Introduction

Abstract

In many ways, energy and security issues were embodied in the European Union’s (EU) seminal origins – the treaties establishing the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the 1957 European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM). Oddly enough, however, during the half-century spanning the 1957 Treaty of Rome and the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, the EU and its predecessor organisations largely decoupled these two issues from each other. All but relegating common security architecture to the remit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an omission that did not seem particularly glaring after the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to corroborate the triumph of global free-market liberalism (Fukuyama, 2006) and the concurrent creation of the European Community in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty gave added impetus and saliency to the single market project, Brussels turned its primary institutional attention to the gradual implementation of an internal energy market that would be an integral and compatible component of the single market. Even this latter objective has proceeded at best rather fitfully, though, with many member states failing to meet the various domestic market-opening stipulations contained in the EU’s acquis communautaire – notably the first and second packages of Electricity and Gas Directives (Andoura et al., 2010, pp. 21–2).