Energy Policy

Abstract

When the Treaty of Rome was being drafted in the late 1950s no energy problem was thought to exist; not surprisingly, therefore, the word ‘energy’ appears nowhere in the Treaty. Until the oil crisis of late 1973 no suggestion that a common policy was necessary for energy as a whole ever arose. That little progress has since been made towards an effective common policy for energy owes something to this lack of a juridical basis on which the Commission could rely to enforce one. More importantly, it also owes much to the fact that, as in the transport sector, the complexity of the sector necessarily makes uniformity amongst the member states both difficult and of doubtful applicability.