A dramatic curtailment of national vetoes, including those over taxation policies, is proposed by the European Commission in its submission to the EU's treaty-changing Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC).
The move will set the Commission on a collision course with countries such as Ireland and Britain, which have been fighting pressures to harmonise company and savings taxes. But, as each member-state has a veto on treaty changes, prospects for some of the Commission's more radical ideas for the IGC, which is due to be completed by December, are not good.
The Union's executive agreed yesterday to recommend moving to qualified majority voting (QMV) as a rule with few exceptions for all EU decisions.
And it specifically targeted those taxation and social security policies which impinge on the efficient functioning of the single market.
In addition to company taxation, that might include, the Commissioner for Institutional Reform, Mr Michel Barnier, said, areas such as double taxation or problems of tax evasion as well as the common VAT system and the circulation of dutiable goods.
"Our concern is not ideological," he insisted, "but how to ensure the single market works efficiently."
Presenting the proposals to Parliament, the President of the Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, warned that "we know from experience that unanimity already means paralysis, or reducing decisions to their lowest common denominators. At 27 or 28 [members] we feel there is no way round a radical approach. We state very clearly that qualified majority voting must be the general rule." Mr Prodi said that he was convinced there was a tide turning in the member-states in favour of a more radical agenda.
In other areas of treaty reform, the Commission was also ambitious. Although member-states have yet to agree formally to include the issue on the agenda, the Commission sets out to simplify the use of "reinforced co-operation" procedures, also known as "flexibility", first included in the Amsterdam Treaty.
Where groups of states wish to work together on political projects that others are not ready to take part in, the Commission argues that they should not be prevented from doing so by the veto of a single state. And it wants both to reduce to one-third of member-states the minimum numbers required and to include such provisions for the first time in the foreign and security policy chapter of the treaty.
Of great concern to Ireland will be the Commission's suggestion that enlargement can be accommodated by dropping the entitlement of each state to a commissioner and accepting a ceiling of 20 - instead states could rotate their entitlements to a seat at the table, each effectively serving in five out of seven Commissions.
Alternatively, and probably more palatable, they could insist on one commissioner per member-state but, the Commission argues, must then accept the logic of a two-tier college.
The Commission also offers two options for the key issue of rebalancing votes in the Council to redress imbalances against the larger member-states. But it comes down in favour of a voting system where a majority would be achieved only with the support both of a majority of memberstates and of states representing a majority of the population of the Union.
The Commission acknowledges the need to leave a series of specific issues in the realm of unanimity voting. These include: treaty changes and decisions affecting the balance of the institutions, admission of new members, foreign treaties, the Union's language regime, and the fixing of the entry rate for currencies joining the euro.