EU Ministers vote either by unanimity or "qualified majority", a system of weighted votes that takes account of population size, Paddy Smyth writes. France, the UK, Germany and Italy each have 10 votes with the balance of 87 votes distributed among the rest; Ireland has three. To pass, a proposal must have 62 votes, a "qualified majority".
The accession of states skews the balance progressively in favour of the smaller partners and the large states insist it must be redressed.
This can be done through a reweighting of their allocations to better reflect population, or through the introduction of a "double majority" system in which the current weighting is preserved, but a majority is also required to reflect a certain proportion of the EU's population (say 50 or 60 per cent).
The Commission is proposing a variant - one vote per member state plus a double majority population requirement.
Adjusting the current weightings is deeply problematic. Some states, for reasons of prestige, demand the same vote as other significantly larger ones. France, with a population of 58 million insists on parity with Germany (which has 82 million people) and Belgium (10 million) with Holland (15 million).
Negotiating such anomalous weightings is hugely complex but the Swedes have proposed an elegant way out: States would have a vote that is a multiple of the square root of their population. (Square roots advance at a far slower pace than the number they are the roots of, so small countries would not be swamped by the vote of the large: 1,2,3.4. . . 1,4,9,16.
If Ireland retained its three votes, the Swedish model gives Germany 14. Problem solved! The problem is the EU doesn't do `elegant'.