Spain and Poland refuse to give up the disproportionate number of votes allocated to them in December 2000 at the European Council meeting in Nice.
In general, larger member states want much more influence than agreed to in Nice, and point to their population size to justify that claim. Smaller member states fear that they would lose any real influence on EU decision-making in such a scenario.
The president of the Convention on the future of Europe, which laid the groundwork for the IGC, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, commented on the problem at a meeting in Athens earlier this year: “One has to take into account the number of states, but one also has to take population into consideration.” The central question is indeed how to join the principles of “one man, one vote” and “one state, one vote”.
The British mathematician Lionel Penrose came up with an elegant solution to this problem in 1946: he showed that the number of votes for any particular country should be equal to the square root of its population size.
You may like
This is easily explained: one Dutch voter has more influence on the composition of the Dutch government than one German voter has on the composition of the German government. There are simply more German voters than Dutch voters.
In order to ensure that the overall influence of every European voter is equal, the number of German votes in the EU should be larger than the number of Dutch votes. Penrose showed that to satisfy this demand, the number of votes allocated to a particular country should be exactly equal to the square root of its population size.
The proposal Penrose made turned out to be more than just a theory. At the European Council meeting in Nice in 2000, the Swedish government, backed by the Finns, actually proposed introducing this square root formula to determine the number of votes in the EU’s Council of Ministers.
In contrast to the needlessly complex voting system agreed to in Nice, Penrose’s proposal is objective, flexible, transparent and scientifically sound. It offers a solution to the most serious problem the EU currently faces: how to distribute voting power between larger and smaller member states.
To put it another way: how to join the principles of “one man, one vote” and “one state, one vote”. Without a clear answer to this question, the mutual suspicion between larger and smaller EU member states will no doubt remain a divisive issue for many years to come.