Cambridge University Press Contemporary European History

The Making of the CAP: Towards a Historical Analysis of the EU's First Major Policy
Author(s): N. Piers Ludlow

Source: Contemporary European History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Aug., 2005), pp. 347-371
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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The Making of the CAP:
Towards a Historical Analysis
of the EU s First Major Policy
N. PIERS LUDLOW*
Abstract
This article seeks to explain the emergence of the CAP between 1958 and 1968. It draws
attention to four particular political factors that made the policy's birth possible, despite the
vagueness of the Treaty of Rome commitment to an agricultural policy and the unpromising
precedents of earlier attempts to integrate Europe's agriculture. These were the strength of the
coalition pushing for the CAP's emergence (primarily composed of France, the Netherlands and
the European Commission), the weakness and inconsistencies of their opponents (Germany
and Italy), the favourable international context, and the incremental nature of the policy's
development. The article further argues that the complexity of the bargaining over the farm
support policy, and the manner in which CAP discussions often became entwined with other
seemingly unrelated aspects of EEC decision-making, illustrate how even the early Community
of the 1960s was sufficiently complex to require a radical change of approach from those who
wish to study its historical development.
For over four decades, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been the
European Union's most expensive policy, consuming substantial proportions of the
EU budget. For most of the first four of European integration's five decades of
operation, moreover, the CAP was also incontestably the most complex, the most
ambitious, and the most controversial undertaking by the European institutions. And
yet amid all the voluminous writings on the CAP's exact manner of operation, its
multiple faults and short-comings, and the way in which it might be or should be
reformed, there has been relatively little analysis of how the policy was born. This is
unfortunate, since the interplay of competing national and institutional perspectives
that gave birth to the CAP also reveals much about the nature and workings of the
early European Economic Community (EEC).
At least one prominent political science analyst of the EU has recently become
aware of this. But while Andrew Moravcsik's extensive writings represent a thought
provoking stimulus to which historians should probably have responded more, his
* Department of International History, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, Aldwych,

London, WC2A 2AE, UK. n.p.ludlow@lse.ac.uk.
Contemporary European History, 14, 3 (2005), pp. 347-371 ? 2005 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0960777305002493 Printed in the United Kingdom
348 Contemporary European History
ideas about the origins of the CAP rest upon too simplified a reading of the
early EEC. For a start, his exclusive focus upon the actions and interests of the
largest three EU member states ? France, Germany and Britain ? is ill-suited
for a policy that was much more shaped by other players within the six-country
Community of the 1960s than it was by a United Kingdom that proved unable
to join before 1973. As will become clear below, neither the Netherlands nor the
European Commission deserved the peripheral role in the CAP's emergence to
which they were condemned by The Choice for Europe. Furthermore, Moravcsik's
impressively multi-lingual coverage of a huge range of secondary sources about the
EU's formative years, is not sufficient to compensate fully for the absence of detailed
archival research. Almost all of the Community's founding member states now release
their official papers after thirty years, as do the Community institutions themselves. It
is therefore possible to examine the details of discussions within each of the member
state capitals and between the Council members and the European Commission, in
a fashion that even the most assiduous interviewer would find hard to match. By
choosing not to do extensive archival research, Moravcsik thus denies himself the
weapon which, though usually wielded by historians, is the most valuable in the
armoury.
Quite how much he thereby missed is underlined by the most accomplished
recent historical analysis of the early CAP - that by Ann-Christina Knudsen.2 As
yet unpublished, this does highlight how different the CAP's emergence appears
when studied with the benefit of archival access and is the source of several of
the ideas that will be outlined below. With its focus on 1958-64, however, it can
inevitably only chart a portion of the eleven-year process by which the CAP came
into being. In particular, its chronological span does not include perhaps the most
celebrated crisis to be triggered by disagreements over the CAP, namely the so
called empty chair crisis of 1965?6. Furthermore, Knudsen's concern to explain the
deeper socio-economic roots of the CAP sometimes limits the extent to which she
can scrutinise the political struggles that surrounded the policy's emergence. This is
especially so since the one great gap in her otherwise comprehensive archival coverage
is France - the single, most ardent political champion of Europe's farm policy. A
political overview of the whole 1958?69 period, which does make use of recent
French archival releases, can therefore add significantly to Knudsen's path-breaking
study.3
Clearly, a step-by-step description of how the CAP was born would require
much more than a journal article. Its most famous interpreter in the 1960s, Leon
1 Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice For Europe. Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht
(London: UCL Press, 1998), 159-237; and 'De Gaulle Between Grain or Grandeur: the Political
Economy of French EC Policy, 1958-1970', Jowrad/ of Cold War Studies, 2, 2 and 3 (2000), 3-43, 4-68.
2 Ann-Christina Lauring Knudsen, 'Defining the Policies of the Common Agricultural Policy. A
Historical Study', PhD thesis (European University Institute, 2001).
3 A really detailed analysis of the multiple French archives relevant to the CAP's birth will have to
await the publication of Gilbert Noel's forthcoming study. Unfortunately, this is likely to concentrate
exclusively on the French role.
The Making of the CAP 349
Lindberg, required over sixty pages to analyse its development between 1958 and
1962; Knudsen's account of 1958-64 is over 400 pages long.4 Those wanting a
sequential narrative charting the multiple agricultural marathons which punctuated
the EEC's first decade should therefore still look either to the various historical
introductions that were written before the governmental archives became available
or to a number of memoir accounts left by participants in the process. Likewise,
the role in the CAP's development of non-state actors other than the European
Commission, and the manner in which Brussels became a focal point for agricultural
lobbyists and interest groups, constitutes a subject area too great to be explored here.
But what this article can do is identify the key political conditions that explain why
a policy whose outlines were only very dimly defined by the Treaty of Rome had,
within eleven years, become the Community's flagship endeavour. An explanation
will be advanced based upon four key arguments. First, the political strength of the
coalition in favour of the CAP will be analysed. Second, the inconsistencies and
weaknesses of their opponents will be highlighted. Third, attention will be drawn
to the favourable international context. And, fourth, it will be explained why the
incremental nature of the CAP's development was a vital element in its successful
launch. Throughout, the argument draws upon the archives of the French, German,
and Italian governments, as well as those of the European Commission and the
Council of Ministers.
A weak starting position
In order fully to appreciate quite how remarkable the successful emergence of the
CAP was during the period between 1958 and 1969, it is important to grasp how
weak was its base within the EEC's founding treaty and how unfavourable were all
the precedents for agricultural integration within Europe. Agriculture had of course
been debated at some length during the negotiations that had created the European
Communities.6 The promise of an integrated agricultural policy had indeed been one
of the features that had helped secure political ratification for the Treaties of Rome
in France. But the actual legal stipulations contained within the EEC's founding
charter were weak, vague and highly underdeveloped when compared to those for
4 Leon Lindberg, The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1963), 219-82.
5 For two pre-archival accounts see Michael Tracey, Government and Agriculture in Western Europe 1880
1988 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) and Edmund Neville-Rolfe, The Politics of Agriculture in
the European Community (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1984). Memoirs include Michel Cointat,
Ees couloirs de l'Europe (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001); Robert Marjolin, Ee travail d'une vie. Memoirs 1911
1986 (Paris: Robert Laffond, 1986); Sicco Mansholt, La Crise. Conversations avecfanine Delaunay (Paris:
Editions Stock, 1974).
6 The most comprehensive account of the Treaty of Rome negotiations is Hanns-J?rgen K?sters,
Die Gr?ndung der Europ?ischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1982); see also his 'The
Treaties of Rome' in Roy Pryce, ed., The Dynamics of European Union (London: Routledge, 1987),
78-104; and Edelgard Mahant, Birthmarks of Europe: The Origins of the European Community Reconsidered
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 93-120.
7 Craig Parsons, A Certain Idea of Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
other crucial policy areas. Thus, article 39 set out a range of very general objectives
for the CAP and made no attempt at all to explain how it might prove possible
to resolve the inherent contradictions between 'increasing the individual earnings
of persons engaged in agriculture', stabilising markets, guaranteeing supplies and
ensuring 'the delivery of supplies to consumers at reasonable prices'.8 And articles
40, 41, 43 and 45 referred to various possible mechanisms that might be used to
establish a European single market in agriculture without establishing which of these
different tools ought to be employed or stipulating when such steps should be taken.
The only two injunctions as to the timing of the CAP's emergence were that the
Commission was to submit its first proposals to the Council of Ministers within two
years of the EEC's start and that the policy should be up and running by the end
of the transition period - that is 31 December 1969. This was very different from
the section of the Treaty of Rome detailing how the EEC customs union should be
established, which included a detailed breakdown of both the scale and the timing
of each move towards the abolition of tariffs between Community member states
and the alignment of national tariffs with the planned Common External Tariff.9 In
contrast, it was much more similar to the portions of the treaty devoted to transport
or social affairs, both of which were subsequently to become notorious for the EEC's
failure to achieve the objectives it had set itself.10 The emergence of the CAP cannot
therefore be attributed to the clarity or comprehensiveness of its treatment within
the Treaty of Rome.
Nor were the precedents for agricultural integration within Europe particularly
encouraging. Intra-European trade in agricultural commodities had been extensively
discussed during the 1950s. The so-called 'green pool' negotiations had however
been totally unable to bridge the divergent interests and visions of the multiple
European countries involved. No first steps towards agricultural integration had
been taken. Again, this was in stark contrast to the situation in the field of
industrial liberalisation where negotiations in the framework of the Organisation
for European Economic Cooperation, set up under the auspices of the Marshall
Plan, had successfully blazed a trail in facilitating intra-European industrial trade
that the EEC would subsequently extend and make irreversible. Western Europe's
recent experience of attempted agricultural integration thus reinforced the grounds
for pessimism about the CAP's likely fate indicated by the largely detail-free treaty
text, and made it appear highly improbable that Europe's farmers would be affected
by the EEC nearly as much or as quickly as their counterparts in manufacturing
8 Quotations from Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (London: Her Majesty's Stationary
Office, 1962), part 2, title II.
9 Ibid., part 2, title I, chapters 1 and 2.
10 Ibid., part 2, title IV and part 3, title III.
11 Gilbert No?l, Du pool vert ? la politique agricole commune. Les tentatives de Communaut? agricole Europ?enne
entre 1943 et 1953 (Paris: Econ?mica, 1988); Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation
State (London: Routledge, 1992), 224-317; Guido Thiemeyer, Vom 'Pool vert' zur Europ?ischen
Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft: europ?ische Integration, Kalter Krieg und die Anf?nge der gemeinsamen europ?ischen
Agrarpolitik 1930-1937 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999).
12 Richard Griffiths, Explorations in OEEC History (Paris: OECD, 1997).
industry. That the CAP was fully operational by July 1968 - its start co-ordinated
with the simultaneous beginning of fully liberalised trade of industrial products
amongst the six founding EEC members ? is therefore an outcome in need of much
explanation.
A strong coalition in favour
The first factor central to the way in which the CAP emerged much earlier than
most expected was the strength of those pushing for the rapid adoption of a European
agricultural policy. Of particular importance was the three-way alliance between
France, the Netherlands and the European Commission.
French determination to secure a highly profitable arrangement for their farmers
has often been singled out as the most important cause of the CAP's development.
Moravcsik's recent setting-out of this argument is, in this sense, no more than an
updating of the traditional claim, much used by early French analysts, that the EEC
rested upon a tacit deal between the industrial interests of West Germany and the
agricultural interests of France. As de Gaulle himself was reported to have told his
minister of agriculture: '[an agricultural policy] is owed to us, in compensation of
the serious risks which we have taken - perhaps incautiously or too early - in
the industrial and commercial field. And while this statement is a major over
simplification (it ignores for instance the extent to which French industry gained
from the EEC), it is certainly the case that France tried hard and largely successfully
to put its stamp upon the nascent CAP.
French negotiators thus featured prominently in all of the successive Council
marathons which finalised the details of the CAP. Edgard Pisani quickly emerged as
perhaps the dominant member of the Agricultural Council of the mid-1960s and
for the climatic moments of negotiation the French were also able to call upon
the still more formidable horse-trading talents of their foreign minister, Maurice
Couve de Murville. It was the latter, for instance, who reacted most quickly to
Germany's belated acknowledgement in December 1964 that it would have to accept
the price level for cereals suggested by the Commission, putting forward a whole
raft of procedural suggestions to build upon this German retreat despite the fact
that it was ostensibly Kurt Schm?cker, the German minister of finance, and not the
French foreign minister who was chairing the meeting. This French usurpation of
the Presidency helped lead, within two weeks, to the crucial 'nuit du bl?' (night of
wheat), in the course of which agreement was finalised on the common price system
vital to the operation of the CAP.
Nor was it simply through force of personality that the French negotiators
were so often able to maximise their impact. The French civil service's method of
13 Cited in Edgard Pisani, Le G?n?ral indivis (Paris: Albin Michel, 1974), 64.
14 Couves prowess as a negotiator was acknowledged by his long-term rival, Paul-Henri Spaak. See
P.-H. Spaak, Combats inachev?es (Paris: Fayard, 1969), vol. 2, 365-6.
15 Council of Ministers archives, Brussels (henceforward CMA), 1666/64, Proces-verbal de la i53eme
session du Conseil CEE (30 Nov.-i Dec. 1964).
co-ordination of European policy, centred upon the Service G?n?ral de Coordination

