Trading Places: The Role of the United States and the European Union in International Environmental Politics

Abstract

When environmental issues emerged on the international agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States was of one of the strongest and most consistent supporters of international environmental treaties and agreements. The member states of the European Union subsequently ratified all the international treaties created in this period, but U.S. leadership was crucial and European states were laggards in many cases. Since the 1990s, the political dynamics of international environmental policy have shifted, with the European Union emerging as a global environmental leader and the United States repeatedly opposing multilateral environmental agreements. The authors argue that a “regulatory politics” model that synthesizes the effects of domestic politics and international regulatory competition provides the most powerful explanation of why the United States and European Union have “traded places” with respect to their support for international environmental agreements.

Regulatory Theory

“…These failures have defied not only state regulatory actors but also private regulatory systems and markets. Vogel (2010) suggests that civil regulation is not a substitute for the exercise of state authority, and argues that it should be reinforced by and integrated with state regulatory systems (see also Buthe 2010).…”

“…It was only natural, then, that the early environmental protection of the 1970s relied on the nation-state or, at the international level, groups of states, acting primarily through treaty-based intergovernmental organisations (de Burca et al 2013;Abbott and Snidal 2009: 505). A raft of issuespecific international rules (for example, on world heritage, trade in endangered species and pollution from ships) was developed and overseen by international organisations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (Kelemen and Vogel 2010). Under this approach, states believed they understood environmental problems clearly, that they could be defined in advance and managed through mandatory rules (de Burca et al 2013: 730).…”

European Union as a Leader in Climate Change Policy: Assessing Europe’s Roles in the World∗

“…Over the last decade, the EU's leadership assessments have been more encouraging (Keleman & Vogel, 2009;Groenleer & Van Shaik, 2005). Emphasis has tended to change with the scholars drifting towards the possibilities of the EU leadership and how it could lead-turning its potential into action.…”

Environmental leadership? Comparing regulatory outcomes and industrial performance in the United States and the European Union

“…Indicatively, it took the lead in pushing for the adoption of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (Bretherton and Vogler 2006). In the course of the past two decades, the EU has ratified every single major international environmental agreement, in marked contrast to the US that has overwhelmingly refrained from entering into new international environmental regimes (Kelemen and Vogel, 2010). Indeed, as Vogler and Stephan (2007: 394) note, the EU has developed competencies across a range of environmental policy areas and is signatory to more than 60 multilateral environmental agreements.…”

“…During the 1970s and 1980s, the US enacted a flurry of regulatory statutes aimed at addressing problems of water, soil and air pollution, widely considered as the most innovative, comprehensive and stringent worldwide (Kelemen and Vogel, 2010). Starting however with the administration of George H. W. Bush (1989Bush ( -1993, US leadership has gradually faded and the country is nowadays widely castigated for lacking an ambitious environmental policy orientation.…”