GREENING EUROPEAN FOREIGN POLICY

Abstract

Establishing the legal framework for a common foreign and security policy (CFSP) was one of the major innovations made by the Maastricht Treaty of European Union. To date, the environment has played little part in the EU's attempts to flesh out the CFSP. This paper explores how foreign policy thinking in Europe and North America has changed since the Rio Earth Summit to take account of the imperative of global sustainable development, and sets out an agenda for the EU as it renegotiates the Treaty on European Union in the Intergovernmental Conference launched in March 1996. The evolution of the links between environmental sustainability and foreign policy are traced from the early 1980s and the conceptual difficulties of rhetorically appealing notions of ‘environmental security’ are highlighted. Three clusters of threats to the EU's environmental security are examined: firstly, its continuing ability to secure access to external resources; secondly, its ability to minimize the impacts of conflict generated by environmental decline on its borders; and thirdly, its ability to manage the impact of global environmental change. Three competing responses are then outlined: the co-option scenario, when the language and rhetoric of environmental security is used to clothe an essentially unreconstructed military definition of European security; the integration scenario, which extends the EU's Fifth Environmental Action Programme approach to foreign policy; and the transformation scenario, in which the goal of sustainable development is taken as a starting point for rethinking Europe's foreign policy objectives and tools. The article concludes with some modest proposals for greening the foreign policy provisions of the Treaty, and calls for the EC to produce a White Paper on Foreign Policy and Sustainable Development, are made.