Informiert bleiben

There will inevitably be a bias towards contributions in the English language. Readers are very welcome to draw my attention to omissions which might be added to this page. Annual Work Programme , 24 October Resolution of 27 October on how the CAP can improve job creation in rural areas. DG AGRI, Public consultation on modernising and simplifying the common agricultural policy Questionnaire and inception impact assessment , 2 February Think tank and research documents listed in alphabetical order Buckwell, A.

Where should the CAP go post?

EM Germany Weekly Round-Up | week ending 19/06/2015

European Parliament Research Service, Issues and challenges for EU agricultural policy , Brussels. NGOs and industry groups listed in alphabetical order Benning, R.


  1. verschlingen - English translation in English - Langenscheidt dictionary German-English.
  2. Hot Nights Forever (Hot Summer Series);
  3. Alice and the Magic Box.
  4. The Passengers!

European Environment Bureau and Birdlife Europe, Spotlight on EU Farm Policy. None of your libraries hold this item. Found at these bookshops Searching - please wait We were unable to find this edition in any bookshop we are able to search. These online bookshops told us they have this item: Other suppliers National Library of Australia - Copies Direct The National Library may be able to supply you with a photocopy or electronic copy of all or part of this item, for a fee, depending on copyright restrictions.

Tags What are tags? Public Private login e. Add a tag Cancel Be the first to add a tag for this edition. Lists What are lists? Login to add to list. He attached especial importance to the common financing of such a policy, for otherwise, in his view, faced with increased competition from firms in other EU member states, French industry would be too heavily burdened with the cost of supporting French agriculture Peyrefitte De Gaulle told Adenauer in May that the EU would be imperilled if French demands for the integration of agriculture into the common market were not met.

He repeated the message in early December and once again shortly before Christmas, as the talks over the launching of the CAP in Brussels were temporarily interrupted Hendriks The linking of the two projects by the Dutch and French governments placed the German government in a quandary. On the one hand, it remained fearful of the electoral-political repercussions of any concessions it might make on agricultural policy.

For this reason, it was important for it to delay any decision on the launching of the CAP beyond the federal elections of September On the other hand, it supported industrial trade liberalisation, closer political integration and especially the enlargement of the Community to include Britain, while, at the height of the Cold War, it was also concerned to maintain good and close relations with France, whose stance on the Berlin crisis Adenauer appreciated more than the British or American.

In as far as the German delegation had a joint negotiating strategy or objective, it was to play for time and to delay the introduction of a common agricultural policy for as long as possible von der Groeben As usual, there were, though, considerable conflicts of opinion between the Agricultural and Economics ministries.

The Agricultural Minister also supported British EU entry, but more ambivalently, fearing negative repercussions rfor German cereal prices Akten He and his ministry wanted to protect the system of import quotas through which Germany imported cheap agricultural produce from non-EU member states in product segments where there was no substantial domestic production and which constituted the heart of its own administrative powers Freisberg They were also hostile to the harmonisation of cereal prices implied by the Commission's proposals and insisted that alleged 'distortions of competition' in agriculture between the member states be eradicated before the introduction of a common agricultural policy Freisberg Italy, which was interested in opening up European markets for fruit, vegetables and wine, sided with France and Holland in the negotiations, although it was less favourable to trade liberalisation for other products and critical of some aspects of the Commission's proposals von der Groeben According to von der Groeben, Belgium, partly because it wanted to keep the integration process going, also allied itself with France and Holland; according to another, both Belgium and Luxembourg aligned themselves with Germany, but were "undependable allies", on whose support the Germans, by implication, could not necessarily count Freisberg The Germans' resistance to the creation of the CAP was, at any rate, the strongest.

