European Politics: Chief Adverse Consequences Research (Essay Sample)

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Political Science
Due Date
European Politics
Critics have been cited hauling accusation on the European Union for weakening nationalism forces among its key members. However, proponents have counted such accusations as baseless by arguing that the EU is at the forefront in fostering conditions that favor movements within original member states from a regional perspective. Both schools of thoughts notwithstanding, the emergence of the Bloc had political ramification with a probability of each faction fighting for the benefit of their nation. One such affected area is policy-making. In ardently, policy-making in the EU is characterized by a large of veto players, with four chief adverse consequences.
First, the involvement of many veto players makes it difficult to reach decisions. Unfortunately, the EU policy-making system consists of the two types of veto players and, as a result, faces difficulty in institutional policy proposal approval and the subsequent inter-institutional policy adoption. Tsebelis and Yataganas, on the analysis of the EU Nice institutional design explained that enlargement procedure created policy divergence. That is, the authors attribute the emergence of the high viscosity legislative system in the EU to the Nice design, citing that the process divided the member states into " the majority of votes, the majority of member countries, and the majority of the populace" (p. 350). Such a division in the policy makers has an inherent tendency of thwarting decision-making process because each of the parties tend to insist on their perspective based on the interest and focus. As per Herman's illustration, in an event that an ordinary legislative procedure is used in the EU, some three other secondary institutions can reject the agreement (Herman 241). That is, a policy must be vetted and accepted by the Commission, the Council and the EP making it difficult to reach an agreement.
Secondly, decision making in the Council circles around the creation and disintegration of “blocking minorities,” in addition to the difficulty of reaching an agreement, the supermajorities constituting the council encourages blocking minorities reasoning instead of focusing on majority practices. The focus of the arguments on the existence of a minority group and most decisions are dedicated to overcoming any existing minority within the design. Tsebelis and Yataganas explain that the favorable vote of a primary state of member nations accounts for the genesis of the blocking minority. Notably, the reweighting of votes in the Council eliminated the benefit that the populated countries had. Currently, less than 14 members can manage a QM of required votes and as a result, a "majority of small nations gained the power to block a decision even if they fail to meet the primary BM" (Tsebelis and Yataganas 287).
Third, decision-making within organizations needs to consider the acceptability of the effects to other institutions. That is, the large number of veto players’ forces thwart strategies for making decisions in inter-institutional context (Tsebelis and Yataganas 287). Particularly, the Commission is mandated to decide the proposal deemed reasonable to reach the EP and the Council. Similarly, when the EP presents “amendment proposals to the Commission, it is obligated to consider the strengths of its constituent groups as well as the acceptability of the proposals to the Commission as well as a qualified majority member of the Council” (Herman, 241). Further, the existence of the three distinct decision-making institutions is the genesis of outcome dispute among these institutions. In specific, the three-decision system makes it difficult to implement any status quo changes by both the Council and the EU at large (Tsebelis and Yataganas 294). Any forced changes can easily trigger policies departures and institutional instabilities.
Finally, actors within the EU operate under a culture of consensus and compromise, especially because the players are forced to make decisions even though they may not fully agree with the proposals. The tendency of approving decisions for the sake of reaching a decision despite individual veto pla...