Nice, Treaty of

Nice, Treaty of (2000) A follow-up treaty of Maastricht and Amsterdam. It extended Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) in the European Council in two-fifths of the articles that had required unanimity before. However, unanimity was maintained in the more important policy arenas such as immigration, social policy, and taxation. It did manage to reform some of the institutions of the European community. The size of the European Commission was to be reduced from 2005, when each country would be able to nominate only one commissioner, up to a maximum of 27. The size of the European Parliament was reduced and new allocations of seats made to old and potential new member states. Finally, the nature of QMV was amended to accommodate the larger countries of the EU. Just like its predecessors, the Treaty of Nice failed to resolve sufficiently some of the institutional problems posed by the expansion of the EU from fifteen to twenty five member states in 2004. At German insistence the Treaty provided for a further Intergovernmental Conference in 2003, which was to consider fundamental reform as part of the proposals to be tabled by the Constitutional Convention. Since the IGC failed to agree on further reform, this imperfect Treaty remained the foundation of governance in an expanded EU for longer than its signatories had imagined.