The Treaty of Amsterdam provides for the abolition of the Social Policy Protocol, the mechanism by which the United Kingdom allowed the other Member States to advance on the social policy front without taking part itself. Following the statement by the new British Government that it intends to join forces with the other Member States on social policy, it was decided to incorporate the Social Policy Agreement into the Treaty establishing the European Community.
The United Kingdom will also implement shortly the directives adopted by the other fourteen Member States under the Social Policy Agreement. The British opt-out from social policy will therefore be over in practice well before the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam and the formal abolition of the Social Policy Protocol.
The Community's institutional balance has for a long time been state-based, with the Member States acting as virtually the sole driving force behind European integration. As this process of construction has developed, the question of legitimacy has become more and more acute. Thus the Treaty of Maastricht sparked off the incorporation of the principle of democratic legitimacy into the heart of the institutional system by giving the European Parliament greater powers over the appointment and supervision of the Commission.
Despite the steps forward taken by the Treaty on European Union, there is still an imbalance between the Council's legislative powers and those of Parliament. The process of ratifying the Treaty in the Member States highlighted the imbalance between the existing state-based legitimacy and the democratic legitimacy which the public expects.
As part of the reform of the institutions, the Treaty of Amsterdam seeks to strike a balance between the institutions which enjoy these two forms of legitimacy, so as to bring about a more democratic distribution of powers and involve Europe's citizens and national parliaments more closely in the decision-making process, one way being by the provision of more information.
A number of changes will be made by the Treaty of Amsterdam, including:
This is the term used to describe negotiations between the Member States' governments with a view to amending the Treaties. An IGC is of major importance as regards European integration, where changes in the institutional and legal structure - or simply in the content of the Treaties - have always been the outcome of intergovernmental conferences (e.g. Single European Act and Treaty on European Union).
There have been six intergovernmental conferences in the history of the European Community, four of them since 1985. The sixth IGC began on 29 March 1996 and ended at the Amsterdam European Council on 16 and 17 June 1997 with the adoption of the Treaty of Amsterdam. It held regular meetings, in principle once a month, at foreign minister level. The preparatory work had been done by a group consisting of a representative of the Foreign Minister of each Member State and the Member of the Commission with responsibility for institutional matters, with the Council's General Secretariat handing the practical arrangements. Throughout the Conference, the European Parliament was kept up to date on the state of progress in the discussions and was able to put forward its views on all matters discussed whenever it saw fit.
The Ioannina compromise takes its name from an informal meeting of foreign ministers in the Greek city of Ioannina on 27 March 1994. Among the decisions taken at the meeting was a Council decision concerning the specific question of qualified majority voting in an enlarged 16-member Community. The decision was later adjusted in the light of Norway's decision not to join. The resulting compromise lays down that if members of the Council representing between 23 votes (the old blocking minority threshold) and 26 votes (the new threshold) express their intention of opposing the taking of a decision by the Council by qualified majority, the Council will do all within its power, within a reasonable space of time, to reach a satisfactory solution that can be adopted by at least 65 votes out of 87.