e European Council and High Representative for Foreign Affairs. They are not the only two institutional novelties. The Treaty also introduces double majority voting for decisions made by the Council of Ministers; gives national Parliaments the right to object to some EU legislation; gives the EU its own legal personality; and introduces an exit clause allowing Member States to withdraw from the Union.
Social regress from the draft Constitutional Treaty? In social terms, key contributions were already included in the Constitutional Treaty rejected two years earlier by referendums in France and the Netherlands. While, in legal terms, few things separate the two Treaties, the Constitutional draft contained a new political purpose for the EU which isn’t in the Lisbon Treaty, which is a compilation of the previous treaties with a readjustment of the EU’s operating rules.