From Health in the Workplace to Water and Air Pollution: IOs and Heavy Industry

Heavy industry was crucial for western European reconstruction after World War II. It quickly became a core business of IOs such as the UN Economic Commission for Europe, the Organization for European Economic Co-operation and the European Coal and Steel Community. Interestingly, the ECSC’s competences were more narrowly economic and thus, extended to health issues in the workplace. In contrast, while they had no independent decision-making powers, the UNECE and the OEEC were far more flexible in debating a greater variety of topics. They included in particular, the great contribution of the steel industry to air and water pollution, which was discussed at expert level and led to the publication of several specialized sector reports from the early 1960s onwards which also contributed to the wider debate about this particular transnational environmental concern. While the EEC developed an environmental policy in the 1970s, the ECSC proved largely resistant to the diffusion of environmental policy ideas and practices from other IOs. The paper argues that this was largely due to the preoccupation of ECSC institutions with the European steel crisis after 1973 and the dominance of business interests. The sector remained focused on issues of cost reduction which crucially included reduced raw material consumption. This also had positive environmental impact, but for a long time only as a side-effect of the strategy of the ECSC and steel companies to invest in new technologies to make the sector more globally competitive.