Their delegation was instructed to 'give up' as little as possible in the agricultural area and to gain as much as possible in economic and political terms quoted in Hendriks However, without firm allies and internally divided, and after the EU 'clock' had been stopped to permit continued negotiations at the New Year, the German side eventually acquiesced in the introduction of a common agricultural policy in mid-January The last obstacle to an agreement - relating to the financing of the policy - was overcome in bilateral negotiations between the heads of the German and French delegations Lahr The only apparent - and, as was later to transpire, temporary - victory that the German delegation took from the negotiations was the rescinding of the Commission proposal to shorten the transitional period to a full agricultural common market by three years to Freisberg It sacrificed the quota system for imports from non-EU member states dear to the Agricultural Ministry: By contrast, the French delegation was by and large successful in achieving its aims: Commission members sceptical about the agreement - such as von der Groeben, who judged it to be much less 'market-oriented' than the Commission's original proposals - felt compelled to accept it so as not to endanger the transition to the second stage, which had to be approved unanimously by the Council, and thus not to jeopardise the integration process itself von der Groeben The implementation of the CAP required the setting of common prices for agricultural products, of which the most important, in political as well as economic terms, given the strong influence exercised by cereals farmers in the farmers' organisations, was cereals.

Between the milestone decisions on the CAP of January and December , when a common cereal price was adopted, the EU and the Franco-German relationship endured a number of crises, most notably that unleashed by De Gaulle's rejection of the British entry application in January However, a preamble added to the treaty by the German Bundestag substantially devalued its significance, disillusioning De Gaulle, and Adenauer, who had sponsored the treaty against considerable domestic opposition, stood down as Chancellor later the same year, to be replaced by the 'Atlanticist' Erhard A German Foreign Office memo prepared for Erhard on his accession to the Chancellorship contained a lengthy list of issues where the French and German governments were in conflict with each other, ranging from the NATO, relations with the US, nuclear weapons strategy and the 'constitution' of the EU to numerous EU policy issues, including agricultural ones Akten For his part, De Gaulle, less than a month after the approval of the Elysee Treaty, complained that, on EU issues, the French and German governments almost always had opposing positions Akten Between these sets of two issues, there was, he argued, an non-negotiable interdependence Akten However, this did not prevent a fresh crisis breaking out between the two governments as the French accused the German agricultural minister of reneging on a pledge allegedly made by Erhard not to oppose the adoption of a common milk price before the end of Akten Again, the battle in the EU was fought primarily between France and Germany and again Paris insisted that a failure of the CAP negotiations would have the "most serious consequences " and affect the "whole future of European integration" Couve de Murville Akten Finally, the two sides reached a compromise on the lines foreseen in May - whereby, however, the German conceded the adoption of concrete CAP regulations in exchange for French agreement to a negotiating mandate for EU participation in the Kennedy Round, which was not to begin until some time in Cereals, however, constituted a much tougher political proposition - and, in Germany, as Erhard told De Gaulle, an especially "neuralgic point" Akten Cereal prices in the member states diverged widely: The Belgian price fell roughly halfway between the German and French prices.

AGRARMARKT: Alles in Butter

It was at this level - "in the middle, between the French and the Germans" Mansholt Initially in favour of a rapid decision on cereal prices Akten The German Bundestag approved this stance in March In January , the Council had decided, at the same time as it adopted the decisions laying the foundations of the CAP, that a common cereals price could be adopted only unanimously before the end of the second stage of the common market in December , but thereafter by a qualified majority vote.

Although the German government could expect to secure a price closer to German preferences while its support was required for a common price to be adopted, the option of postponing the adoption of a common price until Germany's opposition was irrelevant may have been politically more attractive, since the government could then have told German farmers and their organisations that it had done its best for them, but had been outvoted. This was the strategy that Adenauer at least was accused of having followed so long as he was Chancellor Freisberg Under other circumstances, this option could also have been appealing for the member states with lower cereals prices than the German, including France, as a price adopted by a qualified majority was likely to be lower than one which required German consent.

