European Environmental Policy

Environmentalists have an ambiguous, even paradoxical, attitude to European integration. Many advances in environmental protection—in relation to water quality, air pollution, or habitat protection—have come from European Union (EU) legislation. Yet many environmentalists, particularly “deep greens” or fundamentalists, remain opposed to the whole notion of supranational integration.

To understand this paradox, one has to go back to the origins of the European project. J...