Greening the EU - Actors, strategies and instruments

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,0, Abo Akademi Turku, Finland (Abo Akademi Turku, Finland - Department of public administration), course: policy processes in the EU, 25 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper is an attempt to give a broad and systematic outline to environmental policy in theEuropean Union (EU) without discussing explicit or specific problems. Environment is justone policy field among various others within the EU legislation, and the EU is itself not anisolated and closed legislative body, but rather to view it as a sophisticated and highlycomplex framework at a supranational level into a broader setting of internationalorganisations and institutions on the one hand and national influences on the other hand. Tocatch its formal complexity it is important to look to its origins. The first steps toward EUintegration related to economic issues with the creation of the European Coal and SteelCommunity (ECSC), and the Treaties establishing the European Economic Community (EEC)and finally the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) in 1957. These threetogether came to be referred to as the European Community (EC). The creation of the singleEuropean market during the 1970s and the early 1980s symbolises the beginning of the EUintegration process. The term EU was not used before 1992 where it was introduced by theMaastricht Treaty on the European Union (TEU) which marks a substantial shift fromnegative to positive integration of the Member States into the EU framework.1 I will argueduring the analysis that the creation of an economic community as the first step of integrationhad strong and significant long-standing effects to the field of environmental policy in the EU.According to Weale, I will show that issue linkage and spillover effects have beencharacteristic to the development of EU environmental policy (Weale et al. 2005: 53).Furthermore, I will point out that this issue dynamic can be explained by the institutionalsetting of the EU which provides the ground for multi-level governance which is based on ahigh complex system of vertical and horizontal linkages, secondly the issue itself becauseenvironmental issues call for horizontal integration of policy areas and thirdly because of theinterdependence of economic and environmental policy paradigm within the EU to justifyenvironmental policy making.[...]