Establishing the composition of the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the predecessor to the European Parliament, was no easy task. To determine the total number of Members and the numbers from each Member State, the authors of the Treaty establishing the ECSC referred to the only model for a European Assembly in existence at that time: the Assembly of the Council of Europe. The small Benelux countries, major producers of coal and steel, were afraid of being under-represented. As a result, the number of Members representing them was increased. This at once raised the question of representativeness: a delegate from the Luxembourg Chamber of Deputies represented 80 000 citizens as against 3 million in the case of a delegate from the German Parliament.
At its first sitting in 1952, the ECSC Common Assembly had 78 Members, the seats being distributed between Member States as follows:
Table: Distribution of seats in the ECSC Common Assembly by Member State (1952)
The composition of the Common Assembly, as well as its operation, was radically changed with the establishment of the Ad Hoc Assembly in 1952. This Assembly was entrusted with the task of drawing up a draft Treaty establishing the European Political Community (EPC). For this occasion, nine more representatives (three French, three German and three Italian) were co-opted by the Members of the ECSC Assembly. After the failure of the EPC — the scheme was rejected by the Foreign Ministers of the Six in November 1953 — and of the European Defence Community (EDC) — the Treaty was rejected by the French National Assembly on 28 August 1954 — the Common Assembly resumed its normal work until 1958.
It was at this time that the Treaties establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom) came into force. A single assembly was set up to avoid increasing the number of assemblies. It was initially known as the European Parliamentary Assembly before the name European Parliament was adopted on 30 March 1962 (this name was officially laid down in the Single European Act in 1986). It constituted both the Assembly of the two new Communities and the continuation of the ECSC Common Assembly. Its activities extended to new areas, and its membership increased to 142, with the following distribution of seats:
Table: Distribution of seats in the single Assembly by Member State (1958)
Adjustments following the first enlargements (1973 – 1986)
The 1972 Act of Accession added 10 seats for Denmark and Ireland and 36 for the United Kingdom, bringing the total number of Members to 198.
On 20 September 1976, the Council adopted the decision relating to the Act concerning the election of the representatives of the Assembly by direct universal suffrage. The first elections took place on 7 and 10 June 1979. The Act provided for the election of 410 Members and led to a change in the allocation of seats in Parliament (Article 2 of the 1976 Act). The doubling of the number of seats was hotly debated. The question of a better balance of representativeness between Members had to be reconciled with that of representation for the main political movements in the smaller Member States, as well as with ensuring parliamentary work was done effectively. The solution found to this was to amend the system for allocating seats and increase the total number of Members elected. The Council departed from the proposal for a decision from the European Parliament (the Patijn report), which was for a total of 355 Members.
Table: Distribution of seats in the single Assembly by Member State (1979)
The accession of Greece in 1981, and of Spain and Portugal in 1986, increased the number of seats without altering the allocation scheme: Greece was allocated 24 seats, Spain 60 and Portugal 24, bringing the total number of representatives to 434 and then 518.
Table: Distribution of seats in the European Parliament by Member State (1989)
Taking German reunification into account
German unification in 1990 led to an increase of 16 million citizens in the population of Germany. The discrepancy in representativeness between Members of the European Parliament became even more marked: a Member elected in Germany represented 976 000 people, a Member elected in France 698 000 people, a Member elected in Belgium 414 000 and, to take the extreme case, a Member elected in Luxembourg represented 63 000 people. The question of striking a fresh balance, which was raised by the German authorities when the Treaty of Maastricht was being negotiated, was not resolved and was put off until 1992. In a declaration annexed to the new Treaty, the conference agreed to ‘examine the questions relating to the number of members of the Commission and the number of members of the European Parliament no later than at the end of 1992, with a view to reaching an agreement which will permit the establishment of the necessary legal basis for fixing the number of members of the European Parliament in good time for the 1994 elections. The decisions will be taken in the light, inter alia, of the need to establish the overall size of the European Parliament in an enlarged Community.’
