ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
However, the overall impact of legislation has been to raise environmental
standards across the Community – and beyond, as firms wanting access to
the European market must adopt the same standards.^4Critical question 4
Why is the EU so much ‘greener’ than NAFTA?◗ Conclusion
Many of the debates about the international political economy are too often
presented as stark dichotomies: market liberals laud globalisation and free
trade as the only effective way to reduce pollution; environmentalists are
unstinting in their eagerness to condemn them as devastating for the envi-
ronment. This chapter has demonstrated the need for more balanced and
nuanced debates. Certainly the environmental impact of globalisation and
trade is neither all good nor all bad. On a positive note, globalisation
and free trade provide the mechanisms to spread the ecological moderni-
sation discourse worldwide, far beyond the narrow confines of the pioneer
nations (Mol 2003 ). Even the much maligned – in environmentalist circles –
WTO has perhaps been unfairly treated in terms of some of its judgements,
whilst the quest for a European common market has seen the emergence
of the EU as a progressive environmental force, both within the twenty-
five member states and as an international actor. There are also undoubted
negative entries on the balance sheet. To date, the environmental benefits
of trade seem to have been outweighed by the sheer scale of growth in
production, consumption and waste associated with the expansion of the
global economy. One strength of the Brundtland Report was its assumption
that globalisation was already happening, and that ecological sustainability
required solutions to the economic, political and social problems thrown up
byglobal capitalism, the inequitable international trading system and the
power of TNCs. Recent trends, such as the dominance of corporate interests
at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, the likely
failure to implement an environmental agenda in the Doha trade round,
and the resistance of global economic institutions to applying more than
athin coat of ‘greenwash’ to their activities, indicate that the sustainable
development discourse is still struggling to shape the global economy.◗ Further reading and websites
Clapp and Dauvergne ( 2005 )and Lipschutz ( 2004 )provide very good, contrast-
ing introductions to global environmental politics and globalisation. Sachs
(1999)providesacritical assessment of the relationship between globalisa-
tion and the environment, whilst Mol ( 2003 )offersamore sympathetic anal-
ysis from an ecological modernisation perspective. Neumayer ( 2001 )analyses