EU Leaders Approve Reform Package at Nice SummitEuropean Union (EU) leaders agreed to a reform package on the early morning of Monday, December 11, after they bargained over the balance of voting power in marathon negotiations.Leaders from the 15 EU member states had argued about how to extend qualified majority voting to wider policy areas and how to reweight their votes in the decision-making EU Council of Ministers. France, which currently holds the EU rotating presidency, had put forward several compromise proposals since Saturday, the scheduled closing day of the summit, but other members, especially the smaller nations, raised strong objections. The Nice Summit, the final meeting of the year-long proceedings of the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) on EU institutional reform, is crucial for the Union in implementing its eastward expansion strategy in the near future. The Treaty of Nice approved by the leaders as a final result is a revised version of previous Treaties on which the European bloc is founded. The summit in Nice, the French Riviera city, is the longest one involving the toughest issues in the history of the bloc. The EU is now faced with a historic enlargement process involving 13 candidate countries, most of them from Central and Eastern Europe. The search for a larger Europe Union implies a new stage in redefining an European map. |
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