Interminist?rielle (SGCI) was widely acknowledged to be the most effective amongst
the Community's founder members, and ensured that all of the French officials and
ministers who attended Brussels negotiations had the same clear goals and operated in
a manner that reinforced rather than weakened each other's prospects.16 The contrast
with the Germans who were frequently to find their representatives contradicting one
another could scarcely have been greater. And this strong co-ordination enabled
the French to perfect the technique of heading off potential opponents with well
timed side-payments. In June 1965, for example, Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing, the French
minister of finance, arrived unexpectedly at a Council of Ministers meeting in Brussels
to unveil a package of generous financial inducements designed to persuade the
malcontented Italians from pursuing their campaign to prevent a deal on the financing
of the CAP. In the event it did not prove quite enough. It was nevertheless a striking
example of the sense of timing and tactics that made the French so effective within
the early EEC.
Similarly, Paris proved highly adept at turning the mechanisms of the EEC system
to its own advantage. This was perhaps most obvious in the way in which successive
French presidencies used their ability to set the Community's agenda to prioritise
CAP advance at the expense of other issues. It was no coincidence that that the 1962
and 1968 agricultural marathons were concluded with a French minister occupying
the Council chair, as were the vital, if ultimately unsuccessful, negotiations of
June 1965. But it was also apparent from Paris s willingness to moderate its loudly
proclaimed aversion to supra-nationality on occasions where Commission control
would strengthen the agricultural policy. Thus, in 1964, the French joined forces with
the Commission to repulse a determined German attempt to reduce the authority
of the Commission-chaired management committees that ran the CAP on a day-to
day basis.19 From a government whose leader had already spoken so dismissively of
supra-nationalism that a number of centrist ministers had resigned over the issue and
who would within months embark upon a sustained guerrilla war in Brussels to curb
the powers and political ambitions of the European Commission, this was remarkable
institutional pragmatism in pursuit of an effective CAP.
16 The SGCI's operation can be traced through the committee's own archives: Archives Nationales
Contemporaines, Fontainebleau, (ANF), SGCI files, multiple versements. See also Anne de Castelnau,
'Le SGCI: une r?ponse administrative aux d?fis europ?ens de l'apr?s-guerre' in Laurence Badel,
Stanislas Jeannesson and Piers Ludlow, eds., L'adaptation des administrations nationales ? la construction
europ?enne: Une approche historique (1920-1973) (Brussels: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2005).
17 The problem of Bonn's ill co-ordinated aims is discussed further below.
18 CMA. R/850/65, Proc?s verbal de la r?union restreinte tenue ? l'occasion de la I72?me session du
Conseil CEE (28 Jun.-i Jul. 1965).
19 European Commission Historical Archives, Brussels (ECHA), BDT 214/1980, Coreper reports,
multiple documents.
20 For de Gaulle's May 1962 press conference that provoked several MRP resignations see Charles de
Gaulle, Discours et Messages (Paris: Plon, 1970), vol. 3, 406-9; for a discussion of some of the struggles
between the French and the Commission preceding the 1965 crisis, see N. P. Ludlow, 'Frustrated
Ambitions: The European Commission and the Formation of a European Identity, 1958?1967',
Away from Brussels, the French were every bit as forceful. Especially notable
was the manner in which Paris played upon memories of the 1950s, when French
opposition had sunk the ambitious European Defence Community project, and
threatened to leave the Community were their CAP demands not met. Thus in
the run-up to the 1963 agricultural marathon, the French president used one of his
regular press conferences to announce that 'the development of the whole entity
will be stopped' were the CAP time-table not honoured.21 The following year the
tactic was employed again, with Alain Peyrefitte, the presidential spokesman, telling
the press that 'France will stop participating in the European Economic Community
if the agricultural Common Market is not organised in the way that was agreed'.
And then in 1965, as Germans, Italians and Dutch had been showing increasing signs
of being ready to call France's bluff, the French took matters one stage further by
actually withdrawing their representatives from Brussels and initiating a boycott of
the Community in the aftermath of the June 1965 failure to reach the scheduled deal
on CAP finance. France, in other words, was not prepared to let its partners believe
that, in the light of its earlier successes in Brussels, it was now so firmly committed
to the EEC experiment that its allegiance could be taken for granted.
Use of the metaphorical stick was backed up by the carrot. The French repeatedly
told their partners, and the Germans in particular, that concessions on the CAP
would be matched by gains elsewhere. Thus in December 1961 - as the final stage
of the second great agricultural marathon approached - the French President wrote
to Konrad Adenauer, the German Chancellor, promising that: 'If the agreement
upon the rules and regulations that has so far proved elusive can be achieved, France
will certainly not obstruct the developments foreseen by the Treaty of Rome, the
essential basis of Europe's political action. France, in other words, would look
kindly upon Germany's Community priorities were the Federal Republic to be co
operative on the CAP. Likewise, the French dropped multiple hints to Adenauer's
successor, Ludwig Erhard, that progress towards European political union, which
he so energetically pursued, would be the likely result of German flexibility over
agriculture. In June 1965, for instance, de Gaulle seemed suddenly very open about
the possibility of re-starting dialogue amongst the Six about foreign policy co
ordination, despite the fact that only three months earlier the French had refused
to discuss this topic on the grounds that no progress was likely. That a new CAP
in Marie-Th?r?se Bitsch, Wilfried Loth and Raymond Poidevin, Institutions europ?ennes et identit?s
europ?ennes (Brussels: Bruylant, 1998), 322-4.
21 de Gaulle, Discours et messages, vol. 4, 128-9; the threat was later reiterated bilaterally to the Germans:
Documents Diplomatiques Fran?ais 1963 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 2000), vol. 2, document 253.
22 Le Monde, 22 Oct. 1964.
23 French motivations are well analysed in Maurice Va?sse, 'La politique Europ?enne de la France en
1965: pourquoi "la chaise vide"?' in Wilfried Loth, ed., Crises and Compromises: The European Project,
1963-1969 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001), 193-214.
24 Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, Notes et Carnets (Paris: Pion, 1985), vol. 9, 174.
25 Documents Diplomatiques Fran?ais 1963 (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2003), vol. 1, document 271; the contrast
is clearest with de Gaulle's comments to the Dutch ambassador earlier in the year, document 112.
deadline was looming and German co-operation was once more required is the most
likely explanation for this sudden, apparent, change of heart.
For all their energy and ruthlessness, however, the French would not have been able
to secure a working CAP had they alone been pushing for European co-operation
in agriculture. In a multilateral setting like the early EEC, even the most powerful
member state needed allies, if only to reinforce the message that the CAP was a
European venture, and not just a mechanism for subsidising French farmers. It was
therefore vital that they were joined in their crusade by continental Europe's other
most effective agricultural exporter, the Netherlands. The Dutch, after all, were
actually more successful exporters of farm produce throughout the 1960s than were
the French, and had every reason to want a system that would make irreversible their
ability to sell agricultural products to their European partners in much the same way
that the EEC customs union guaranteed the Netherlands access to the market for
industrial products in Germany and the rest of the Six. It was true of course that
Dutch agricultural priorities were not identical to those of France. Horticulture, for
instance, was much more important to the Netherlands (and Italy) than it was for
France. And the Dutch would have preferred an agricultural system that would assist
their agriculture while at the same time allowing them to go on importing low-cost
cereals from outside the EEC. But the shared desire to see the rapid establishment of
a working European agricultural policy outweighed such differences between Paris
and The Hague.
The Dutch hence threw themselves into the pursuit of a CAP with just as much
determination as the French. Indeed, the Netherlands pioneered the tactic of refusing
to permit EEC advances in non-agricultural areas unless parallel moves were made
towards CAP objectives. In December i960, the Dutch held hostage the planned
'acceleration' of the tariff-removal timetable which was being championed by the
Commission and the French but was widely supported by the other member states,
unless and until the Germans ended their foot-dragging on the principle of variable
levies ? the first major building block in the planned agricultural policy. Their
eventual success may well have encouraged the French to follow suit in subsequent
years. And the principal Dutch negotiators ?Joseph Luns, the long-serving foreign
minister, but also Victor Marijnen and Biesheuvel who were successive ministers of
agriculture - rivalled Pisani or Couve de Murville in their forcefulness and impact
in Brussels.
The real importance of the Dutch to the politics of the CAP's birth, however, went
beyond their direct impact in the course of Council discussions. For there were two
crucial ways in which The Hague's advocacy of a CAP altered the dynamics of debate
26 OECD figures make clear that the Dutch sold more farm produce to their EEC partners than did the
French throughout the 1960s. The argument that Dutch support for the EEC derived from a desire to
make irreversible their access to the German market in particular is in Milward, The European Rescue
of the Nation-State, 173-96.
27 Johan Molegraaf and Ralph Dingemans, 'The Netherlands and the Common Agricultural Policy,
1958?1963' in Anne Deighton and Alan Milward, eds., Widening, Deepening and Acceleration: the
European Economic Community, 1937?1963 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), 156-8.
on this issue amongst the Six. The first was that the Netherlands helped Germany to
go on believing that a European agricultural policy might not necessarily be highly
disruptive to the Community's position in world trade for far longer than would have
been the case had France alone been the key mover behind the CAP. Throughout
most of the 1960s, West Germany had a highly jaundiced view of French commercial
instincts, believing Paris to be incorrigibly protectionist and intent on creating the
whole of the EEC in its own image.28 The Dutch, however, were seen in a very
different light, since they, like Germany, were a low-tariff country with a good record
of taking the 'liberal' side in most discussions in Brussels. It was therefore of some
importance in the agonised German debate about the CAP that the Dutch as well
as the French were in favour of an agricultural policy, and that Dutch representatives
seemed to believe that an agricultural policy could be devised that was not necessarily
unduly protectionist. In the late autumn of 1963, for instance, as the Germans braced
themselves for yet another round of agricultural discussions in Brussels, the Dutch
permanent representative in Brussels, Dirk Spierenburg, sought to send a reassuring
message to Bonn that the Netherlands too held EEC trade with third partners to be
of vital importance and that The Hague believed that the CAP could be adjusted so
as not to disrupt these commercial links.29 Bonn's subsequent (ill-placed) faith that
it had succeeded in building vital reassurances about the CAP's impact upon third
parties into the December 1963 accords makes much more sense in the light of these
Dutch reassurances.
Still more important was the way in which the Netherlands' interest in seeing a
CAP develop deprived those hostile to the policy of support from the member state
that was least adverse from clashing openly with Paris. As will be explained below,
both Germany and Italy had strong political reasons to avoid too overt a confrontation
with the French. They were therefore wary about taking their efforts to challenge
the French over the CAP too far. The Dutch did not share these qualms: whether
over political union or EEC enlargement, Luns and his ministerial colleagues seemed
almost to relish their frequent confrontations with de Gaulle.31 The French returned
the compliment, repeatedly identifying The Hague as their most persistent, and
formidable, opponent on Community matters. But on the CAP, shared economic
self-interest pushed both countries onto the same side of most debates, thereby placing
all the onus for resisting the policy onto Bonn and Rome. The repeated German and
Italian climb-downs that were to characterise the decade during which the CAP was
created were the inevitable result. And it is surely no coincidence that on the one
occasion when the French found that they were not able to prevail and were forced
28 See for instance Akten zur Ausw?rtigenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1963 (henceforward AAPD
1963), document 78.
29 Bundesarchiv, Koblenz (BAK), Bundeskanzleramt files (BKA), B136, Band 2589, B?mcke note,
26 Nov. 1963.
30 BAK, BKA, B136, Band 2589, Kurzzusammenfassung der Ergebnisse des Ministerrats der EWG vom
16-23 Dec. 1963.
31 Luns' memoirs contain a chapter proudly entitled 'My no to de Gaulle'. Joseph Luns, 'Ik herinner
mij . . .', (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1971), 139-63.
in response to carry out their threat to withdraw (albeit partially and temporarily)
from the Community was in the 1965 negotiations over CAP finance when the
Dutch had temporarily switched sides and aligned themselves with the Germans and
Italians.32
The 1965 negotiations also highlight the importance of the third member of the
pro-CAP coalition, namely the European Commission. For, as with the Dutch, the
discussions over CAP finance that triggered the empty chair crisis were notable for
being the one occasion during the 1960s when the Commission and the French
found themselves on opposite sides of a CAP debate. Again, therefore, the exception
rather underlines the rule: on most CAP negotiations the French (and the Dutch)
were greatly helped by the support that they received from the EC's self-styled
'executive'. Indeed, one participant in the 1961?63 membership discussions with the
British ? significant portions of which revolved around protecting the nascent CAP ?
described the relationship between the Commission and the French as being akin to
that between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor.33 Both the reasons for the
Commission's enthusiasm about the CAP and those that made such enthusiasm so
important for the successful emergence of the agricultural policy do therefore need
to be examined a little more closely.
The Commission's reasons for desiring a CAP were highly political. Under its
first president, Walter Hallstein, the Commission saw itself as the vanguard for
a sweeping transformation of the way in which Europe was governed, which
would eventually culminate in full political federation.34 In order to hasten this
process, however, the Commission needed to press ahead with at least one ambitious
common policy. Negative integration, such as the removal of tariff barriers, would
not suffice, since it would not require the same degree of common decision-making
and common governance as a fully-fledged common policy, and would not therefore
exercise the same transformative influence over the governments and peoples of
Europe. Instead, it could be carried out by the sort of light-weight secretariat
that characterised less ambitious European structures such as the European Free
Trade Association (EFTA). A major common policy, by contrast, would require a
degree of political and bureaucratic activism, and a common budget high enough to
emphasise that the Commission was a political player and not just an international civil
service.
Of all the possible candidates for Commission activism, none seemed more
promising than agriculture. For a start, agriculture was a deeply problematic sector,
where change of some sort was almost certainly necessary. It was very different from
32 For details see Anjo Harryvan and Jan van der Harst, 'For Once a United Front. The Netherlands
and the "Empty Chair" Crisis of the Mid-1960s' in Loth, Crises and Compromises, 173?92.
33 Cited in Nora Beloff, The General Says No (London: Penguin, 1963), 123; for the centrality of the
CAP to the enlargement discussions, see N. Piers Ludlow, Dealing With Britain: The Six and the First
UK Application to the EEC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 92-104.
34 The best public source for Hausteins vision is Walter Hallstein, Europe in the Making (New York:
Norton, 1972). Much of its content, however, was set out in innumerable speeches while Hallstein
was still Commission President. See ECHA, speeches collection.
the monetary field, for instance, where in the late 1950s and early 1960s the Atlantic
institutions of the Bretton Woods system seemed to be working sufficiently well
for there to be little need of European activism. Furthermore, it was a sector with
strongly organised professional bodies, with whom the Commission might, over time,
be able to build the type of relationship necessary to break the purely national mould
of European politics. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, it was a policy
area where Commission activism was likely to be viewed favourably by the country
most crucial to the success of the European experiment, namely France. As the 1950s
had shown, France was the member state most able to make or break the European
integration process. With de Gaulle back in power, moreover, its commitment to
the treaties signed by the government of Guy Mollet could not be taken for granted.
An operational CAP would therefore help, in Hausteins telling metaphor, to entangle
de Gaulle in so many threads that the French president would be unable to break up
the EEC. Self-interest and self-protection thus blended with a genuine belief that
an integrated approach to agriculture could improve the lot of Europe's still sizeable
rural population to persuade the early European Commission to concentrate much
of its energies upon the quest for a CAP.
The Commission's contribution to the making of the CAP was threefold. The
first, and perhaps most distinctive, feature was its role in providing the basic ideas upon
which the agricultural policy was based. This went far beyond its treaty-given role
to draft all EC legislation, and instead encompassed most of the creative thought that
went into establishing the CAP. Moravcsik is hence entirely wrong to talk about the
shaping of the CAP constituting 'a straight defeat' for the European Commission.
Instead, as Knudsen demonstrates convincingly, both the underlying structure of the
policy and numerous vital details such as the price level selected for cereals (a decision
which then set the tone for all subsequent price decisions) were the work of the
Commissioner responsible for agriculture, Sicco Mansholt, and the small but high
calibre team he had assembled in Brussels. Naturally, some of the Commission's ideas
underwent a degree of modification in the course of the fraught Council negotiations
that transformed Commission proposals into European law. And equally it is
true that, as Moravcsik points out, the Commission in general and Mansholt in
particular would have liked a policy that had less disruptive effects on global trade
35 For a discussion of the influence over the early European Commission of neo-functionalist thought,
including the belief that a rapport with professional bodies and interest groups was central to the
integration process, see Jonathan P. J. White, 'Theory Guiding Practice: the Neofunctionalists and
the Hallstein EEC Commission', fournal of European Integration History, 9, 1 (2003), 111-31.
36 See for instance the Italian diplomat's comments cited in Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation
State, 223.
37 Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-8 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1995),
vol. 13, 112.
38 Moravscik, The Choice for Europe, 208-17.
39 Knudsen, Defining the Policies, 148-224, 368-76.
40 See, for instance, the number of special subsidies that the Germans, Italians and Luxembourgers
managed to claim in the course of the final days of the grain price negotiation in 1964: CMA,
R/1269/64, Proces-verbal de la r?union restreinte tenue ? l'occasion de la I54?me session du Conseil
CEE (12-15 Dec. 1964).
patterns. For this reason the Commissioner would certainly have wanted to see
more money devoted to the structural improvement of European agriculture in such
a way that Europe's remaining farmers would require less commercial protection in
the medium term. But the fact that the policy did not function in practice quite
as the Commission had hoped in no way alters the historical reality that Mansholt
and his team were the principal authors of the legislation that brought the CAP into
being.
The second Commission contribution was as a key player in the multiple Council
negotiations that established the agricultural policy. Here too, Moravcsik's claims that
these negotiations represented the triumph of intergovernmentalism and the defeat
of the Commission's views does not tally with archival evidence. Instead, it makes
much more sense to view these negotiations as a clash of national interests certainly,
but one where the input, both technical and political, of the Commission was a
crucial factor in their eventual outcome. Mansholt in particular was a heavy-weight
player in virtually all of the Council negotiations over agriculture, not least because of
the way in which his grasp of the intricate mechanisms of the nascent policy was vastly
superior to that of all others. At one stage of the British membership negotiations
he even had to get out a blackboard to explain some particularly recondite point to
the assembled ministers. The political impact of his November 1963 intellectual
demolition of the German case against the early CAP is a clear case in point: once he
had finished talking, none of the German suggestions for reform made a month earlier
remained upon the Council agenda. And such technical expertise was flanked with
a good sense of political timing. In virtually all of the key marathons, the Commission
intervened at a crucial point with a compromise package designed to even out the
national losses and gains that the legislation would cause. Almost invariably the
final outcome of the talks bore a close resemblance to this final Commission package.
Little wonder therefore that even the French ? who for ideological reasons were
seldom generous in their praise of the Commission ? repeatedly acknowledged
the vital contribution that Mansholt and his colleagues had made to the CAP's
emergence.
41 Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 210.