In October 1991, the European Parliament recommended that the number of representatives elected in Germany be increased by 18 1 — corresponding to the number of observers from the five new Länder invited by the European Parliament. In June 1992, to take account of the possibility of enlargement to six new Member States (Austria, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Malta and Cyprus), Parliament recommended a change in the composition of Parliament which would involve a departure from equality in the number of Members elected from the large Member States. Strict proportionality was ruled out — leading to certain distortions — out on the grounds that ‘the development of a federal type of European Union has not reached a sufficiently advanced stage’. 2
The December 1992 Edinburgh European Council endorsed the Parliament Resolution of June 1992 and tasked the Council with amending the 1976 accordingly, which it did in Decision 93/81/Euratom, ECSC, EEC of 1 February 1993. 3 The decision was applied for the 1994 June elections. With a 567-seat Parliament, most states saw a marked increase in the number of their Members, and the number of Germany’s representatives increased by over 20 %:
Table : Allocation of seats in the European Parliament by Member State (1994)
Adjustments following the 1995 enlargement
In 1995, the Act of Accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden brought the total number of Members up to 625. Without altering the previous distribution, it added 21, 16 and 22 seats for each of these countries respectively. Austria and Sweden each gained one seat more than what was recommended in the European Parliament Resolution of June 1992. The European Parliament turned into what was, at the time, one of the largest parliamentary assemblies among democratic systems: the lower house of the Indian Parliament had 545 Members statutorily, the House of Representatives of the United States Congress 435. Only the UK House of Lords, the German Bundestag and the Italian Chamber of Deputies were on a level pegging (with 780, 598 and 630 Members respectively). To keep this regular expansion in numbers within limits, the European Parliament, in its Resolution of June 1992, recommended setting the maximum number of MEPs at 700.
Difficult adjustments following the 2004 – 2007 enlargement
With a view to further enlargement, the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam introduced an upper limit of 700 Members of the European Parliament, without amending the current allocation of the 626 seats (Article 20 ECSC, Articles 189 and 190 (2) EEC and 107 and 108 (2) EAEC). This question was held over. The Protocol on the institutions with the prospect of enlargement of the European Union annexed to the Treaty of Amsterdam provides that ‘At least one year before the membership of the European Union exceeds twenty, a conference of representatives of the governments of the Member States shall be convened in order to carry out a comprehensive review of the provisions of the Treaties on the composition and functioning of the institutions.’
The launching of the process of accession to the Union for the ten countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Cyprus by the Luxembourg European Council of December 1997, and the opening of the accession negotiations for six of them from spring 1998, made it necessary to resume the discussions on the functioning of the Community institutions. The European Council, meeting in Cologne in June 1999, confirmed that it proposed to convene, for the beginning of 2000, an intergovernmental conference which would have to complete its work within the year. The Weizsäcker-Dehaene-Simon report on the institutional implications of enlargement which was submitted to the Commission in October 1999 made an obvious point: ‘A significant increase in the number of participants automatically increases problems of decision making and management.’ 4 Maintaining the rule for allocating seats selected in 1997 as the means of determining the number of elected representatives from the future Member States would mean that the 700-Member limit could not be adhered to; conversely, maintaining that ceiling, the position defended by the European Parliament (Dimitrakopoulos/Leinen report), 5 would require a radical revision of the allocation rule. In either case, a balance should be maintained in the representation of Europe’s citizens, even though the Union consisted of countries with increasing disparities in terms of size.
The Treaty of Nice took action on these two parameters: the cap on the number of elected representatives was raised to 732, while a new distribution of seats was carried out, to take effect, in principle, from the beginning of Parliament’s 2004–2009 term. Article 2 of the Protocol on the enlargement of the Union reduced the number of representatives of the 15 Member States from 626 to 535, distributing the seats in such a way that only Germany and Luxembourg kept the same number as before. There was provision for 197 seats for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Cyprus and Malta.
Table : Distribution of seats in the European Parliament by Member State of the 15-member Union pursuant to the Treaty of Nice (2004)