Introduction: European climate leadership

There is no shortage of would-be leaders in EU climate change politics. The EU institutions (e.g. European Council, Council of the EU, Commission and the European Parliament (EP)), member states and societal actors have all, though to varying degrees and at different time periods, tried to offer leadership in EU and international climate change politics. Importantly, public support for EU environmental policy in general, and climate change policy in particular, has been consistently high (e.g. Eurobarometer 2015). The economic recession which followed the 2008 financial crises triggered only a moderate drop in public support for EU action on climate change, although considerable variation exists between member states. As will be discussed in more detail below, at first sight the EU seems ill equipped to offer political leadership because decision-making powers are dispersed among a wide range of political actors including EU institutional and member state actors thus making the EU a ‘leaderless Europe’ (Hayward 2008). In the 1950s, when the EU was founded, ‘efforts were made in “taming” the “beast” . . . of leadership’ (Blondel 1987: 3). The dispersal of the EU’s decisionmaking powers has, however, led to the emergence of a wide range of veto actors which have repeatedly led the EU into political stalemate and ‘joint decision traps’ (Scharpf 1988) from which it is able to escape, typically, only after lengthy periods of arduous negotiations and by adopting complex compromises and sub-optimal policy solutions. The victory of the Leave Campaign in the Brexit referendum in June 2016, which will lead to the UK exiting from the EU (see Chapter 12), has plunged the EU into the most serious crisis in its history, which it will be able to overcome only with skilful leadership. This chapter will first give a short historical overview of EU climate change politics in a global context, followed by an introduction to the key analytical concepts and themes of this book