The Europeanization of British Environmental Policy

[Introduction]. When Britain first considered the case for joining what was then know as the EEC, environmental considerations were at best secondary to what were widely perceived to be more pressing national interests, such as trade, agriculture and the sovereignty of parliament. When the decision to join was finally taken in 1972, there was still a widespread view in Britain, that - to paraphrase the title of this book – as a full member state, British environmental policy would thereafter formally be ‘in Europe’, but European environmental policy would not conceivably ever be ‘in Britain’. Or, to put it slightly differently, membership would offer Britain an opportunity to share its long experience of dealing with environmental problems with other member states, but British policy would not - and for many dominant actors including the national environment ministry, should not - be systematically Europeanized by Europe. In adopting a top-down approach for understanding the impact of EU membership on British politics, Bache and Jordan (forthcoming) define Europeanisation as ‘the reorientation or reshaping of aspects of politics in the domestic arena in ways that reflect the policies, practices and preferences of European level actors, as advanced through EU initiatives and decisions’. This definition provides the starting point for this discussion