THE IMPACT OF U.S.A. AND E.U. ON ENVIRONMENTAL AND ENERGY DEMOCRACY IN HUNGARY
THE IMPACT OF U.S.A. AND E.U. ON ENVIRONMENTAL AND ENERGY DEMOCRACY IN HUNGARY

Summary/Abstract: This study examines the Hungarian environmental and energy democracy from the regime change in 1989 to 2015. The main pillars of environmental democracy (access to information, public participation and access to justice) have been strengthened and the Aarhus regulations have been incorporated to the Hungarian legal system. This study argues that environmental democracy belongs to the normative-empirical theories of democracy. I elaborate on the constitutional and legal bases of environmental democracy and I argue that, since 2010, several restrictions have been carried out about the environmental democracy by the Hungarian governments. Since the projected extension of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, these restrictions have increased. Despite of the strong legal foundations, the Hungarian environmental policy and environmental democracy have been in continuous regression and under attack. This paper proposes two main hypotheses. According to the first, the Hungarian environmental democracy has been evolved through legal constitutionalism (which is a main constitutional tendency in the United States), and its restrictions have been in conjunction with the constitutionalist era since 2010. The other hypothesis concerns the energy democracy, which means – in the United States and Germany – socializing and democratizing the methods of energy production and consumption without harming or endangering the environment or people. It has been argued that the prevailing of the Aarhus pillars in the field of energy policy (i.e., energy democracy) has a huge impact on the environmental democracy.

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