Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Ta ble 15.1
EU membership growth
1957
Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany
1973
Britain, Ireland and Denmark
1981
Greece
1986
Spain and Portugal
1995
Austria, Sweden and Finland
2004
Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia
and Slovenia
2007
Bulgaria and Romania
membership negotiations, and several others have expressed a desire to join. At 27
members, the EU population is approximately 485 million, meaning that approximately
one in 14 people in the world live in the EU. The size of the EU economy - roughly $11
trillion - is similar to that of the USA (population 300 million). In parallel with a sharp
growth in membership, the EU's legal and political authority has been greatly expanded
through the Single European Act and subsequent EU treaties. This expansion of policy-
making competence covers trade and investment issues within the internal market as well
as most environmental policy issues.
The Maastricht Treaty divided EU policy into three 'pillars'. The
rst pillar consists of
all the policy areas of the 'old' European Community. Over time, these have been
expanded from a focus on free trade issues to include social and environmental issues. For
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rst-pillar issues, new policies are developed in collaboration between the European
Commission (the administrative bureaucracy), the Council of Ministers (member-state
government representatives) and the European Parliament (members elected by European
citizens). In contrast, for policy areas falling under the other two pillars - the Common
Foreign and Security Policy (second pillar) and Police and Judicial Cooperation in
Criminal Matters (third pillar) - cooperation is still primarily intergovernmental in char-
acter, with member states retaining important veto rights. EU policy remains divided into
these three areas, but that may be changed by future treaty developments.
The European Commission is the EU's executive body, located in Brussels (Nugent,
2000). It has four main roles in EU a
airs: (1) it has exclusive power to propose new EU
legislation to be considered by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament; (2)
it oversees the implementation of all EU policy and manages the EU budget; (3) it
enforces EU law and can initiate legal action against member states that fail to comply in
the European Court of Justice; and (4) it represents the EU internationally. The
Commission is bureaucratically organized in Directorates-General (DGs) and Services,
with separate DGs for, for example, the internal market and services, competition, enter-
prise and industry, and environment. As a result, many organizational parts of the
Commission are involved in overseeing overlapping trade and environment issues.
The Council of Ministers consists of government representatives from each member
state. The Council meets in di
ff
gurations: for example, the Environment
Council addresses environment and human health issues and the Competitiveness
Council deals with issues related to the internal market. On
ff
erent con
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rst-pillar issues, the Council
uses quali
ed majority voting, where each member state has a set number of votes
roughly proportional to population size. Member states are also responsible for the
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