ABSTRACT

At its founding in 1957, the European Union (EU) had no environmental policy, no environmental administration and no environmental laws. The European Economic Community (EEC), as it then was, was primarily an intergovernmental agreement between six like-minded states to boost economic prosperity and restore political relations in a Europe ravaged by two world wars. Most of the environmental policies of the EU have emerged only in the past 40 years or so. Today, the EU has some of the most progressive environmental policies of any state in the world, although, curiously, it does not possess many of the formal attributes of a state such as an army, a common system of taxation or a constitution.