Introduction: Perspectives, Aims and Contributions

Abstract

In February 2015, the Commission of the European Union put forward a proposal for an EU Energy Union that signaled a shift in the EU’s use of economic power in external relations. Some of the new policies would amount to the EU’s using market might in the shape of a $17.5 trillion economy and a 400 bcm gas market, not only for setting market standards, but also for political ends such as energy security. The proposal featured five related and mutually reinforcing dimensions—security of supply, a fully integrated internal energy market, energy efficiency, emissions reductions and research and innovation (European Commission 2015). The first two have a direct effect on the EU’s external energy policy. The external dimension of security of supply concerns the diversification of the EU’s sources of gas imports, with dependence on Russian gas, a particularly sensitive issue in the context of gas cut-offs in the 2000s (particularly related to Russian–Ukrainian relations in 2006 and 2009) and the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Completion of the internal energy market affects external players inasmuch as they have to comply with EU rules if they want to sell gas to or operate on the Single European Market. Moreover, as the Commission and the more liberally oriented member states have long argued (Andersen and Sitter 2009), an integrated and interconnected market reduces each state’s vulnerability to external gas supply shocks. The EU’s long-standing approach to energy policy has been to treat energy as a commodity that has important public goods characteristics, and to address issues related to the behavior of Russia and its state-owned gas monopoly exporter, Gazprom, as matters of a big firm’s abuse of its dominant market position. The central question in this book is whether the Energy Union proposals and the debates surrounding them signal a shift from the EUs long-standing ‘regulatory power’ approach to energy policy to a new policy agenda that involves more direct and assertive use of the EU’s economic power.