The Historical-Institutional Evolution and the Political Dynamics of the European Union's Environmental Policy

Abstract

The European Union's environmental policy has been shaped and refined over the years through a series of complex and non-linear processes that have seen institutional, national and regulatory dynamics intertwine. Despite the lack of provision for environmental issues in the founding treaties and the initial need to find an economic justification for any Community initiative, already in the 1950s and 1960s the Community, beginning to recognise the importance of environmental issues, intervened, mainly through the instrument of directives, in an attempt to define a single environmental policy and harmonise the different policies of individual states to prevent them from altering the functioning of the common market. To be able, however, to speak of a real environmental policy in the European sphere one would have to wait until the 1970s, when the Community, infected by the new international orientations, undertook a change of course in environmental matters. It was, in this regard, the United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972, the first world forum for warning of the seriousness of environmental problems, that marked the beginning of an international environmental policy and led the European Council of Heads of State and Government in Paris in 1972 to declare for the first time the need for a common environmental policy, thus giving rise to the first Environmental Action Plan that introduced the principle of prevention and insisted on the need to rationalise the use of natural resources. From the 1970s to the present day, also due to various environmental disasters that have struck Europe and the world, attention to environmental issues has grown considerably, giving rise, both at national and European level, to numerous movements and political parties that have based their programmes on the protection, preservation and re-evaluation of the environment, triggering a rethinking of priorities also within the European Commission. The aim of the work therefore appears to be to trace the historical-institutional evolution, through a careful reconstruction of the political dynamics and the directives issued by the European Commission, of the process that led to the definition of the European Union's environmental policy, emphasising how Europe has gone from considering these issues in a marginal way to playing an ever-increasing role as a policy maker capable of massively influencing the political agendas of the various Member States in the context of environmental policies.