Title: The Principle of Environmental Integration in the European Union : From a Discursive Constructivism
Abstract: The remarkable development of EU environmental law since the 1970s indicates that the EU is an arena of normative evolution. However, EU environmental law has also faced the so-called implementation deficits. Although it is difficult to single out a specific reason for this problem owing to the labyrinthine relationship between EU legal system and national and international laws, the incompatibility between environmental protection requirements and other policy orientations towards the building of common markets is noteworthy. In general, environmental protection requirements affect almost all policy areas, thereby leading to the contestation between environmental and other norms. This can be observed to a greater extent in the multi-dimensional legal system of the EU, which was originally orientated towards economic integration. Certainly, common market building permitted the adoption of environmental secondary legislation during the early stages of European integration. This is because environmental regulations need to be harmonized with a view to the functioning of common markets. Nevertheless, this also meant that environmental law was undoubtedly parasitic on common market law. This situation continues even after the Single European Act established a legal base for environmental legislation. Hence, the so-called Cardiff process, through which the EU institutions have attempted to mould the principle of environmental integration (hereinafter PEI) since the late 1990s, can be considered as remarkable. The paper focuses on the need of the PEI to integrate environmental protection requirements into the definition and implementation of the common actions of EU Member States. The basic concern of the paper is the significance of the PEI in terms of environmental normative evolution in the institutional context of the EU. As will be discussed later, the legal effect of the PEI is so uncertain that it is difficult to specify the roles of the PEI in the EU legal order. This uncertainty of the PEI in legal terms may urge us to query whether or not the PEI is merely a political rhetoric or a hollow bureaucratic statement. In the light of this dubiousness of the PEI as a legal principle, the paper proposes a discourse approach based on social constructivism. Some hypothetical viewpoints will be presented referring to this discursive constructivism: the PEI is expected to bridge a discursive gap between the political and the legal and thereby activate normative discourses of environmental protection. These viewpoints also cast light upon the features of the EU as an emerging polity, which needs to be distinguished from both a federal state and an international organisation in traditional senses. In this sui generis institutional structure, we can come across normative discourses not only in highly legalised processes but also in politically orientated intergovernmental processes. In other words, the legal and the political interact around normative evolution, and this interaction may lead to constitute the signification structure on the basis of which norms evolve. In this way, the paper highlights that the research strategy based on the discursive constructivism is expected to be fruitful if non-hierarchical spheres of normative communication in evolving EU institutional complexes are taken into consideration.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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