In the EU, a New Push To Streamline Foreign Policy Decisions Emerges

Despite a new proposal to eliminate the use of unanimity to make the European Union's foreign policy more efficient, resistance from small member states means that the bloc is unlikely to introduce such a drastic change in the short to medium term. On May 22, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares announced that during his country's six-month presidency of the European Union (which begins on July 1), Madrid will promote a change of the bloc's voting rules on foreign policy, security and enlargement to use qualified majority voting instead of unanimity. Later on May 22, the governments of Poland and Hungary rejected the Spanish proposal and said they were in conversations with like-minded governments to preserve the use of unanimity....