Paper Titles & Abstracts

The present article on the formation of the European environmental conscience will ask the question, why an environmental conscience has grown since the late 1960s and early 1970s in the industrialised world. It will show that the undeniable environmental degradation during this time are one side of the argument, but that a European environmental conscience has mainly developed through successive steps of European integration in energy policy. It became a European environmental conscience, when the EU, particularly the Commission, devised policies to counter such effects, which is captured in the concept of environmental policy integration (Jordan and Lenschow, 2010). The EU has assembled expertise in the environmental field over the past decades and can thus cater for the European environmental conscience better than any Member State. In this connection between energy and environmental we find the driver for European integration and indeed European identity, which is branded the European environmental conscience in this article.