“The evolution of an environmental policy reflects the increasing significance of the environment within the EU”

At its founding in 1957, the European Economic Community (EEC) (as it then was) had no environmental policy. It was not until the surge of environmental awareness in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, which culminated in the 1972 UN Stockholm environment conference, that the EEC began to take a more sustained interest in environmental matters. However the absence of a specific Treaty base meant that those supporting a greater role for the Community had to operate terra incognito until the environment was entrenched in the Treaty by the Single European Act (SEA) in 1987 (Jordan, 1999).
All this meant that in the very early days of the European Union (EU) environmental policy, the Commission had to go to great lengths to justify measures such as protection for bathing water and wild birds that frankly had little to do with the establishment of a common market. For various reasons, the member states chose to turn a blind eye, and trade and industry bodies ignored the ...