Introduction

In parallel with its development as a deeply integrated economic zone, the European Union (EU) has evolved as a space where a cumulatively significant pooling of sovereignty around environmental issues has developed apace. From a position in the early days of the European integration process where the environment hardly featured, the EU of 28 member states of today has highly developed policy competences across a range of environmental areas and is a signatory to more than 60 multilateral international environmental agreements (Vogler and Stephan, 2007). Since at least the mid-1980s, the EU supranational space has contended with and, to a significant degree, displaced the national level as the preferred locus of activity for its member states on environmental issues. This process of evolution and adaptation has not been a linear one: contestation of, and resistance to, a muscular EU presence within the environment has been a permanent feature of the politics of the environment in Europe and of inter-institutional relations in Brussels. But the stark reality of climate change, in particular, has moved the member states towards tacit acceptance of the need for a strong EU environmental acquis as the key mechanism for managing cross-border externalities of different kinds and for maintaining leadership within the international domain.

The key turning point in moving Europeans towards enhanced environmental action came in 1986, when the principle of substantive environmental integration was introduced into the treaties by the Single European Act (SEA), which stated that environmental requirements shall be a component of the European Community's other policies (Article 130r(2)). This commitment was further sharpened by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which stated that environmental protection requirements must be integrated with the definition and implementation of other European Community policies (Article 130r(2)) (Koch and Lindenthal, 2011, p 981). Successive treaty changes have thus taken the environment from exclusively the intergovernmental arena to a decision-making system that combines national and shared EU competences. This should not surprise students of integration. After all, environmental problems do not stop at national boundaries; their intrinsic elements demand complex technocratic arrangements supported by pooled sovereignty and international cooperation.