The European community's environmental policy, 1957 to ‘1992’: From incidental measures to an international regime?

This contribution reviews the environmental policy of the European Community from the Treaty of Rome to the Maastricht Treaty, tracing its evolution and outlining the determining factors. An international institutional framework is applied to the analysis in order to come to terms with the dynamic nature of the policy. Through the process of institutionalisation, the participants’ behaviour has gradually converged around a set of established rules. These rules, in turn, evolve as a reflection of the participants’ experiences during the process of institutionalisation. The tradition of neo‐liberal institutionalism provides the conceptual tools to understand how a number of ad hoc environmental measures can, over time, evolve into an international regime or a ‘negotiated order’. The European Community's environmental policy can indeed be interpreted as having reached the state of an international regime. This is no reason for complacency, however. In order to address the urgent environmental problems facing the European Community, its member states must respond to the dictates of the regime and comply with the institutional requirements. In order to build on the guideposts set up by the advocates of international institutional approaches and determine when and to what extent international environmental regimes matter, systematic compliance studies will be needed that take into account both domestic and international variables.