ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
legislation. Many of these policies far exceeded ‘any conceivable standards
that would be strictly necessary by a concern to ensure a single function-
ing market’ (Weale 2005 :128). By making the environmentalacquisan entry
requirement to be met by all accession states, the expansion of the EU to
twenty-five member states – with more to follow – has directly raised leg-
islative and regulatory standards across much of Europe.
The EU has also expanded its role as an international actor (Vogler 1999 ;
Sbragia 2005 ). Since its early foot-dragging resistance to the Vienna Con-
vention on ozone depletion, the Union has sought to establish itself as a
normative power pushing a sustainable development agenda on the interna-
tional stage (Lightfoot and Burchill 2004 ). Thus the EU has taken a proactive
role – as a lead ‘state’ – in negotiating the Kyoto and Cartegena protocols
on climate change and biosafety (see Chapter9). At the Johannesburg World
Summit on Sustainable Development it managed to keep sustainable devel-
opment on the agenda by playing a mediating role between less developed
countries and a group of developed countries including the USA, Japan and
Australia who were pressing an economic globalisation agenda (Lightfoot
and Burchill 2004 : 339). Environmental NGOs now look to the EU to adopt
aleadership role in international diplomacy, pushing the sustainable devel-
opment agenda.
The EU is able to assume this role because of its economic weight in the
global economy. To perform it effectively, it is vital to secure member state
agreement before negotiations; for example, by agreeing the emissions ‘bub-
ble’ prior to Kyoto (see Box9.4), the EU was able to exercise great influence
in those negotiations. If there are splits between member states, as in ozone
diplomacy in the mid-1980s, then it is harder for the EU to exercise influ-
ence. One constraint is its lack of a coherent legal identity on the world
stage. Other countries have sometimes resisted the EU acting as a signa-
torytointernational agreements – for example, it has not been allowed to
accede to CITES (Lenschow 2005 : 323). The compromise carved out in both
the ozone and climate change conventions is a form of ‘mixed agreement’,
whereby both the Union and the member states sign, but this still involves
some complicated wrangling over who holds legal competence to deal with
aparticular problem. Is it the EU or the member states, and, within the
EU, is it the Commission or the Council of Ministers? Significantly, the need
toresolve these issues and to co-ordinate responses is itself an additional
pressure on the EU to ‘put its own house in order’ by pursuing a more effec-
tive sustainable development strategy within the Community (Lightfoot and
Burchill 2004 : 343).
Why has the EU adopted such a relatively positive approach to the
environment? It is important to note that unlike other trading agreements,
theEUisamuch more ambitious project involving the active pursuit of
both economic and political integration in Europe. During the 1980s, Euro-
pean public opinion became increasingly concerned about the environment,
which was widely seen as a natural ‘European’ issue requiring international