To me, the EU seems like a 'heavy machine', that is difficult to turn or change.

Migeru:

The entire EU bureaucracy employs fewer people than the Amsterdam city council and the EU budget (which funds all the EU's structural, regional and cohesion funds, the CAP, and other programs, and finally the bureaucracy itself) is less than 1% of the EU's GDP.

I guess what makes the UN more attractive than the EU in the eyes of the Norwegians is, then, that the UN is toothless and demands no concessions as a condition of membership, while the EU demands legal changes on accession and in the future, as agreed collectively?

We have met the enemy, and it is us — Pogo

Voting in the Council of the European Union - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Treaty of Nice (current)

• To pass: Majority of countries (50% or 67%) and votes (74%) and population (62%)
• To block: Condition to pass a vote not achieved

This is the currently applicable voting system. According to the procedure, each member state has a fixed number of votes. The number allocated to each country is roughly determined by its population (see table on the right), but progressively weighted in favor of smaller countries. To pass a vote, both of the following conditions must apply to establish qualified majority voting (QMV) - the bloc's key way of decision-making in the absence of a consensus:

• the proposal must be backed by a majority of member states (or two thirds in certain cases: see below);
• the proposal must be supported by 255 votes from a total of 345 -- about 73.9% of the votes.

Furthermore, a member may^[1] request the verification of the population condition (which is then also required for the resolution to be adopted):

• the countries supporting the proposal must represent at least 62% of the total EU population.

The population requirement is almost always already implied by the condition on the number of votes. The rare exceptions to this happen in certain cases when a proposal is backed by exactly two of the five most populous member states but not including Germany, that is, two of France, UK, Italy and Spain, and by all or nearly all of the 22 other members.

Furthermore, when the European Council is not acting on a proposal of the Commission, the qualified majority requires backing by two thirds (rather than a simple majority) of the member states^[2].

Note that mechanisms by which the Commission makes a proposal may not require weighted votes. For example, the Anti-Dumping Advisory Committee (ADAC) can approve a proposal to impose tariffs based on a simple, unweighted majority. Since this simple majority vote leads to a Commission proposal to the Council, the simple majority effectively requires a qualified majority to overturn it (because overturning the recommendation of the ADAC means voting against a Commission proposal). This greatly increases the power of small member states in such circumstances.

The declarations of the conference which adopted the treaty of Nice contained contradictory statements concerning qualified majority voting (QMV) after the enlargement of the European Union to 25 and 27 members: one declaration^[3] specified that the qualifying majority of votes would increase to a maximum of 73.4%, contradicting another declaration^[4] which specified a qualifying majority of 258 votes (74.78%) after enlargement to 27 countries. But the treaties of accession following the Treaty of Nice clarified the actual required majority.

[edit] Reform Treaty (proposed)

• To pass: Majority of countries (55% or 72%) and population (65%)
• To block: Condition to pass a vote not achieved and at least 4 countries against the proposal

The Constitution envisaged the "double majority" system for the QMV which according to some countries better reflects the true size of populations and at the same time acknowledges the smaller member states' fears of being overruled by the larger countries. The reform treaty has adopted this method. The second condition of at least 4 countries against the proposal is to ensure that the most populous Member States cannot block decisions and is important in 10 different voting scenarios where legislation requiring QMV can be passed although the population requirement isn't fullfilled and all member states except:

Germany and France and one of UK, Italy, Spain or Poland
Germany and UK and one of Italy, Spain or Poland
Germany and Italy and one of Spain or Poland
France and UK and Italy

are for the proposal. In practice one has to take into account the political likelihood for each minority.

[edit] Penrose method (proposed)

• To pass: Majority of votes (61.4 %)
• To block: Condition to pass a vote not achieved

Poland proposed the Penrose method (colloquially called the "square root" system) which would narrow the weighting of votes between the largest and smallest countries in terms of population. The Czech Republic supported this method to an extent, but has warned it would not back a Polish veto on this matter. All the other states remained opposed.^[5] After previously refusing to discuss the issue, the German government agreed to include it for discussion at the June council.^[6]. The given percentage is the game theoretical optimal threshold.^[7]

Now, as we know the number of votes is not a reliable measure of the amount of power a voting block holds, but that is another story.

Banzhaf power index - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Banzhaf power index, named after John F. Banzhaf III (though originally invented by Penrose (1946)), is a power index defined by the probability of changing an outcome of a vote where voting rights are not necessarily equally divided among the voters or shareholders.

To calculate the power of a voter using the Banzhaf index, list all the winning coalitions, then count the critical voters. A critical voter is a voter who, if he changed his vote from yes to no, would cause the measure to fail. A voter's power is measured as the fraction of all swing votes that he could cast.

The index is also known as the Banzhaf-Coleman index. See History.