Learning the Hard Way? European Climate Policy After Copenhagen

Abstract

For the European Union, the December 2009 United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen represents more than a grand failure of political strategy—it represents an identity crisis. Over the past two decades, climate change and European policy responses to it have fulfilled a number of important roles for the Union. The emergence of a coherent international climate policy regime through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol was a powerful illustration of seemingly effective multilateralism and sustainable development. Europe believed that it had played a leadership role in creating and sustaining this global regime 1 and earned prestige domestically and internationally by taking an approach consistently different from the United States, especially after President George W. Bush announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. Climate change increasingly became a powerful rationale for furthering the European integration project and an important legitimization for EU action. 2