42 Mansholt 's single biggest defeat was the emasculation of his 1968 plan for structural reform - but this
came after the rest of the CAP had been successfully put in place.
43 Moravscik, The Choice for Europe, 212-17.
44 N. Piers Ludlow, 'Influence and Vulnerability: the Role of the Commission in the Enlargement
Negotiations' in Richard Griffiths and Stuart Ward, Courting the Common Market: The First Attempt to
Enlarge the EEC 1961-1963 (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1996), 144.
45 CMA, 1496/63, Proces-verbal de la ii5eme session du Conseil de la CEE, 12-15 Nov. 1963. For the
German attack on the CAP, see CMA, 1368/63, Proces-verbal de la ii2?me session du Conseil de la
CEE, 15 Oct. 1963.
46 See by way of example the package deal that brought the May 1966 talks to a successful end: CMA.
R/609/66 Proc?s verbal de la r?union restreinte tenue ? l'occasion de la i85eme session du Conseil
CEE (4, 5, 9-12 May 1966).
47 See for instance de Gaulle's (grudging) comments in the wake of the December 1964 accords: cited
in Alain Peyrefitte, C'?tait de Gaulle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), vol. 2, 273. Rather less jaundiced were
77h? Making of the CAP 359
Finally, the Commission also played a fundamentally important role in creating

