1.1 The EU, normative power, and climate change
In few global policy arenas has the European Union (EU), together with its member states, been more active than in the field of climate change. While the United States (US) was the initial driving force for the adoption of international environmental policies in the late 1970s and 1980s, its interest in leading a global climate regime waned towards the end of the 1980s, and EU â until 1993, European Community (EC) â leadership became increasingly important. Indeed, following the Maastricht Treaty, climate change turned into one of the core international policy fields that the newly formed EU got involved in. Although it was certainly not the only important actor in getting the Kyoto Protocol agreed on and ratified, the decisive role of the EU in this process is undisputed (Wurzel and Connelly 2011b; Wurzel, Connelly, and Liefferink 2017; Adelle, Biedenkopf, and Torney 2018). Its internal Emissions Trading System (ETS), in effect since 2005, served as a model for emissions accounting when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol came into force in 2008. Kyoto was the first global climate agreement that included binding emission reduction targets, although one of its shortcomings was that it only compelled 38 so-called Annex I parties to such reductions. After Kyoto, the EU has made several attempts at achieving a universal regime with a more extensive reach or at least extending the duration of the Kyoto Protocol beyond the initially agreed end date of 2012.
These efforts culminated in the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, which was supposed to agree on a new climate treaty. Yet, negotiations failed and resulted in nothing more than a vague and non-binding declaration. In the years immediately following Copenhagen, the idea of a globally binding agreement was put on the back burner, and the EU stepped back from the foreground of the negotiations. When the international community eventually agreed on a new global framework in the 2015 Paris Agreement (PA), it was built on voluntary contributions and discursive pressure rather than binding rules. Yet the EUâs role in achieving the PA is worth a second look. We suggest that it is perhaps better understood as the result of a learning process, which implied the acceptance of fundamental ambiguities in international society and thus led to a change of tactics, instruments, and basic understandings rather than resignation or a wholesale change of aims. The EU was important in forging the agreement in Paris, and during the negotiations it worked hard to include at least some obligatory elements. After Paris, actors within the EU started pushing for further action. In late 2019, the European Commission proposed its ambitious European Green Deal, which, if implemented, would at least in some respects restore the EUâs position as a vanguard in the climate regime. However, some member state governments, including Hungary and Poland, remain sceptical and insist on a slower transformation.
How can we understand and assess the EUâs global climate policy and its transformation over time? In this book, we look at this policy primarily from a global justice angle. We are interested in the ways in which the EUâs global climate policy invokes justice concerns, implicitly or explicitly, how these concerns have shifted over time, to what effect, and how we may explain these shifts. As we will outline at greater length in Chapter 2, our understanding of justice focusses predominantly on procedural justice. We thus pay particular attention to the way the EU envisages the organisation of the climate regime, and the role it assigns to different actors and institutions, as well as to how it involves these actors in the negotiations towards the further development of the regime. This is different from most works on climate justice, which tend to focus on substantive justice issues, such as the distribution of responsibility for climate change mitigation (e.g. Meyer and Roser 2010; Page 2013; Caney 2014). Yet, as we argue in Chapter 2, the focus on substantive justice, while inspiring many concrete policy principles, all too often is mired in deliberations of an ideal world and neglects the realities of political power and negotiations in the climate regime. In addition, substantive justice claims often speak on behalf of actors who are not themselves involved in the negotiations or turn concrete individuals and groups into abstract categories. We thus think it is important to include procedural justice in the global climate justice debate. We see this book as a contribution towards this aim.
We argue that there has been a shift in EU global climate policy after the Copenhagen summit, consisting of a move away from impartiality as the main justice consideration. Impartiality in our framework is tied to the idea of a global, binding climate regime that takes into account intergenerational concerns and applies to state as well as non-state actors, with a neutral arbiter deciding between competing claims, and differentiations of rights and duties among regime members being the exception rather than the rule. We set impartiality against non-domination and mutual recognition (Eriksen 2016). In non-domination, justice is primarily guaranteed through the self-determination of states to protect the independence of their peoples. Mutual recognition, in contrast, demands the involvement of a variety of societal actors in decision-making as well as provisions to account for their different identities and interests.
