dc.description.abstract |
Since its beginnings in the 1950s the history of European integration has been
tied to agriculture. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) became the first
European Community (EC) common policy and has been its most expensive
single budget item ever since. The CAP is both passionately defended and
fiercely criticised, standing out as the single most controversial policy of the
history of European integration. In more than five decades of existence it has
been reformed numerous times, some reforms being mere attempts to reduce
its costs, others somewhat more radical have transformed the way the
European Union (EU) aids and protects its agricultural sector. The CAP has
been analysed and discussed to various degrees on different spheres. In the
scholarly sphere, economists, sociologists, political scientists and more recently
historians have scrutinised the CAP from top to bottom to understand its main
drivers and constraints. In the political sphere, politicians have always
manoeuvred to secure a policy, which, although far too complex to understand,
provides them local support. In the general public sphere, the CAP resides as
an almost invisible policy, rarely mentioned, less discussed, except by the
agricultural actors themselves. Despite the controversy, analyses and
discussions, the truth is that the CAP, conceived to overcome very specific
objectives in a post-war, food-scarce, food-unsafe EC, endures sixty-one years
after its inception. In the present EU, where agriculture is still the sector in
decline, where issues such as international terrorism, climate change,
immigration and public health matters cover most of the public scope, how can
the endurance of the CAP be explained? Why is there such a resistance to turn
the page on a policy that could open the door to other, fairer, more effective,
less controversial, policies? The purpose of this thesis is to analyse this
endurance and to understand why despite the controversy, the discussions and
the attempts to reform, the CAP remains unbeatable at the centre of European
policies. It is not the purpose of this paper to advice European politicians on
alternative policies for the EU, but rather to suggest that the CAP, as once
conceived, has long overdue its life expectancy and is a dispensable policy in
the EU. |