Governing the European Union, by Michele Boselli

1. The European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)

The Common Agricultural Policy’s three main features are:

b) support prices of agricultural produce above a politically set minimum level;

c) restrict imports to the EU from other countries to give preference to home-grown produce; and

d) subsidize export from the EU of the surplus stocks created by the CAP’s itself promotion of higher agricultural productivity since its introduction in the Sixties.

High productivity was indeed the main goal of European governments (namely those of the six founding countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg and the Netherlands) which, facing food shortages in the years after the second world war, needed a common strategy and a common market in order to achieve food self-sufficiency and keep unemployment low. Thanks to the simultaneous technological innovations, they proved to be highly successful in turning Western Europe from a traditional position of importer of agricultural goods into one of exporter (Europe now produces far more food than it needs) to an extent that the CAP has been almost too successful.

In fact, the huge surplus production resulting in the disturbing destruction of food, the trade protectionism persistently damaging the economies of developing countries, and eve the threat to food safety and public health epitomised by the BSE disease, all fit well in the “conflict and consensus” theme as well as in the “inclusion and exclusion” one as the clearest example of how the EU institutions, along national governments, affect the lives of the people – as professor Brown observes “these issues demonstrate just how far the reach of the CAP and RU policy making goes: policies designed to address agriculture in Europe have international importance, and impact on some of the poorest countries in the world”.

The study of the agricultural case provides a savoury sampling of the broad concept of governance, a decision-making process wider than government alone, when we focus on the unlikely coalition of the different socio-economic interests of farmer and agribusiness that has until recently made virtually impossible to tackle the CAP’s self evident, above-mentioned problems. The CAP can also be seen as the connection between the development of the agricultural sector and the policies of governments and the EU towards agriculture. In this respect, the only key feature of the CAP is the high level of government intervention in the market since it was founded in the Fifties.

Now that we have outlines the CAP’s key features, it will be interesting to see how this policy fits in with the aims and aspirations of the founding fathers of the EU, such as Jean Monnet. Whether or not they would have found the CAP’s developments consistent with their idea of Europe is an issue which could easily fall into the dichotomy between the socialist ideology and the liberal, market-oriented thought. We know of Monnet’s contempt for economic protectionism. He indicates it as a major threat to peace in Europe in his 1945 speech, so we can assume that he would be quite horrified by the CAP’s budget-eating proportions along the decades.

But such judgements are easily misleading if extruded from the proper historical context. As we have seen, after the war there were severe food shortages in Europe. The priority was to achieve a self-sufficiency never experienced before, also as a measure to establish economic ties to make war impossible after the mistakes of the intra-wars period policies (or non-policies). Other measures included the establishment of the first European community, the one on coal and steel (ECSC). Monnet became its president in 1952, thus fulfilling his idea to “share” Germany’s Ruhr as a guarantee for peace.

That post-war Europe was non place for extreme liberism is well shown by the cases of Germany and Italy, where the ruling Christian-Democrats respectively led by two other founding fathers, Adenauer and De Gasperi, carried out popular if not populist policies much softer for the working class than what would have been expected according to their right-wing position in the political spectrum (or indeed woul be in contemporary Europe).

Welfare, argues Judt in his essay on Europe, is the great West European achievement of recent years: “it is what distinguishes the region not only from the United States, where there is almost no community provision for the health and protection of all its members, but also from Earn Europe, were the provisions were formal but often not much more”. Judt’s 1996 statement is supported three years later by Motsi defining the much-discussed third way as “an attempt to combine America’s free market traditions, with their emphasis on flexibility, inventiveness, and risk-taking, with European social-democratic principles”.

Such views, applicable to the CAP as well as to many other aspects of modern Europe’s political and socio-economical situation, would probably satisfy the aims and aspirations of the Union’s founding fathers. However, they could also concern them in view of the future perspective of enlargement to include Central and Eastern European post-communist countries and, possibly, Israel and Turkey.

Enlargement cannot come without a deep revision of the Union’s processes and policies (the CAP is in fact the first to be addressed) and such reform cannot come without a brave and bold move towards the “United States of Europe”, a concept astonishingly introduced by Churchill in a speech delivered at Zurich University in 1946. Churchill himself anticipated that it would astonish the audience, for he said that “the first step in the recreation of Europe must be a partnership between France and Germany”, an assertion that one would not expect at that timing after the war and especially from the British point of view.

A truly visionary statesman, Churchill foresaw what is still today the ideal European federalists aim to, the axis of the Union would develop around, and embodied the unique position of half participant and half observer that Britain has had over the following decades and still has today towards everything European, particularly towards the CAP. In that, Churchill could be seen as the fifth pillar in the building of Europe, albeit not taking part in what he suggested, along the other founding fathers usually recognised in the names of France’s foreign minister Shuman, the above-mentioned Adenauer and De Gasperi, and the same Monnet, who said that “it is not the addition of sovereign nations getting together that makes an entity of them”.

That brings us back to the question of how the CAP fits in with the founding fathers’ aims and aspirations. We can conclude that yes, it fitted in well up to now for it proved, together with other policies, to be effective in maintaining over fifty years of peace in Europe, which was the founding fathers’ priority. It is now our job, citizens of an enlarged and strengthened Europe, to make their ideal fly high again “for a positive common cause” – as Seton-Watson would say – “for something more exciting than the price of butter”.