PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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address the first of these challenges – remember that the EU’s original raison d’être was
economic, not political integration – while the decision on Trans-European Networks
showed that public infrastructure provision is increasingly being coordinated at the supranational
level. Meanwhile, the Cohesion Fund, the Environmental Action Programs and,
most recently, the Sustainable Development Strategy are all expressions of the
redistributive and mitigating functions that the EU also has to perform in order to not lose
its legitimacy as a supra-national institution. So seen from a structuralist (Marxist)
perspective, the main reason for the EU to provide structural funds to disadvantaged and
peripheral regions and adopt the precautionary principle for environmental management
is the continued assurance of the institutional prerequisites for capital accumulation for
future generations. Yet in my view, such an interpretation is overly cynical,
deterministic, and gives the EU too much credit for successfully anticipating the
structural needs of organized capitalism in a globalized economy. More importantly, my
study showed that such a “black box” perspective of the EU as a unitary decision-maker
acting – possibly even unbeknownst to itself – more or less at the services of dominant
economic agents underestimates the extent to which different decision-making arms
within the EU exhibit fundamental differences in their outlook on matters of environment
and development. Not only does there exist a significant range of approaches within the
EU’s dominant discursive framework of ecological modernization, but many stakeholders
inside the EU are even poised to adopt alternative decision-making rationales favoring
much more environmentally, socially and procedurally demanding interpretations of
“sustainability” (e.g. DG Environment officials, Green and socialist parliamentarians, the
EU Ombudsman). Structuralist perspectives provide convenient, often sweeping, ex-post