Is EU enlargement bad for environmental policy? Confronting gloomy expectations with evidence

As the EU expands to include the Central and East European (CEE) countries, its capacity to adopt and implement environmental policy will be negatively affected—this has been a widely held assumption. The CEE countries have been expected to be laggards, slowing down, weakening or even reversing progress in environmental policy-making. More than 2 years have now passed since the enlargement, and the new member-states have begun to make their mark on EU decision-making and implementation. This article confronts gloomy expectations with evidence in three issue-areas: genetically modified organisms, air pollution and climate change. The main conclusions are, first, that there is no indication that enlargement will result in any breakdown of EU environmental policy. Second, the consequences vary across issue-areas. The new member-states have strengthened the group that favours strict regulation of genetically modified organisms, weakened the implementation of the EU emission trading directive and have affected EU air policy hardly at all. These results can give an indication of what is to come. On the other hand, only a short time has passed since enlargement, and the picture may change with regard to other issue-areas.