An American Perspective on Belgian and British Environmental Law within Europe

It is unusual these days for an American to offer an outsider's view of a comparative topic that does not involve the United States either as one side of the comparison or an interested party. One does not need to look to disagreements over policies regarding NATO, Bosnia, or Iraq to find this tendency. As Europeans know only too well, we Americans are often parochial in our views, if not isolationist. The recent success of the U.S. economy as compared to Europe and Asia has not helped us to lose an unjustified sense of our own primacy. A virtue of the Fulbright program of international exchange of scholars (not to mention the academic innovation called a sabbatical) is to put an American like me into the unfamiliar position of chairing a few sessions of a conference that compares environmental law in Belgium and Britain and trying to offer a useful comment on the subject. In doing so, I hope to provide some relevant points of objective comparison without coloring my comments too strongly with an American point of view. In accordance with my modest knowledge of Belgian and British law, I will also keep this comment brief.1