From this angle, the PA, as well as the EU strategy in the run-up to Paris and afterwards, represents a step away from a focus on impartiality towards non-discrimination and mutual recognition. We argue that these two principles overlap in their emphasis on maintaining pluralism, but that they nonetheless stand in tension to each other. Whereas non-domination in global justice reinforces a society of states, mutual recognition works towards breaking down state boundaries and opening up space for transnational civil society engagement at various levels. The move away from impartiality thus is a move towards the enhanced recognition of the concerns of other actors, rather than assuming a congruence between the concerns of the EU and what should count as global challenges. Yet normative debate persists on whether such actors should be mainly states or, for instance, vulnerable groups.
We will expand on these justice concerns in Chapter 2. We propose not seeing impartiality, non-domination, and mutual recognition as opposites, but rather as three corners of a triangle that need to be kept in balance: to combat climate change fairly, we need binding rules that do not privilege some actors over others; yet we also need to take into account the diversity of histories, identities, and interests that are at stake in any global climate regime; and non-domination guards us against undue impositions of rules against countervailing claims. In that sense, as Chapter 3 will develop, the EUâs emphasis on impartiality in the 1990s and 2000s made it stand out as a progressive climate actor, but at the same time was more problematic in justice terms than is often realised, and is in part responsible for the ultimate failure to install a global climate regime. By the same token, however, we argue that the PA moved too much in the direction of non-domination to be able to achieve a just regime for all actors. While the EU has considerably improved its climate diplomacy after Copenhagen, it needs to ensure that the principle of non-domination is not becoming the overriding concern if it wants to avoid justice taking second place in the climate regime.
Despite the importance that the EU assigns to climate change and the considerable debate on climate justice in the literature, justice has so far played little to no role in analyses of EU climate policy. It is not raised much in policy assessments. Justice does not feature in the explanation of the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen summit, where the EU had strongly promoted a new binding climate treaty, or of the success of the negotiations in Paris. Instead, the existing literature on the EU and climate change has primarily taken an introspective view and focussed on the policymaking process, including the impact of interest groups (Boasson and Wettestad 2016) or the role of member states (e.g. OberthĂźr and Roche Kelly 2008; OberthĂźr and Dupont 2011). We agree, as we elaborate in Chapter 3, that institutional developments such as the formation of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the competition between different EU institutions or various Directorates-General (DGs) within the Commission, have been important factors in shaping EU policy. Yet, by excluding justice concerns, such an institutionalist perspective misses an important factor in the EUâs climate strategy and its influence on the global regime. Likewise, we concur with the argument that the dependence of many Central and East European countries (CEECs) on coal has shifted the priorities among member states after the 2004 enlargement, but we argue that it is problematic to phrase this only in terms of interests and not also in terms of justice claims. This book is thus a reminder to the EU climate literature to consider the importance of justice not only for global climate policies, but also for the EU and its engagement with the global climate regime.
Normative issues have of course played a role in the literature on the EU as a normative power, in which EU climate policy and in particular its role in the agreement of the Kyoto Protocol have been a major reference point (Lightfoot and Burchell 2005; Scheipers and Sicurelli 2007; van Schaik and Schunz 2012). This strand of EU Studies developed from the engagement with Ian Mannersâ seminal 2002 article on the EU as a ânormative powerâ (Manners 2002). Manners argues that the EU is different from other great powers in that its power does not rest so much on material capacities or that it is seeking material gains, but that its main asset in international politics is its ability to âshape conceptions of ânormalââ (Manners 2002, 239). The EU would thus be aiming at, and also be capable of transforming international politics from an emphasis on states and power politics to a world of regional integration, multilateral institutions, and far-reaching cooperation in the tackling of transnational problems. Among these problems was climate change, and the EUâs efforts to combat climate change served as crucial support for the characterisation of the EU as a normative power. It has even led some to make the case for the EU as a âgreen powerâ (van der Heijden 2010), although others have branded this a âmythâ (Lenschow and Sprungk 2010) and pointed to economic interests behind green policies (Falkner 2007).
