Consumer Policy (European Union)

The European Union (EU), and in particular its executive arm, the European Commission, is considered to be the foremost champion of consumer rights in the world as of 2010. The commission's latest action program (2007–2013) in the field of consumer policy (Decision No 1926/2006/EC) contains numerous proposed legislative measures to add to an already large array of EU consumer protection legislation. The program is backed by 156.8 million euros of funding and details its main objectives as being: (1) “to ensure a high level of consumer protection, notably through better consultation with consumers and better representation of their interests;” and (2) “to ensure the effective application of consumer protection rules, in particular through cooperation on enforcement, information, education and redress.” The program thus not only signals a willingness to take action in favor of the consumer, but also provides the material means for consumer protection and confirms the EU's commitment to democratic innovation in the matter of policy formation.

Given the substance of European consumer policy, it is perhaps surprising that the history of consumer protection within the EU is a relatively recent and troubled one. Notwithstanding the release in 1975 of a European Economic Community (EEC) Council Resolution on a Preliminary Programme for a Consumer Protection and Information Policy (OJ 1975 C92/1), the European treaties, first established the EEC (in the Treaty of Rome, 1957) and, second, the European Union (in the Treaty on European Union, TEU, 1992, now the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, TFEU, 2010) only endowed the supranational body with an explicit competence to pursue consumer protection policies in 1987 (in the Single European Act, SEA).

The 1975 resolution declared that it would provide the European consumer with an ambitious set of rights: the right to protection of economic interests, the right of redress, the right to information and education, and the right of representation. However, and despite its rhetoric, the resolution was merely a statement of intent and the subsequent history of the development of EU consumer policy is better described as an accidental process, caused by judicial and legislative spillover from European efforts to establish a common and then a single market. Equally, the establishment of EU consumer protection policy has been characterized by tensions between the need to protect the European consumer from the potential ill-effects of market integration and the desire to encourage the European citizen to adopt the mantle of an economic citizen to confidently engage in European market building.

The primary and founding tension between the EU's vision of its citizens as, on the one hand, economic units with the necessary freedom to engage in the process of market building, and, on the other, as individuals who must be protected from any harm that might be caused by market integration, is still to be found within the language deployed by the commission directorate general responsible for health [Page 285]and safety and consumer affairs. According to its director, consumers are essential to economic growth and job creation. Yet, across the European Union, consumers lack confidence in cross-border shopping. As a consequence of such formulations, it is perhaps all too easy to begin to question the commitment to consumer policy within the EU: are European policymakers less concerned with protecting consumers from harm and more concerned with encouraging individual Europeans to act as units of economic integration? This tension and struggle to define the role of the European consumer has haunted each of the three historical stages of the evolution of European consumer policy: (1) a period encompassing judicial efforts to overcome national barriers to trade and to give the market consumer an appropriate “European character;” (2) a period of European re-regulation, led by the commission that sought to ensure a high level of legislative protection for European consumers; and (3) a final period, during which the EU is seeking to respond to an apparent loss of confidence of European consumers through intensified efforts to ensure a measure of consumer representation within policy making.

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