External Boundaries of European Integration – Environmental and Climate policy between Planetary Boundaries and Geopolitical Tensions

In the past, European integration was often driven by the EU’s common market project. The area of environmental and climate policy is no exception. To facilitate the free movement of goods and services and, thus, the single market, the EU harmonized environmental standards. In doing so, it created a comprehensive body of legislation that also contributed to a transfer of national competencies to the supranational level. While this enabled European institutions, especially the Commission, to use environmental and climate policy as a tool to increase the EU’s legitimacy, the ‘myth of green Europe’ would not facilitate a new integration dynamic. However, recently with the European Green Deal and with increasing knowledge of global environmental degradation and an emerging climate crisis, the EU took a role as a global leader in international environmental and climate policy. Moreover, this ambition translated into a new internal integration dynamic. Interestingly, what triggered this new dynamic is less the assessment of market imperfections but the insight that planetary boundaries (e.g., limited resources and capacities of the planet’s ecosystem to process human activity) pose limits to societies’ actions: Staying within these boundaries requires a transformation of economic and social activities. Yet, in parallel, global threats, the war in Ukraine and challenges to the established global trade and economic order caused a turn towards geopolitical considerations. Against this backdrop, we investigate whether and to what degree the Green Deal’s premise, i.e. respecting planetary boundaries, function as policy justifications and to support integration attempts across a variety of policies, ranging from nature convention to global trade. Thus, on the one hand, a broad reception of related objectives would signal a new integration dynamic driven by environmental considerations. On the other hand, geopolitical considerations might rival the orientation towards planetary boundaries. Our contribution argues that recent integration dynamics are increasingly shaped by the construction of such non-territorial, external boundaries – whether it is based on planetary boundaries or geopolitical tensions. We analyze eleven policies (from climate, to trade, critical resources, and agricultural policy) to inquire relevant themes in policies and show that, while external boundaries play a crucial role in recent EU policies, there is a limited relevance of planetary boundaries confined to the core of environmental and climate policy.