Some countries may be slow in handing back test papers on majority voting

IT'S a bit like an exam paper - 58 questions, three options for each answer: Yes, No, Maybe. Each "yes", some would say, a potential erosion of national sovereignty.

The Irish Presidency of the EU has been given the formidable challenge of brokering an agreement on revising the Union's treaty, and the thorniest of questions is whether, in the interests of efficient decision making, there should be a reduction in unanimity voting.

It is arguable that the achievement of the single market was in no small measure the result of the 1987 decision to dramatically extend majority voting through the Single European Act (SEA). It broke the logjam of the years of stagnation, when all important issues were decided by unanimity.

Majority voting on some issues has been available since the early years of the European Community, but in practice was hardly ever used. Under the Treaty of Rome, 1966 was due to see the introduction of qualified majority voting (QMV) in external trade issues, agriculture and transport, but the policy was strenuously resisted by France, which in 1965 adopted its famous "empty chair" boycott.

A deal, known as the Luxembourg compromise, was finally agreed which allowed members to assert a "vital national interest" to block issues. In practice, however, decisions continued to be made by the process of laborious consensus building, or not at all.

At the 1985 Inter Governmental Conference, the looming admission of Spain and Portugal and the prospect of total paralysis concentrated minds and the result was agreement to the extensive use of the SEA in areas of internal market and trade issues.

With further enlargement on an even more dramatic scale now in prospect, the same concerns have returned in relation to other areas of Union policy making. The problem is, as Dick Spring's personal representative on the Inter Governmental Conference, Noel Dorr, points out, that no one can agree on a common criterion for extending qualified majority voting.

In the absence of an agreed formula they will have to do it clause by clause, and so Mr Dorr has circulated an exhaustive list of the 58 current treaty provisions for unanimous voting, and asked each of the member states to tick the appropriate boxes to indicate whether or not, or possibly, they might consider change.

He says the multiple choice questionnaire is just an informal aid to negotiation, not to be seen as a final commitment, not to be seen by the prying press, and easier than ringing round and getting the answers individually from each of his colleagues. Common sense, one might think.

But the subject is so sensitive that some of the class may be slow to return their papers, they do so at all. Not good PR to be seen to send the form back with 58 "nos" (not neins or nons, you understand), even if one's politicians have already been saying publicly they will not give an inch on the issue. Looks a little like non co operation.

This is, however, a curious battlefield, as a quick tour of the 58 clauses will show. There are the obvious core issues on which no one is likely to cede their veto amendments to the treaty, arrangements for the single currency, taxation, accession of new members, structural funds, common foreign actions - though on the latter there may be a willingness to let others proceed, a system of "constructive abstention".

But no one is asking for the complete abolition of the veto.

Far more puzzling, however, are some of the other veto areas - compensation for agricultural raw imports, social security, coordination of free movement, the right for the Commission to make provision for migrant workers, culture, common rules for European elections, state aids to industry, the research programme, certain environmental provisions, appointments to the Court of Auditors, to the Committee of the Regions, to the Economic and Social Committee, the procedures of the Committee of the Regions, all of justice and home affairs, almost all of foreign and security policy, financial regulations.

Ireland will join the majority of member states in backing significant increases in QMV in many of these areas - and each member state will have its own quite distinct list.

To see a defence of most of these vetoes as critical to some notion of national sovereignty - not, in any case, a threat of lost sovereignty, but of sovereignty to be shared - is verging on the perverse. Yet this is why we will have to await the British general election before significant progress is made on this issue in the IGC.