The establishment of EU environmental policy

The environmental policy of the EU has developed in a remarkable fashion in the past five decades. An increasingly dense network of legislation has emerged, which extends to all areas of environmental protection. The environment is now a core area of EU policy and politics. Such dynamic developments could hardly have been expected given the legal and institutional conditions which existed in the late 1960s. This chapter describes the establishment of EU environmental policy in three phases. It illustrates how policy makers, acting without any legislative authority, initially made a clever move to increase the EU’s capacity to act by defining environmental policy as a trade problem. In the course of time, EU environmental policy emerged as a formal policy area, with its own policy actors, policy principles and procedures.