Séminaire
Date(s) : du 28 novembre 2025 14 h 00 au 18 novembre 2025 16 h 00
Lieu : Salle Germaine TILLION - MMSH - Aix-en-Provence
Organisateur(s) / trice(s) à TELEMMe :
Groupe(s) organisateur(s) :
PRÉSENTATION
This contribution draws on my research on the origins and development of the early history of European Law and Policy, which started with the First Environmental Action Programme of 1973. It encompasses several case studies of policy and law-making projects ranging from common standards for bathing water to the protection of migrant birds, and from instruments like the polluter pays principle to environmental impact assessment. The goal of this paper is to draw out continuity and change, in terms of priorities and issues, the involvement of different actors within and beyond the European institutions, the borrowing of ideas and solutions from outside, and the growing challenge of making environmental law actually work. The paper will seek to explain why European-level environmental policy advanced despite a non-existent legal basis, and shapes the environmental laws in EU member states, but also why it remained fragmented, haphazard, and sometimes ineffective.
PROGRAMME
Saving the European Environment? Assessing the Emergence of EU Environmental Law and Policy (1969-1985)
Jan-Henrik MEYER (Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt)
Discutante
Mauve Carbonell (MCF en Histoire, TELEMMe, AMU)
Jan-Henrik Meyer is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt a.M., an associate researcher at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and a project leader at the Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment. He teaches European Studies at FU Berlin. His main areas of research are the history of European integration, legal, social and political history. He is an expert in environmental history, and energy history. He has worked in leading function e.g. in a European project on the history of nuclear energy and society.
Recent publications:
Meyer, Jan-Henrik. 2025. « The Nuclear-Water Nexus and the Origins of European Environmental Policy: Thermal Pollution as a Transnational Problem. » In The Nuclear Water Nexus, edited by Siegfried Evens and Per Högselius, 85-95, 321-327. Open access: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15572.003.0012
Meyer, Jan-Henrik. 2025. « Modern Environmentalism in Europe (Chapter 33). » In Companion to Global Environmental History, edited by John R. Mc Neill and Erin Stewart Mauldin, 510-526. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Meyer, Jan-Henrik. 2024. Nuclear Power and Geography: How the European Communities Failed to Regulate the Siting of Nuclear Installations at Borders in the 1970s and 1980s. Historical Social Research 49 (1): 167-192. doi: 10.12759/hsr.49.2024.08. Open access: https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_3573406_1/component/file_3573407/MeyerJHNuclearPower2024.pdf?mode=download