the widespread belief that the fortunes of the CAP and the fortunes of the whole
European integration process were inextricably bound together. As will be argued
further below, this linkage mattered immensely, since it blunted many of the sharpest
attacks on the CAP, whether from internal sceptics like the Germans or Italians, or
from external critics such as the United States. But it would have been much less
convincing a view-point, if it had emerged at all, had the policy really been a simple
product of French (and perhaps Dutch) national interests, championed exclusively by
two out of the six member states. It was thus of great significance that the most high
profile advocate of CAP advance was an institution ostensibly designed to speak for
the 'European interest' and generally held in high political esteem in those capitals,
Bonn, Rome and Washington in particular, from which the strongest dislike of the
nascent CAP emanated. No French spokesman could have had the same impact in a
meeting of German farmers with the claim voiced by a Commission representative:
'No price alignment - no agricultural policy - no European unity.'48 The manner
in which an attack on the CAP came to be equated with an attack on European
integration as a whole, was a direct and vital result of the energy with which the
Commission had adopted the creation of the CAP as its central early task.
The weaknesses and inconsistencies

of its opponents
The leading internal malcontents with the CAP were the Germans.49 Economically,
the Federal Republic was a major agricultural importer, with little interest in paying
artificially high prices for its food. Its own farmers, moreover, while much too
inefficient to survive in a fully liberalised agricultural market, were scarce enough and
unproductive enough to have been effectively protected by a much less grandiose and
expensive system than the CAP. Bonn thus resented paying over the odds primarily to
subsidise agricultural production elsewhere in Europe. Furthermore, the international
repercussions of the CAP were contrary to the interests of western Europe's most
successful industrial exporter. Any disruption to global trade patterns caused by
Europe's farm policies was likely to cause disproportionate harm to Germany's
successful exporters. Indeed, one early casualty of the CAP was Bonn's deliberate
policy of buying much of its food requirements from countries such as the United
States, to which it wanted to sell its own industrial products. And intellectually,
the dominant figure of postwar German economic policy-making, the long-serving
minister for economics and then chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, was a persistent and
Boegner's comments a year earlier: ANF, SGCI files, versement 900638, article 25, Boegner to
Couve, tel. no. 23/DE, 3 Feb. 1964.
48 Cited in Ann-Christina Lauring Knudsen, 'Creating the Common Agricultural Policy. Story of Cereal
Prices' in Loth, Crises and Compromises, 131.
49 For the background to Bonn's approach see Thiemeyer, Vom "Pool vert" zur Europ?ischen
Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft and Gisela Hendriks, Germany and European Integration. The Common Agricultural
Policy: an Area of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
3 6o Contemporary European History
vocal critic of the CAP. Successive ministers of agriculture and leaders of the
German farmers' union (the Deutscher Bauernverband) were also hostile towards most
of the agricultural policies that came out of Brussels although not necessarily to the
principle of a European agricultural policy.51
This mixture of economic, political and intellectual discomfort with the emerging
CAP, fed through into both foot-dragging within the Council of Ministers and
several abortive pushes for root and branch reform. The former would perhaps reach
its apogee over the question of cereal prices in 1963 and 1964 ? due to dogged German
opposition to any early move towards common prices, the first internal deadline of
April 1964 was missed and the second, of 15 December 1964, was only met after
massive international pressure was placed upon the Bonn government ? but was in fact
a feature of virtually every agricultural marathon from i960 onwards. The various
French and Dutch pressure tactics discussed above were devised primarily to counter
just such behaviour on the part of the Germans. And the push for reform constituted
part of Gerhard Schroder's so-called 'action plan' of April 1963, was reiterated in
October 1963 by two German state secretaries, Rolf Lahr and Rudolf H?ttebr?uker,
rumbled on through 1964 with a sustained if unsuccessful German effort to alter the
operation of the management committees that controlled short-term decisions about
the CAP, and was again extensively discussed in Bonn in the early months of 1966.
None of these efforts achieved much. But they do bear witness to Bonn's underlying
dislike of the way in which the CAP was developing. And yet, despite the strength
of this antipathy, the Germans found themselves consistently outmanoeuvred and
out-negotiated by those pressing for an agricultural policy.
The ineffectiveness of the Federal Republic's efforts to halt, slow or modify the
CAP can be traced to a number of factors. The first was the inconsistency of the
arguments put forward by the Germans. Thus in i960 and 1961 their initial complaints
were directed at the undue haste of the Commission and its allies in pushing for early
CAP decisions when there was no need for an agricultural policy to be in place until
the very end of the decade. Throughout 1962 their focus was on the way in which
the CAP was being raised as a complicating factor in the course of the membership
discussions with the British. The next year the German charge sheet concentrated
on the disruptive effects of the CAP upon Germany's food imports from outside
the EEC. From late 1963 until the end of 1964 Bonn was obsessively concerned
50 See for instance Erhards comments to the US Ambassador: Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-8
(Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1995), vol. 13, 91.
51 Knudsen, 'Defining the Policies', 136-8.
52 The best account of the lengthy struggle over cereal prices is Knudsen, 'Defining the Policies', 277
376; see also H?l?ne Delorme, 'L'adoption du prix unique des c?r?ales' in Pierre Gerbet and Daniel
Pepy, eds., Le decision dans les Communaut?s europ?ennes (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles,
1969), 269-96.
53 For Schr?ders presentation of his action plan CMA. R/295/63 Proces-verbal de la r?union restreinte
tenue ? l'occasion de la ioo?me session du Conseil de la CEE, 1?2 Apr. 1963; for the state secretaries'
assault, CMA, 1368/63, Proces-verbal de la ii2?me session du Conseil de la CEE, 15.10.1963; for
Germany's criticism of management committees, ECHA, BDT 214/1980, S/0484/64, No?l note on
19.2.1964 Coreper meeting; for a flavour of internal German discussions of CAP reform, BAK, BKA,
B-136, Bd. 3546, Herwarth to AA, tel. no. 91. 5 Feb. 1966.
with cereal prices. And in early 1965 the main issues seemed to be the cost of the
policy and the way in which it was not being flanked by advance towards non
agricultural EEC objectives. Each of these grievances had some basis in reality. But
the rapidity of Bonn's movement from one to another undermined the effectiveness
of each individual complaint and inflamed French and Commission suspicions that
the Germans were really seeking to destroy the whole policy.54
Furthermore, the Federal Republic's representatives in Brussels also found their
position weakened by the deep policy divisions over the CAP that characterised
debate in Bonn. In the spring of 1966, for instance, the German permanent
representative found himself being rebuked by H?ttebr?uker for having continued to
insist that all advance towards the CAP be accompanied by parallel progress in the
Kennedy Round of GATT negotiations. Instead, the state secretary at the ministry
of agriculture maintained that Germany's representatives should have been pressing
for a number of detailed provisions in the Community's treatment of sugar and dairy
production. In such circumstances it became extremely difficult for Germany's
negotiators to counter effectively the much better co-ordinated, and often better
argued, French or Dutch case for CAP advance.
To make matters worse for Bonn's representatives, their case was frequently
undermined by the commitments into which their government had already entered.
The October 1963 push for CAP reform for instance, was hamstrung not only by
the need to couch everything as a constructive 'improvement' to the CAP so as
not to contradict either Bonn's acceptance of the Treaty of Rome provisions on
agriculture or the unanimous outcomes of the December i960 and January 1962
agricultural marathons, but also by the fact that the Germans themselves had put
forward a timetable for Community advance that included the pledge to conclude
the new set of CAP agreements by the year's end. Setting out a programme for
wide-scale reform in October was scarcely compatible with such a target. Likewise,
Germany's efforts in the spring of 1965 to question the importance of the 30 June
deadline for a deal on CAP finance, were highly vulnerable to the charge that Bonn
had accepted this deadline in January 1962 and had allowed it to be reaffirmed by
the December 1964 agreement. Needless to say, the French representatives pressed
home this argument with all their customary vigour. The Germans, in other words,
frequently found that they were already too bound up within the nascent CAP to be
able easily to escape from its provisions.
The problem of prior commitments also underlined a second major weakness in
Germany's efforts to obstruct the CAP, namely the way in which anti-CAP stances
were often overridden by Bonn's wider political objectives. Germany's involvement
in the whole European integration process was a deeply political choice designed to
54 For an example of French suspicions see de Gaulle's comments as reported in Peyrefitte, C'?tait de
Gaulle, vol. 2, 263.
55 BAK, BKA, B-136, Bd. 8319, H?ttebr?uker to Sachs, 25 Feb. 1966.
56 For the presentation of the German timetable see CMA. R/295/63 Proces-verbal de la r?union
restreinte tenue ? l'occasion de la ioo?me session du Conseil de la CEE, 1-2, Apr. 1963.
57 CMA. R/850/65, Proc?s verbal de la r?union restreinte tenue ? l'occasion de la i72?me session du
Conseil CEE (28 Jun.-i Jul. 1965).
secure a number of primarily political goals. Given that such goals included both
Franco-German rapprochement and the continuation of the integration process itself, it
was always likely that the Bonn government would periodically be forced to downplay
its economic aims so as to protect either links with Paris or the onward march of
the EEC. Thus to have held out indefinitely against a successful outcome of the
CAP marathon of December 1961 to January 1962 might have been to endanger the
smooth progression of the Community to the second stage of its development and to
disrupt the increasingly close ties between Konrad Adenauer and de Gaulle. Similarly,
by late 1964 Erhard seems to have been conscious that further German obstinacy over
cereal prices might worsen his already strained rapport with the French (something
for which he was being bitterly criticised by influential factions within his own party)
and would almost certainly condemn to total irrelevance the proposals for European
political union which he had just launched with much fanfare.59
Nor was it just Bonn's deeper political objectives that clashed, often decisively,
with its desire to slow, amend or block the CAP. For Germany was also highly
conscious during much of the mid-1960s of the way in which impasse over agriculture
might threaten the EEC's common approach to the Kennedy Round.60 A successful
