The study of economic energy policy is more relevant to International Relations today because of the increase in energy interdependence and its interaction with other issues on the international agenda, climate change in particular. This paper will analyze the progress made and the obstacles that lie ahead for energy policy in the European Union (EU). The objective is to identify the factors that have led the European Commission, especially after 2005, to unleash an remarkable degree of activism in the energy area, despite the lack of an official forum for the establishment of a common energy policy. This resulted in an innovative and ambitious European legislative program, which is examined in this paper and evaluated on the basis of official documents, the recent literature and qualitative interviews with around twenty policymakers and analysts, carried out in Brussels in September 2012. It was clear that the discussion of climate change changed the view of energy issues. The fact that the EU as a whole has a growing energy deficit increased the relevance of the issue of security and also stimulated the search for alternative sources, at the same time that it placed conditions on its external relations, especially with Russia. Important progress was made, in particular with regard to the establishment of strict mandatory standards for the countries that were members of the Energy-Climate Agreement, that justified the leadership role that the EU began to assume in international climate discussions. The search for community responses and convergence among the objectives related to climate change, energy security and economic competitive position suffered enormous pressure with the impact of the global crisis after September 2008. The crisis revealed an institutional framework that was still fragile and, in the context of a recession, ended up reinforcing centrifugal trends around national interests and strategies. At the same time, this made the realization of the investments necessary to move forward with the implementation of policies in the energy and climate area more complicated. On the other hand, there is an undeniable and strong interdependence among the economies in the block, and the European Commission has insisted on defending the gains that could be achieved with community actions.
Energy Policy; Climate Change; European Union; Energy Security
