ABSTRACT
Introduction When one looks at the larger political context of contemporary European transport policy, two developments appear to be particularly important: First, there is a growing awareness that environmental concerns must be more systematically integrated into transport related decision-making at the European level. Efforts are already under way in this respect in the framework of the so-called ‘Cardiff Process’. Second, the end of the Cold War and the upcoming enlargement of the European Union (EU)1 to include ten Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs)2 have fundamentally altered basic parameters of European transport policy. Against this background, and based on a detailed analysis of the implications of enlargement for European environmental policy, this chapter argues that in addition to posing a number of more general environmental policy challenges, enlargement further increases the need to systematically integrate environmental concerns into transport policy.Eastern enlargement of the EU has often been described as a major challenge for European environmental policy (cf. EC, 1998a; Carius et al, 2000). In its Agenda 2000 the European Commission concluded that ‘none of the [Central and Eastern European] Accession countries can be expected to comply fully with the [environmental] acquis in the near future, given their present environmental problems and the need for massive investments’ (EC, 1997, p.67). In a similar vein, Jordan points out that the ‘impending enlargement of the EU to encompass countries from the former Eastern Bloc constitutes a far stiffer challenge to the internal cohesiveness and high aspirations of the environmental acquis than anything that has gone before, including tardy implementation and fitful policy integration’ (Jordan, 1999, p. 15).