outcome of the GATT talks was deemed essential for the Federal Republic's economy
and of equal value to Bonn's relationship with Washington. Here too, therefore,
Bonn's wider aims hindered the extent to which German negotiators could slow
the CAP's advance and made the Germans extremely vulnerable to threats from the
French in particular. The 1963, 1964 and 1966 agricultural marathons are all likely
to have been affected by Bonn's awareness of looming Kennedy Round negotiation
deadlines and its realisation that obstruction over agriculture might well provoke
French retaliation over GATT.
Also of some importance in weakening the German critique of the CAP was
Bonn's own tendency towards agricultural protectionism. Nowhere was this clearer
than over the issue of cereal prices, where the refusal of Germany's government
to force its own farmers to accept a lower grain price obliged Bonn to push for
and obtain a Community price level that made a surge in French grain production
almost inevitable. The consequence was seriously to weaken Bonn's ability to achieve
meaningful CAP reform. For a start, the Germans were forced to resort to ever
more improbable suggestions as to how production could be lowered within the
Community without the price level upon which Bonn had proved so obstinate being
58 Herbert M?ller-Roschach, Die deutsche Europapolitik. Wege und Umwege zur politischen Union Europas
(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1974).
59 Ulrich Lappenk?per, '"Ich bin wirklich ein guter Europ?er" Ludwig Erhards Europapolitik 1949?
1966', Francia, 18/3 (1991), esp. 110-11.
60 See, for instance, Lahr's description of the cereals price accord as the 'key' to Kennedy Round progress:
Rolf Lahr, Zeuge von Fall und Aufstieg. Private Briefe 1934-1974 (Stuttgart: Albrecht Knaus, 1981), 412.
61 Ausw?rtiges Amt archives, Ref. 200 (IA2), Bd. 1152, Aufzeichnung 'St?rkung der europ?ischen
Gemeinschaften', 8 Feb. 1965.
62 For one of the many German documents acknowledging the link between the CAP and GATT see
BAK, BKA, B-136, Bd. 2589, Ausw?rtiges Amt note, 'Europ?ische Gemeinschaft', 12 Nov. 1963.
altered. Furthermore, the French, towards whom most of Bonn's complaints about
surplus production were directed, remained able throughout the decade to rebut the
German critique by reminding Bonn that such overproduction was the inescapable
and widely foreseen result of the price level upon which the Germans themselves had
insisted. The Federal Republic's overall ability to act as a champion of liberalism
within the context of the CAP was thus seriously restricted by its own weakness in
the face of pressure from domestic farmers.
Such German failings might have mattered less had Bonn enjoyed consistent
support from elsewhere in the Community. Unfortunately for the Federal Republic,
however, the only other country to harbour widespread misgivings about the CAP,
Italy, was a highly imperfect ally. For not only did the Italians share some of the same
inconsistency of approach that had weakened the Germans, but they also sought a set
of solutions for their CAP difficulties that were totally at odds with those pursued by
Germany. Rome and Bonn were therefore seldom able to combine forces effectively
in order to challenge the French, the Dutch and the Commission.
The first reason that Italy's opposition to the CAP proved less than totally effective
was that it was very slow to develop. Not unreasonably, Italy, as a country with a
large agricultural population, initially believed that it might draw substantial benefits
from the CAP. In particular, there was a hope in Rome that the policy would act as a
mechanism to channel useful European funds towards the impoverished and heavily
agricultural Mezzogiorno. Italian representatives in the early CAP discussions, while
expressing some anxieties about the short-term capacity of their farmers to compete
within a European market, had thus decided to side with France and Holland in
pushing for CAP advance.66 It was only in the mid-1960s as the policy began
operation that the Italians began belatedly to realise that the CAP as they had allowed
it to develop was extremely contrary to their economic interests.
At the root of the problem were the commodities covered by the first tranche of
CAP regulations and the manner in which the agricultural policy was paid for.
The former were almost exclusively northern European agricultural products -
cereals, poultry, dairy produce and pigs. Few subsidies were therefore paid out
initially to Italian producers of olive oil, wine, rice or tobacco. And the latter heavily
penalised countries that imported substantial quantities of food from outside the
EEC. Unfortunately for the Rome government, one of the unexpected side-effects
of the increasing standard of living enjoyed by its population during the 1960s, was
that Italians began to consume much higher quantities of meat than before, much of
it imported from countries such as Denmark, Argentina or the United States. This
63 For an extract from the rather unconvincing German cabinet discussions of this see BKA, B-136, Bd.
8319, Kurzprotokoll f?r die 20. Kabinettsitzung des Bundesregierung, 25 Mar. 1966.
64 See Archives Nationales, Pompidou papers, 5AG2/1035, Gaucher to Lemerle, 14 Sept. 1969.
65 The most detailed recent study of Italy and the CAP ends its analysis too early to take account of
the mid-1960s shift in the Italian stance: Giuliana Laschi, L'agricultura italiana e l'integrazione europea
(Berlin: Peter Lang, 2000).
66 Rosemary Galli and Saverio Torcasio, La partecipazione italiana alla pol?tica agr?cola communitaria (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1976), 30-1.
had the perverse effect of turning Italy - which despite its rapid growth was still the
poorest of the Six ? into the largest net contributor to the agricultural fund. Far from
being a welcome source of additional money, the CAP was therefore a significant
drain on the resources of the Italian state.
Once this became clear, the Italian government belatedly sought to redress the
problem in Brussels. From mid-1964, Rome made a series of approaches to the
Commission and to its European partners asking for the CAP to be substantially
altered. And in the spring of 1965, the Italians were still more vigorous than the
Germans or Dutch in their resistance to the French attempt to finalise the
arrangements for CAP finance. But like Bonn, Rome was hamstrung in such
efforts to hinder the CAP's emergence by the fact that it had acquiesced in each of
the early agreements setting out the gradual development of European farm support.
And also like Germany, the Italians were loath to campaign whole-heartedly against
the CAP were this to cut across other foreign policy objectives.
Admittedly, by the late 1960s, relations between Rome and Paris were so strained
that the need to protect Franco-Italian links did not constitute a significant reason
for moderating the attack on the CAP. Indeed, some Italians seemed to feel that the
general discord between the two countries made it more and not less imperative to
block the CAP. As one Italian diplomat commented: 'It would be absurd to finance,
albeit indirectly, the force de frappe [de Gaulle's putative nuclear strike force] by means
of an agricultural policy too beneficial to France.'69 But the Italians were highly
conscious of the need to protect the EEC ? from which their industrial exports
benefited substantially and which the Italians hoped to see expand over time into an
out and out political entity - and were thus susceptible both to French threats and to
the perception that a working CAP was a sine qua non of general European advance.
Furthermore, Italy was the smallest and least powerful of the early Community's
'big three' and was hence reluctant to take on the French single-handedly.70 It was
therefore particularly unfortunate that the CAP solutions sought by the Italians were
entirely out of line with those pursued by the other main CAP-sceptic, namely
Germany.
By the mid-1960s, Rome had identified two main ways in which Italy's budgetary
problem with the CAP could be resolved. The first would be to broaden the range of
products covered by the generous subsidy system so as to include more commodities
of relevance to Italian farmers. And the second was to increase the percentage
of the total CAP budget devoted to structural assistance to inefficient farmers ? a
67 See, for instance, Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Ministero del Bilancio e della Programmazione
Econ?mica (MBPE), vol. 93, Moro to Hallstein, 6 Jun. 1964.
68 For an analysis of Italy's role in this see N. Piers Ludlow, 'Challenging French Leadership in Europe:
Germany, Italy and the Netherlands and the Outbreak of the Empty Chair Crisis of 1965?1966',
Contemporary European History, 8, 2 (1999), esp. 245-7.
69 ACS, MBPE, vol. 93, Venturini to Rome, 12 Jan. 1964.
70 For an example of Italian awareness that Bonn was better placed to counter de Gaulle see Attilio
Cattani (Rome: Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 1987), 114.
71 ECHA, BDT 144/92, SEC(66)87i, Sigrist note on Coreper meeting, 16 Mar. 1966.
system of payouts from which Italy gained more than any other member state.
Such solutions had the great merit of being highly communautaire and therefore not
contradicting Italy's traditional role as an advocate of EEC advance. But they had
the major disadvantage of being on collision course with the Germans' preferred
solution to their CAP headache, which was to diminish the overall level of CAP
expenditure.7 Italy, in other words, wanted the EEC to spend its way out of the
CAP problem; Germany meanwhile sought cut-backs and financial caution. There
was hence little scope for more than a fleeting alliance between the two states least
happy with the early agricultural support system.
A propitious international environment
If internal opposition to the early CAP was largely without impact, that from outside
the EEC was no more effective. Again, the CAP had no shortage of potential foes.
The policy was contrary to the interests of those numerous countries ? including the
United States - that had traditionally exported large amounts of agricultural produce
to western Europe. It was a potentially serious disincentive to countries such as
Britain that spent much of the 1960s contemplating EEC membership, likely at best
to complicate the already taxing task of negotiating Community enlargement and at
worst to introduce a burden so high as to render UK membership unfeasible. As the
decade progressed and substantial European surpluses emerged and were exported at
subsidised rates onto the world market, it also began to constitute a threat to market
stability. And it was a standing affront to the notion of economic liberalism at a time
when the United States was seeking to use mechanisms such as the GATT to promote
a more open operation of the world trading system. But for a variety of reasons none
of its numerous critics proved able to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the EEC
actually to divert or slow the emergence of the policy in any significant fashion.
The United States could have been the policy's most formidable external adversary.
US farm exports to western Europe were worth over $1 billion in 1961. The United
States therefore had a great deal to lose. Washington in the early 1960s, moreover,
was acutely sensitive to its growing balance of payments deficit with western Europe
and keen to redress this by means of increasing exports. A drop in farm sales to the
Six (or still worse to the enlarged Community) would therefore be all the harder to
bear. And the Americans possessed multiple means of leverage over western Europe.
Not only did Washington enjoy strong ties with the European Commission, but it
72 CMA, R/609/66, Proces-verbal de la r?union restreinte tenue ? l'occasion de la i85eme session du

