European Union Environmental Policy and Britain

Abstract

At its founding in 1957, the EU had no formal environmental policy and no environmental bureaucracy. The European Economic Community (EEC) was primarily an intergovernmental agreement between six states (none of whom had environmental ministries) to achieve social and economic prosperity. Today, the EU has some of the most progressive environmental policies of any state in the world, although it is not actually a state. Moreover, contemporary EU environmental policy adds up to considerably more than the sum of national environmental policies. In the EU, national environmental policies are no longer legally or politically separate from EU environmental policy: in a word, they have been deeply Europeanized as a result of their interaction with EU policy-making. This chapter describes the history of EU environmental policy, then explains how the British government has responded to the continuing Europeanization of national policy-making. The final section traces the DoE’s historical relationship with EU environmental policy, drawing out the links between European integration and the Europeanization of British policy.