Such claims to normative power rest on the EUâs ability to persuade other international actors to prioritise climate change. In order to achieve this, climate change needs to be represented as a threat that overrides or is at least as important as other concerns such as economic development. Such a threat thus requires urgent countermeasures even if these compromise other policy goals. In other words, the development of an effective global climate regime presupposes the securitisation of climate change. Such securitisation is visible in the demands of Fridays for Future and other climate movements such as Extinction Rebellion, who have repeatedly referred to climate change as an âemergencyâ, âcatastropheâ, or âapocalypseâ. Yet the emergency measures asked for and the demands for more urgency in implementing them also pose challenges to democracies based on deliberation and compromise (for a good discussion, see Pickering, Bäckstrand, and Schlosberg 2020). While the EU itself has securitised climate change on the global level, as Chapter 4 shows, it has not quite done so to the extent that those marching in the streets have been doing, although the protesters have allowed EU actors to return to a more radical tone post-Paris. Crucially, the demonstrators have linked their securitisations to claims of intergenerational justice, which procedurally implies impartiality as well as mutual recognition, and in doing so have distanced themselves from the turn towards more non-domination in the PA and its focus on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the mitigation of climate change.
Yet securitisation is not only about placing an issue on top of the policy agenda and devising measures to tackle it. In Chapter 4, we argue that justice claims are also linked to, and sometimes embed, securitising moves. This is because appeals to justice imply an injustice, and such instances of injustice are, in turn, linked to articulations of threat. The claims of the youth climate movements are a good illustration of this linkage. They are demands for justice for the younger and future generations, which experience injustice in the sense of current generations exploiting the resources of this planet and thus threatening the existence of humans in the future. The securitising move thus identifies an existential threat (current behaviour leading to climate change) that needs to be tackled to achieve justice. It installs a subject for whom justice is claimed through the construction of a referent object of this threat (younger and future generations). And it leads to demands for appropriate remedies to counter the threat and thus establish justice (binding mitigating measures).
We thus argue that variations in justice claims, such as those underpinning the shifts in EU climate policies, are linked to alterations of securitisation, invoking the threat of climate change in different ways and constructing different referent objects. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which EU actors have securitised climate change, how far-reaching these securitising moves have been, how much they ran in parallel or were connected to other core EU concerns, and which of our justice principles shine through in these securitisations. Our analysis demonstrates how securitisation, on the one hand, is necessary to establish and keep climate change as a concern on the political agenda, but how, on the other hand, it may also serve as a tool for domination, imposing particular conceptions of climate change on others, and thus at the same time narrowing the debate.
1.2 Justice, the climate regime and international society
In hindsight, the normative power argument, whatever its other problems, on the one hand, was an important contribution to the development of an EU international identity as ânormative powerâ in the 2000s, but, on the other hand, was also a child of its times. More than the US, the EU was at the heart of the liberal moment in world order that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War. While most analysts have emphasised the role of the US in the liberal world order, many aspects of this order, from the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Kyoto Protocol, were seen in Washington with a great deal of suspicion and resistance, while they were at the core of EU policies. Yet rather than merely âshaping conceptions of normalâ, the end of the Cold War provided a window of opportunity for the EU to promote its multilateral mode of governance, and thus the international context also shaped EU policy (Lucarelli 2018). Yet the failure of Copenhagen was an indication that Realpolitik had not quite disappeared from the world stage. The criticism of the Western powersâ use of R2P in Libya as much as the conflicts over Crimea, Syria or Yemen, among others, brought an end to the idea of a new order, and instead reduced it to (another) liberal moment (Latham 1997). The growing rift between the EU and the US concerning the global order after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the continued struggles over Brexit further exemplify the limits of the liberal order and the EUâs normative power.
The changing justice concerns in EU climate policy must be seen in this wider context. Impartiality, as a principle that is tied to binding rules, equal treatment of individuals, and central institution of arbitration, was very much evident in this post-Cold War liberal moment. Yet resistances to such binding rules and supranational institutions have made it clear that the ânormalâ of the EU remains contested. As Richard Ashley once put it, what EU actors may regard as an urgent global concern that has to be tackled, others may see as the âimpositionâ of âinternational purposeâ (Ashley 1989). Chapter 5 will therefore discuss to what extent actors from the Global South have regarded the EUâs policies as just or unjust. The record on this question is sobering. While EU efforts in favour of a global climate regime are welcomed by many like-minded states and especially by the most vulnerable developing countries, to others impartiality all too often looked like domination in disguise. The ETS, for instance, and the various provisions for rewarding collaborations with actors in the Global South in the Kyoto Protocol, allowed industries in Europe to continue with their emissions, and devalued emission certificates. And although the inclusion of the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (C...
