This article explores the European Commission’s role in shaping the European Community’s carbon and energy tax project from 1988 to 1992. Drawing on fresh materials from European, national, and private archives, it examines how internal debates and competing visions, which reflected divergent interpretations of European integration, helped politicise climate policy within the Commission and sink a common environmental tax on the eve of the 1992 Rio Conference. The study shows that between 1988 and 1992, the European Commission acted both as a major promoter of the ecotax project and as an actor engaged in strategies aimed at undermining it. Focused on the Commission’s internal struggles and strategic positioning, it thus sheds new light on the complex interplay between environmental ambitions, economic interests, and European governance in the early years of European climate policy.
This article critically assesses the European Community’s/Union’s environmental leadership. Although the EC/EU is often seen as a global environmental leader, this study challenges that by analysing the limits of ‘greening’ efforts in Western European intensive agriculture, especially related to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), from the 1970s to the 1990s. Instead of experiencing a genuine ‘green turn’, intensive farming maintained an air of inevitability which greening efforts failed to penetrate. The study shows that despite a plethora of initiatives and discursive shifts, structural adjustments to intensive farming remained largely absent. By highlighting this, the article attempts to offer a less teleological view of EC/EU environmental history that includes setbacks and contradictions. Taken together, it contributes to a more fine-grained understanding of the EC/EU’s environmental policy trajectory and its (lack of) ecological impact.
When the United States started environmental policy with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1970, one of its core instruments was the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) which Congress accepted without much debate. By contrast, it took more than ten years of often controversial discussions, until the European Communities (EC) eventually enacted their Environmental Impact Assessment Directive in 1985. This article tells the story of this directive, reviewing the factors that enabled, but also those that delayed the process of implementing this central element of preventive environmental policy. The article draws on a wide range of archival sources and discusses the involvement of actors, including experts, lobby groups and NGOs. The central argument is that while in the US in 1970 the EIS was introduced without anticipating its consequences, subsequent European law-making not only took place in a very different institutional as well as socio-economic context, which slowed down legislation. Importantly also, Europeans were aware of the US experience, and mobilised “avoiding American mistakes” as an argument in the debate.
European Environmental Policy underwent a process of liberalisation from 1973 to 1992, shifting from so-called ‘command-and-control’ instruments such as technical standards, to ‘market-based instruments’ such as tradable pollution permits. This transition is usually depicted as a move from ‘dirigiste’ to ‘neoliberal’ instruments. This paper will nuance this reading by first contesting the ‘dirigiste’ interpretation of the ‘command-and-control’ system, arguing that the concept of ‘neo-corporatism’ more accurately captures how standards have been negotiated and implemented. Second, instead of reducing the global shift to a process of neoliberalisation, this article will underscore the role of the US model, in addition to a dynamic of globalisation. Third, it will argue that all instruments – whether ‘command-and-control’ or ‘market-based’ – can be used either to promote environmentalism or to protect polluters. In short, what matters is less the instrument than its purpose, whether it be to free markets, protect the environment, promote local industrial interests, or all three simultaneously.
