Compliance with EU Environmental Law: From the Southern to the Eastern Problem?

Environmental policy is one of the policy fields where European integration went particularly far during the last decades. Not only did the size of the environmental acquis grow rapidly, but the EU’s impact has also become the main driver for policy output in the Member States. At the same time, EU environmental policy has witnessed very severe compliance problems during the last decades and the European Commission was forced to open the highest number of legal procedures against the Member States for breaching EU environmental law. Different waves of EU enlargements have contributed differently to this “compliance gap”. Accounts of the „Mediterranean Syndrome“ were particularly popular after the accession of the Southern European states in the 1980s and 1990s and highlighted the structural shortcomings of a “one-size-fits-all” policy. While the accession of Northern Member States and Austria was seen to bring in champions of environmental policy, one of the main arguments against the Eastern Enlargement was that by accepting these states as members, the EU will face massive problems of non-compliance with the acquis communautaire. In order to avoid the “compliance gap” witnessed after its southward enlargement in the 1980s, the EU installed a new “preparatory” phase before it finally accepted the CEE states as new members in 2004 and 2007, respectively. In this paper, we analyse the impact of different accession waves on compliance with EU environmental law. We use data on infringement proceedings with environmental policy output for the time period 1978-2010 as indicators for compliance. The paper presents longitudinal descriptive statistics on characteristics of the compliance problem and proposes several explanatory factors that might help us understanding these developments.