Not prudent, ain’t gonna do it

Poland will veto efforts to draw up a new European Union constitution unless Warsaw wins a battle over the voting clout wielded by certain member states. Gazeta Wyborcza said that Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his identical twin, President Lech Kaczynski, were determined to oppose plans for a new EU accord if Poland did not get its way within the 27-nation bloc.

The EU reform process has been on ice since a constitutional treaty was rejected by French and Dutch voters in referendums in 2005.

Current Map of the EU

Over the past two months, Warsaw's conservative government has been unable to garner support for its proposal to shake up the way votes for EU decision-making are distributed between member countries.

Poland, which has grown increasingly assertive since joining the EU in 2004, wants the number of votes each member state has in EU decisions requiring a qualified majority to be calculated by taking the square root of the country's population in millions. Thus, diluting the power of sheer population.

Example of Polish formula: Germany, which has 82 million inhabitants, would have 9 votes and Poland, which has a population of 38 million, would have 6, rather than 9 to 3.

"The small, the poor and the weak must be taken into account. That's what Poland is doing," according to Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga.

The stalled EU constitution defined a qualified majority decision as one carried by 55 percent -- meaning at least 15 of the current 27 member states -- and representing 65 percent of the total population of the EU.

The Polish proposal in contrast says a qualified majority decision is one carried by 62 percent of total votes plus a simple majority of members -- currently at least 14 states.