EU Environmental Policy Ten Years after Eastern Enlargement

Abstract

Driven by the EU’s membership conditionality, the ten post-communist Central and Eastern European states engaged in far going reforms of their legal, political and economic systems and underwent changes in their state-society relations. This development culminated in their EU membership in 2004 and, respectively, for Romania and Bulgaria, in 2007. Prior to accession many observers of EU environmental policy were skeptical of the benefits of Eastern Enlargement both for the EU as a whole but also for the new member states. Focusing on the EU level, the main expectation was that the Eastern member states will help making EU environmental policy less progressive. At the level of the new member states, many were skeptical about the sustainability of the conditionality-induced impact of the EU, arguing that EU transformative leverage will evaporate once the goal of membership is reached. Ten years after the completion of the first round of the Eastern enlargement in May 2004, time is now ripe to assess the outcomes and the impact of EU membership on EU environmental policy and on the development of this policy field in the Central and Eastern European member states. The panel brings together analyses focusing at the EU level and the member states and includes large-N comparative papers as well as case studies from specific subfields of EU environmental and climate policy.

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