PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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The 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam (ToA) then produced several important
amendments and revisions to the Treaty on European Union and made an even stronger
commitment to sustainability by explicitly and unequivocally referring to the principle of
sustainable development in its preamble and then calling for sustainable development in
its first substantive paragraph. Compare Article 2 of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty with
Article 2 of the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty:
The Union shall have as its basis the following objectives:
- to promote economic and social progress and a high level of employment and to
achieve balanced and sustainable development, in particular through the creation of an
area without internal frontiers, through the strengthening of economic and social
cohesion and through the establishment of economic and monetary union […].
[Emphasis added]
Particularly noteworthy is the conspicuous absence of the term “economic
growth” in the formulation of both this and the four other objectives. The term
“progress” fills in the blank here. Also of interest is the mention of the problematic term
“cohesion” next to the calls for market integration and monetary union. 5
Following the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED,
or ‘Rio Earth Summit’), the EU has been one of the most committed governments with
regard to promoting Agenda 21, which, together with the Rio Declaration, was the major
outcome of this international conference. Just in time for the Earth Summit, the
Commission also published a “Green Paper on Transport and the Environment” designed
to reflect the EU’s growing concern about transport’s impact on the greenhouse effect
and rising CO2 emissions (Commission of the European Communities 1992a). While
transport’s role in global environmental deterioration is thus widely acknowledged,
Agenda 21 still did not include a separate chapter on transport to reflect its importance.
5 Note that a more extensive discussion of the controversial term is provided in later chapters.