Already in autumn , De Gaulle, however, pushed Erhard to acquiesce in a common cereal price as quickly as possible; otherwise, he told the German Chancellor, there would be no Franco-German agreement over the Kennedy Round and the EU itself would be jeopardised Akten De Gaulle's tactics may have been motivated by his wish, later manifested in the 'empty-chair crisis', to thwart the scheduled transition to qualified majority voting.

The Foreign Minister, Couve de Murville's, statement that, on an issue like the common cereals price, a big member state such as Germany could not be outvoted, points in the same direction Freisberg After the German Agricultural Minister had blocked a cereal price decision in April, the Agricultural Council decided in June that a decision must be taken by December. After, in May , De Gaulle had told the permanent secretary in the German Foreign Office that "France is not in a hurry" over the cereal prices issue, Bonn was encouraged to believe that it might be possible to postpone a decision beyond the German elections after all Akten By October, however, the French president had changed his mind again.

If the CAP was not implemented according to the agreed schedule, he had his press spokesman declare, France would cease to take part in the EU Akten This prospect was so terrifying, according to one observer, that it caused consternation among the other member states Freisberg The threat seems in retrospect not to have been a mere bluff, although the German Foreign Office considered it more likely that the French government would prevent any progress in the Kennedy Round negotiations than withdraw from the EU altogether Akten The French tactic of 'upping the stakes' in the cereal price conflict raised the pressure on the German government and heightened the dilemma Erhard faced.

On the one hand, it was clear that, if Germany did not acquiesce in a common cereal price, France would block a successful conclusion of the Kennedy Round as well as German proposals for closer European political integration, if not destroy the EU altogether as well Freisberg On the other hand, to cave in to French pressure risked incurring dangerous domestic political consequences: In October , at the same time as De Gaulle threatened to take France out of the common market if there was no agreement on a common cereal price, Erhard's coalition partner, the liberal FDP, threatened to withdraw from the coalition if the government were to give in to French pressure Freisberg Moreover, there was no prospect that another member state would rescue the German government from its dilemma by taking over its role as principal opponent of a common cereals price.

Italy had just as strong an interest in resisting the Commission's proposal, but it began to signal its preparedness to agree to a compromise on the issue in November , threatening to leave the German government completely isolated among the six Freisberg As in the conflict over the foundations of the CAP, France, supported again by Holland, was the principal force for agricultural policy integration among the six and Germany the principal opponent.

Erhard sided with the Foreign Office Akten The farmers' leader, in the light of the government's repeated pledges to prevent a cut in German cereals prices, demanded a high price for his association's acquiescence in a government climb-down: Shortly before the decisive Council meeting, the German government too signalled that it would no longer oppose the adoption of a common price.

However, it did not want to accept any per tonne soft wheat price lower than DM The council negotiations turned into a confrontation primarily between the German and French ministers and were characterised by the most extreme tensions that the Agricultural Commissioner had ever witnessed at an international conference Mansholt With the talks at an impasse, the council asked the Commission to formulate and propose a 'package deal', which Mansholt and his advisers drew up in a Brussels restaurant with the aim of offering something attractive to each of the delegations, not least to the French and German Mansholt put forward the package, which contained the same cereal price that the commission had proposed originally, on a 'take-it-or-leave-it' basis; the council accepted it.

The leader of the German delegation who accepted the deal was the Economics Minister - at the time the package was accepted, the German Agricultural Minister was back in Bonn. For the Italian, Luxembourg and German cereal farmers who also obtained national subsidies the losses implied by the common price were 'sweetened' by the provision of temporary EU subsidies Otherwise, however, the only concessions that the German delegation obtained were slight increases in the common prices for rye and hops compared with the Commission's proposal and a one-year delay in the implementation of the common cereals prices - to Tracy Concretely, this probably meant that it sought French and other member states' support for the initiative for closer political cooperation between the Six that Erhard had launched in November Osterfeld Confronted in the first case with a joint Franco-Dutch, and in the second case with a French, ultimatum, and after fighting long rearguard actions, the German government chose on both occasions to make major agricultural policy concessions in favour of overarching foreign policy objectives, such as the maintenance of a close Franco-German relationship.

