor; the Treaties provide for certain issues that the approval of the Parliament is required; for other issues, the Parliament merely gives statements about its opinion. The major legislative organ of the EC/EU is the Council, and the Parliament isn’t even allowed to propose bills independently (that’s the Commission’s job). But it has the power to pass the budget, which is its most important weapon in conflicts with other organs.

11

I really wish I had the faintest notion of what it’s all about. But I don’t.

Mine and others’ responses are indicative of part of the problem.

12

Or in your case Ipswich Town :smiley:

13

OK, maybe a historical view might help.

After WWII, the idea of European unification came up in order to avoid another war that would devastate the continent. Because of its importance for the arms industry, the idea, mostly put forward by French foreign minister Robert Schuman, was to put the coal and steel sector under common administration (the Council of Europe, as said, had already been founded in 1950, but its competences are slim - it’s more of a debating platform). In 1952, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was founded, with France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Italy as original members.

The Treaties of Rome, which came into force in 1957, founded two more communites: The European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Community (EAC/Euratom). Each one was based on its own treaty, and the three communites functioned parallelly, but the organs were merged - the Commission was exercizing its powers as Commission of the EEC in one case and as Commission of the EAC in another, depending on which treaty it was applying. The ECSC was a special case because it had a slightly different organizational and terminological framework.

Over the years, the membership was increased from the original six to (now) 25: In 1973, Britain, Denmark and Ireland joined; in 1981, Greece; in 1986, Spain and Portugal; in 1995, Finland, Austria, and Sweden (the Norwegians voted against accession in a referendum). In 2004, ten East and Southern European nations joined. Parallelly, new treaties were concluded between the member states, amending or supplementing existing treaties. Important ones were the Single European Act of 1986 and the European Union Treaty of 1992. In 1992 as well, the European Economic Community, by far the most important one because its treaty covered the process of economic harmonization, was renamed the European Community (EC). In 2002, the ECSC Treaty, which was limited to a period of fifty years, expired (which didn’t make any difference because everything the ECSC Treaty covered can also be based on the other treaties). The whole cmplex is now left with the European Union and the two remaining European communites, namely the European Community and the European Atomic Community (the latter one is of very minor importance).

The problem is that the framework wasn’t installed instantaneosly in one single constitutional document, as you Americans did in 1787.

14

Yes, EU membership involves some surrender of national sovereignty. Governments are still essentially free to carry out many of their major functions: defense of the realm, holding elections, collecting taxes, and so on. However, the EU has a huge influence on trade, foreign policy as it doesn’t relate to conflict, and labo(u)r laws, among other things. Also, countries which have adopted the Euro naturally cede the authority to regulate their own markets, naturally.