Conseil CEE, 4-12 May 1966.
73 The Italians retrospectively acknowledged their lack of closeness to Bonn on these issues: ACS, MBPE,
vol. 94, Resoconto sommario della 66a riunione ristretto dei direttori generali incaricato dei problemi
CEE e delle relazioni con i paesi terzi, 13 May 1966.
74 Statistical Abstract of the United States. 1962 (Washington, US Department of Commerce, 1962). This
figure is for western Europe as a whole, rather than for the EEC. Given, however, that the largest
western European country not within the EEC, Britain, had applied to join and seemed likely to be
a member by 1963 or 1964, these western European figures give a reasonably accurate impression of
how much US trade appeared to be at stake.
also had means to bring pressure to bear on each of the member states represented
in the Council of Ministers. It was also the EEC's prime interlocutor in the vital
Kennedy Round negotiations, which the Community was deeply committed to
bringing to a successful outcome. It ought therefore to have been able to influence
EEC decision-making over the CAP.
Nor were the United States shy about making their views known. In May 1961
Hallstein visited Washington and was told in no uncertain terms of US concern
about the planned agricultural policy. Later in the same year, these warnings were
reiterated by US Agricultural Secretary Orville Freeman and in the final stages of
the marathon CAP negotiations of December 1961, President Kennedy dispatched
a special assistant, Howard Peterson, to Brussels to ensure that US needs were not
overlooked. Likewise, in autumn 1962 Freeman toured Europe, making a series of
outspoken speeches in which he warned of the dangers which a protectionist CAP
might entail. Mansholt was invited to the United States in April 1963 and told once
more of the importance which Washington attached to the continuation of strong
agricultural trade links between the United States and Europe.7
All such efforts were undermined, however, by the basic political awareness, on
both sides of the Atlantic, that the US commitment to the success of European
integration was a fundamentally political choice that was not going to be significantly
altered by arguments over agricultural trade, however valuable.79 In the course of the
period during which the CAP emerged, Washington was busy urging the countries
of Western Europe to do more together not less and sought at virtually every stage
to promote the integration process not attack it. No threats of an 'agonising
reappraisal' of US policy could thus be issued over the CAP, nor, had they been,
would they have been remotely credible. Likewise, US bluster within the context
of the Kennedy Round was difficult to take entirely seriously. It was certainly the
case that Washington would have been pleased had the GATT talks been able to
safeguard US agricultural exports to the EEC. But, ultimately, the United States was
too eager to see the Round as a whole brought to a successful conclusion to allow
its agricultural desires to override its wider commercial interests. By 1967, when the
negotiations reached their climax, the Americans had thus allowed the agricultural
component of the talks to be reduced to a largely empty shell, so as to permit the
overall success to which Washington was so committed.82
75 Foreign Relations of the United States. Western Europe & Canada, 1961-3. (Washington, United States
Printing Office, 1995) vol. 13, 97-100, 113-6, 128-34.
76 Ibid., 99.
77 Le Monde, 21 Nov. 1962.
78 FRUS 1961-3, vol. 13, 194-8.
79 Geir Lundestad, Empire by 'Integration': The United States and European Integration, 1943-1997 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 13-28.
80 Ibid.
81 Ernest H. Preeg, Traders and Diplomats. An analysis of the Kennedy Round of negotiations under the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Washington: Brookings, 1970), 140.
82 Thomas Zeiler, American Trade and Power in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),
217-45.
British opposition was even more ham-strung. UK negotiators did admittedly

