Cooling Enthusiasm for Fighting Global Warming: The Unravelling of Ecological Modernisation in the European Crisis?

Once upon a time the future of the EU looked bright green. On the global stage the EU portrayed itself as an environmental frontrunner. The extent of its ‘soft’ power in battling climate change was reflected in both the Lisbon Strategy (2000) and the ‘Europe 2020’ Strategy (2010). Crucially, the ‘greening’ of the economy was appreciated not only for environmental reasons, but as instrumental for achieving the overall goal of ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’. Only five years later, however, a crisis-ridden EU has apparently turned its back on overambitious environmental goals. Actually the consequences of the crisis were not just the relegation of environmental concerns but the fundamental disentanglement of the political ideals that merged to form the vision of a ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive’ EU. The crisis has exploded the apparently straightforward and rational connection between economic growth and environmental sustainability that is asserted by ecological modernisation. With many European economies in decline and unemployment on the rise, growth of any kind is on demand. Can the governments of the most crisis-ridden countries be blamed if they prefer quick instead of ‘sustainable’ recovery? Can the ‘donor countries’ be expected to invest in green technologies when there are economically more feasible ways of contributing to the debt relief of recipient countries? Yet discarding environmental goals indicates a fundamental shift in the European narrative, and its political discourses. In this contribution we map these changes and investigate the implication for the viability of ecological modernisation in the EU today. Our aim is to analyse the transforming patterns of discourse that shifted from uniting economic and environmental aims to opposing them. We argue that the dominant discourse can be characterised by its exclusion not only of sustainability but also alternative models.