Dramatically easing the process of EU reform by curbing national veto rights on amendments to the treaty will be a key demand of the President of the European Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, in the forthcoming treaty-changing Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC), The Irish Times has learned.
Sources close to Mr Prodi say he favours both the introduction of qualified majority voting for a range of treaty changes, and making possible the quick implementation of such changes even if not all member-states have put them through national ratification.
With the ink barely dry on the Amsterdam Treaty, memberstates had been hoping the planned IGC, needed to deal with the so-called "unfinished business" of Amsterdam, would be minimalist in scope and confine itself to a largely non-controversial agenda.
So Mr Prodi's radical and ambitious suggestion is likely to get short shrift from many capitals, not least those of the smaller member-states like Ireland where it will be seen as a threat to the equality of member-states that they regard as fundamental to the balance of the treaty.
In Dublin, one source close to EU policy-making described the suggestion as akin to "imposing federalism on smaller memberstates, but not the larger".
Sources close to Mr Prodi accept the climate may not yet be right for the idea, but say he believes in leading from the front. In an implied critique of the Santer years, one says Mr Prodi sees "the single most important function of the Commission", after legislation and management of Community programmes, as setting out the real needs of the EU, however controversial, and "not simply playing the role of barometer of member-state opinion".
To strengthen his hand he has asked a group of the former Belgian prime minister, Mr Jean Luc Dehaene, the British Labour peer, Lord Simon, and the former German president, Dr Richard von Weizsacker, to report by next month on treaty reform options.
The challenge for the IGC, the sources say, is not just to put in place the minimal reforms required by the Amsterdam Treaty, but to prepare for the reality of enlargement by 10 to 12 states over the next decade. That need not mean making the institutional and policy changes now, but making it possible to implement them more easily in the future.
The nightmare scenario is held up of a European Union in permanent time-consuming IGCs or of individual small, "rogue" states holding up all future reform over unrelated issues.
Irish diplomats have always insisted that such fears are much exaggerated.
While Mr Prodi is understood to accept that some areas of the treaty amendment will always require unanimity, such as votes on accession or on voting arrangements themselves, he believes many policy areas, and indeed much of the treaty, are amenable to qualified majority voting. But, for example, the idea of majority voting on tax harmonisation or on structural fund allocation would be anathema to Ireland.
An analysis of the IGC by a high-powered committee of Dublin's Institute for European Affairs, involving senior diplomats, academics, and politicians, is due to be published shortly and is expected to come out strongly in favour of confining it to a much more limited agenda.
The Amsterdam Treaty provides that an IGC must be completed before the next single accession in order to resolve "unfinished business"; the reduction in the number of commissioners to one per country, the rebalancing of voting weights in favour of larger states in the Council of Ministers, and some extension of qualified majority voting.
But the Cologne summit in June also allowed for an IGC mandate that could include discussion of "other necessary amendments to the treaties arising as regards the European institutions . . . in implementing the Treaty of Amsterdam."
A further, more fundamental review is also required by the treaty ahead of the EU's enlargement to 20. It may be that in raising such radical demands now Mr Prodi is in reality preparing the ground for that review.