press for what would have amounted to root and branch reform of the CAP in the
course of Britain's first membership negotiations in 1961?3. And had the British bid
succeeded, it is likely that London and Bonn would have joined forces substantially
to alter the CAP's course.84 But the failure of the first application both postponed the
Anglo-German alliance against the CAP that the French had so feared, and taught
the British that membership negotiations were not the time or the place to seek to
adapt the EEC. By the time London approached the Community again in 1967, the
British had learnt that in order to maximise their chances of getting in, they had to
accept the EEC as it was, rather than seeking substantially to alter it on their way
in. British negotiators were still highly conscious of this political reality during the
1970?2 membership talks that were finally to bring the United Kingdom into the
EEC. Any hopes of radically transforming the EEC before Britain joined had thus
to be firmly suppressed. And in between membership bids, the United Kingdom was
to discover the extremely limited nature of any single third country's influence over
the complex internal bargaining of the Six, especially in the ever-sensitive field of
agriculture. It would prove hard enough for London to keep the question of general
commercial links between the EEC and the rest of Europe somewhere close to the
top of Community's agenda during the 1963 to 1966 period, without complicating
this task with any attempt to steer the Community's agricultural policy from the
outside.87
It was even harder for other, less powerful countries to have an impact. European
neighbours like Denmark tried repeatedly in the course of the 1960s to persuade the
Commission to take into account their interests as traditional agricultural suppliers
to the EEC. While Mansholt expressed sympathy for their plight, however, he
was able to offer no real solution other than the suggestion that Denmark either
apply to join the Community or seek a solution within a multilateral forum like
the Kennedy Round. And non-European suppliers such as Australia were to realise
during much the same period that having a representative office in Brussels in no
way guaranteed that their pleas about the CAP would be heeded. In the complex
Council discussions out of which the agricultural policy emerged, the distant voices
83 Ludlow, Dealing With Britain, 103.

