"Me, Too!" the Emergence of a European Environmental Policy and the Role of International Organizations

By the time the European Communities (EC) started an environmental policy in the wake of the Stockholm Conference of 1972, the environment as an area of policy making had already been firmly established not only within most nation states, but also among the various regional international organizations in Europe, such as the OECD or the Council of Europe. This paper argues that a central reason for the establishment of an EC environmental policy – without a legal treaty base – is a "Me, too"-logic. The European institutions competed with other IOs in Europe for competences in the new and popular policy area. Such a case for task expansion was crucially relevant for the promotion of environmental policy. This aspect has so far been overlooked, as standard textbook accounts routinely refer to the neo-functional spill-over logic of the Common Market, which was understood to require common environmental rules.

Based on the preparatory documents for the first environmental action programme of 1973, this paper will demonstrate how the European institutions, notably the European Parliament and the European Commission drew on the models of environmental policies and established practice among other European regional international organizations. Not only did they import environmental policy ideas into the EC, adapting them as they went, but also used other IO's action as a precedent to advocate EC action along the same lines. Thus, established IO practice served to propel and legitimate the emergent EC environmental policy.