Amoco Cadiz and the Early Days of EC Maritime Regulation

This chapter outlines and explores how maritime safety became an issue for the European Community (EC) in the period mid-1970s to end 1980s. It provides analysis on how maritime safety found its way onto the EC agenda. It explores the political power play that followed the sinking of the Amoco Cadiz oil tanker in 1978. The accident merged safety and environmental concerns and thereby challenged a maritime regulatory regime which had hitherto mainly addressed safety issues. The oil spill that followed gave important new impetus to the international regulatory debate and drove maritime safety and environmental considerations up the EC agenda. The chapter describe and analyses how the key EC institutions acted and reacted. Particular attention is devoted to analysing and explaining the emerging role of the European Parliament. The political processes, which gradually prepared the ground for port state control (PSC), are also outlined. The way EC Member States sought to balance their interests as shipping nations in the global arena through their membership of the International Maritime Consultative Organisation (IMCO later renamed IMO) on the one hand, with their EC interests on the other, are analysed. The chapter also investigates how internal EC processes interacted with the broader political, economic and commercial changes taking place in the wider maritime world. Finally, the chapter explores whether the emerging joint EC maritime safety policy can be explained also by broader internal institutional EC developments, such as treaty changes and consecutive EC/EU enlargement processes.