84 ibid., 186-7.
85 For Labour's realisation of this, see Helen Parr, Harold Wilson and Europe, (London: Routledge,
forthcoming).
86 Con O'Neill, Britain's Entry into the European Community. Report on the Negotiations of 1970-1972
(London: Frank Cass, 2000), 38-41.
87 British frustration at the difficulty of keeping the EEC's relations with the UK 'at the foreground
of Community thinking' is well-captured by PRO, FO371 182299; M1063/1, O'Neill to Gordon
Walker, Annual Report on the European Communities for 1964, 2 Jan. 1965.
88 Morten Rasmussen, 'Joining the European Communities. Denmark's Road to the EC Membership,
1961-1973', PhD thesis, European University Institute, Florence, 2004, 143-5.
89 N. Piers Ludlow, 'Too Rich, Too Stable and Too Far Away. The EC and Trade with Australia during
the 1960s', Australian fournal of Economic History, 41, 3 (2001).
of countries not inside the EEC, were all but drowned out by the varied and multiple
interests of those countries that were present at the negotiating table.
An incremental policy
The final factor that needs to be taken into account when explaining the birth of the
CAP, is the way in which the policy emerged gradually from a series of interlinked and
yet separate decisions spread over the best part of decade, the full implications of which
were not wholly apparent until the process was complete. Thus the 1957 decision
to include an agricultural policy within the EEC was distinct from but led logically
to the reaffirmation of this idea at the 1958 Stresa conference. This in turn paved
the way for the i960 decision on the variable levy system ? the Commission's policy
response to the mandate it had been given at Stresa. Once the central mechanism
of the CAP had been identified, it made sense to decide how this tool could be
used in the first tranche of commodity regulations finalised in January 1962. And
once one set of agricultural products had been singled out for special treatment,
pressure accumulated for other commodities to be brought within the system. The
further agricultural marathons of December 1963, June 1966 and May 1968 hence
represented logical sequels. The full operation of the emerging system, moreover,
also required additional agreements on internal price levels and on the manner in
which the increasingly expensive common policy should be financed. These needs
therefore led to the December 1964 cereal price accord and the May 1966 agreement
on CAP finance. This chain reaction was not necessarily unstoppable. But it did
possess a strong degree of internal logic that increased the pressure on all of the
member states to acquiesce in each successive step. The numerous internal deadlines
for further advance included within most of the agricultural deals struck only added
to such pressure.
This gradual emergence also had a number of other consequences. First of all,
as argued above, it meant that those who sought to slow or block the policy were
constantly vulnerable to the accusation that they had signed up to earlier agreements
and were hence under a degree of obligation to allow the process that had begun
to continue. From i960 onwards, virtually no agricultural marathon was complete
without multiple references back to earlier rounds of Community negotiation. This
phenomenon was facilitated by the fact that several of those most involved in the
successive sets of Council talks ? Mansholt himself, for instance, or Couve de
Murville - served lengthy terms that enabled them to accumulate an extraordinary
collective memory of earlier CAP discussions. And, second, it meant that no single
meeting was confronted with a clear-cut decision between a liberal or a protectionist
agricultural policy. The levy system accepted in December i960, for instance, was
not of itself a guarantee that the CAP would be protectionist. It was only when
this was combined with the decision taken four years later to set EEC prices at a
level close to the high German domestic price, that the surge in European domestic
production that would lead to growing EEC agricultural self-sufficiency became
inevitable. The intervening 1962 agreements, meanwhile, meant that comparatively
low-cost European producers like France who might have been expected to resist too
high a European price precisely because of the likely rise in production were absolved
from the financial consequences of any such production increases by a system of CAP
finance that transferred the cost of paying for surplus production onto the shoulders
of countries like Germany that imported food rather than those who produced
it. And Bonn chose temporarily to accept this future cost so as to avoid a short
term confrontation with its own farmers' leaders. The Six thus found themselves
sliding into a highly expensive and protectionist system without ever having held a
generalised discussion about the merits or otherwise of such a policy departure. As
Erhard would lament somewhat plaintively to the Americans, the EEC had 'glided
into [the CAP agreements] as if in a dream.'90
Conclusion
There was nothing particularly dream-like about the CAP's overall emergence,
however. It was instead the complex outcome of a lengthy and fraught negotiation,
spread out over the whole of the EEC's first decade of operation. Any analysis of this
ten-year debate, moreover, needs to recognise it as a highly political process. For while
the basic European acceptance that something needed to be done for the still sizeable
farming population may have been determined in part at least by socio-economic
realities, the genesis of the policy itself had much more to do with the politics of the
early EEC.
The CAP thus constitutes a monument to the effectiveness and determination of
both Dutch and French national representatives and to the dynamism and intellectual
fertility of the early European Commission. Its frustrated opponents meanwhile
received a number of object lessons in how not to operate within a European context.
The Germans and Italians shifted target too often to be effective and repeatedly
appeared intent upon re-opening bargains already struck. They attracted criticism for
ill-faith and non-communautaire behaviour that neither country desired and saw many
of the genuinely sensible points they made about the emerging policy dismissed as
yet more Italian or German sour grapes. They also failed signally to co-ordinate their
tactics with one another and were hence seldom able to balance out the normally solid
French-Dutch-Commission alliance with a persistent Bonn-Rome counterweight.
The ineffectiveness of external criticism, meanwhile, highlighted the speed at
which the EEC became a decision-making system in which responsiveness to the
needs of insiders was bought at the expense of near total inflexibility when dealing
with those not within the Community. Even the United States, a power that in the
1960s seemed to have so many tools at its disposal to influence the EEC, proved
almost entirely unable to make its views count in Brussels. Finally, a political analysis
of the CAP's birth underlines the extent to which European policies can acquire a
strong degree of internal logic that can propel negotiations forward, sometimes at
the expense of proper debate about the full consequences of each action. Although
90 FRUS 1964-8, vol. 13, 91.
the neo-functionalist analysts who sought to describe the early Community were
undoubtedly wrong to turn this inner logic and momentum into an inexorable
force bound to spill over into yet more integration, their exaggeration should not
entirely discredit the importance of the incremental manner in which European
policy advanced. As both the Germans and the Italians were repeatedly to discover
to their cost, no CAP milestone could be passed without there being a resultant
increase in the calls for the EEC to press onwards. In such circumstances it became
extremely hard to delay or still more to reverse the process. Few of the individual
decisions taken during the 1960s can thus be properly understood in isolation from
those that had been taken before.
The emergence of the CAP in the course of the period 1958?68 is also a good
illustration of how complex EC policy-making was from the very outset. The stream
of Community agreements and legislation that established the complex farm support
system was not the result of any single factor or any single player. Instead, its
development can only be thoroughly explained by an analysis that covers most if
not all of the member states and the Community institutions. Nor can the CAP's
birth properly be understood by an account that never strays beyond the discussions
of agriculture itself. For on multiple occasions over the ten-year span which gave
rise to the CAP, agricultural agreements were struck that only make sense when read
in conjunction with other parallel Community decisions about enlargement, the
Kennedy Round, the establishment of the customs union, or the repeated attempts
to transform the EEC into a political union with a co-ordinated foreign policy stance.
The common agricultural policy, in other words, was so much at the heart of the
Community's overall political system, that its birth cannot be properly interpreted
without a strong sense of the overall functioning of the early EEC and an ability
to place seemingly technical agricultural bargains within their proper Community
context.
For historians of the European Community, this underlines the necessity of doing
research that draws upon multiple national and institutional archives, and which is
not too narrowly confined to a single policy area. Studies tracing the behaviour
of single actors or the discussions that surrounded one seemingly distinct policy
area have their uses of course. But such detailed investigations need also to be
flanked by more ambitious attempts to trace the interplay between different member
state and institutional players and the cross-connections between multiple policy
arenas. An analysis of France and the common cereal price decision of December
1964, however impeccably grounded in archival findings, cannot hope in isolation
to capture the full complexity of the process that led to this single decision. Instead,
historians need to acknowledge that in attempting to analyse a multilateral process like
91 The most famous neo-functionalist analysis predates the CAP: Ernst Haas, The Uniting of Europe.
Political, Social and Economic Forces, 1930-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958) but his ideas
were picked up and applied to the early EEC by Lindberg, The Political Dynamics of European Economic
Integration.
European integration, neither the multiplicity of national and institutional actors nor
the continuous and ongoing nature of bargaining in Brussels can safely be ignored.
Accepting this does not mean accepting, partially or wholly, the theoretical
assumptions of those political scientists who have worked on the EC/EU. Indeed,
arguably many of their claims - if not their theoretical conclusions - are even harder
hit by systematic historical research than those of most historians. But it does mean
that some political historians at least need to move beyond the national political
framework which has long been their preferred stamping ground, and adapt their
techniques to the rather different challenges posed by supranational decision making
in Brussels. A European political system of sorts has now been in existence for over
half a century. It is about time that historians did more to respond fully to this reality.

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The Making of the CAP: Towards a Historical Analysis of the EU's First Major Policy

Author(s): N. Piers Ludlow

Towards a Historical Analysis

of the EU s First Major Policy

* Department of International History, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, Aldwych,

A weak starting position

A strong coalition in favour

co-ordination of European policy, centred upon the Service G?n?ral de Coordination

41 Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 210.

Finally, the Commission also played a fundamentally important role in creating

The weaknesses and inconsistencies

A propitious international environment

72 CMA, R/609/66, Proces-verbal de la r?union restreinte tenue ? l'occasion de la i85eme session du

British opposition was even more ham-strung. UK negotiators did admittedly

83 Ludlow, Dealing With Britain, 103.

90 FRUS 1964-8, vol. 13, 91.

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