Madariaga - College of Europe Foundation

Madariaga Report - 6 October, 2009

Asked for a second time to vote on the Lisbon Treaty on 2 October 2009, the Irish made no mistake this time: with a majority of 67.1% of a 59% turnout, it gave its backing to Treaty reform, affording the EU a way out og the institutional impasse it had been caught in for more than 4 years since the French and Dutch rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in Spring 2005. But what difference will the Lisbon Treaty really make? Are the changes introduced under Lisbon - a double majority voting system and two new positions of a permanent President for the Council and of a double-hatted High Representative for Foreign Affairs - likely to ease the decision-making process or will they add to the complexity?

To answer these questions, the Madariaga Foundation invited two specialists in EU institutional and legal affairs, Piotr Maciej Kaczynski, Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), and Jean-Victor Louis, Honorary Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), to a Citizen's Controversy on 6 October 2009.

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