The crisis that blew up in connection with the financing of the CAP in differed from the previous two in as far as Franco-German differences were not mediated, the French government chose to confront the other member states over the EU's future constitution, and the dispute plunged the EU into a deep crisis, the like of which did not recur - rather as a farce - until the very short-lived British 'boycott' of the EU over the 'mad cow disease' in According to the January council decision, a new formula for the financing of the CAP, which was initially funded by variable contributions from the national exchequers, was to be agreed by the end of June At the cereal price meeting in December , the council asked the Commission to make proposals for a new formula by April The Commission's proposals were worked out by a small group of officials working with Mansholt Newhouse In retrospect, it seems that the Commission was emboldened by the success of its mediation efforts in the cereals price negotiations Le Monde The proposals, by giving the EU direct control over revenues from import duties and thus increasing its financial autonomy vis-a-vis the member states and by expanding the budgetary powers of the EP European Parliament , would have substantially strengthened the EU's supranational character and so were bound to antagonise the French government.

The Commission had been divided over whether to play the role of a 'mediator' and make modest proposals or to play the role of 'motor' of the integration process that the member states, including, at least in agricultural policy, France, had so far accepted von der Groeben Given the nature of the proposals and as De Gaulle himself recognised, the majority of the Commission clearly calculated that the French government would be prepared to sanction a widening of the EU's powers in exchange for a CAP financing regulation that would be in France's financial interests and that, in this way, Gaullist resistance to a stronger EU could be circumvented Newhouse The French government was all the more hostile to the proposals because of the Commission's failure to consult the member states about them and the fact that they had been presented to the EP before the Council.

It immediately rejected them see Peyrefitte Opinion among the other member states was more nuanced. In contrast to the French government, the German liked the 'integrationist' components of the package, but disliked the proposals concerning the financing of the CAP, to which it would be a net financial contributor. De Gaulle had also angered Bonn by rejecting its proposal for a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Six to consider its plan for closer political integration - contrary to a pledge that Erhard believed De Gaulle had made following Germany's acceptance of a common cereal price Osterfeld Of the other member states, Belgian and Luxembourg supported France so as not to endanger the integration process, while, without being as hostile to the proposals as the French government, both Italy and Holland wanted to make some changes in them - not all of them the same ones that France wanted von der Groeben Italy, as the country which had done most poorly out of the already existing CAP financing arrangements, was actually to become France's strongest opponent in the ensuing council negotiations Newhouse The Franco-German relationship continued to be beset by the same issues and conflicts that it plagued it, at the latest, since the British entry application crisis in January At the regular Franco-German summit meeting a few weeks before the decisive council meeting, the two governments failed to reconcile their differences over the Commission's proposals see Akten Essentially, the French side insisted that the financing regulation be adopted by the end of June, as agreed in January , and the Germans that this deadline be extended, because the issues on which they sought concessions from France were too complex to be resolved in the time left.

If the French government wanted an agreement on the CAP budget within the month, this could not be for the five-year period it demanded A serious clash in Brussels appeared, however, to have been averted, when, just prior to the scheduled council meeting, fresh talks between leading foreign ministry officials of the two governments produced a bilateral agreement. A German memorandum suggested that they had agreed to limit the expansion of the European Parliament's powers proposed by the Commission, and at least to postpone the direct transfer of revenues from import duties to Brussels.

The German Foreign Office understood that Paris would not insist on a definitive resolution of the CAP budget at the forthcoming council and that, in continuing negotiations, it might acquiesce in an initial one-year agreement on the issue Newhouse Hence it did not anticipate that the meeting would lead to a Franco-German confrontation. The offical French version of the meeting blamed the German delegation for the meeting's collapse.

According to this account, the Germans reneged on the pre-summit bargain reached by the two foreign ministries, first by rejecting a French proposal to detach the agricultural policy components of the Commission's package from the institutional-political components and to deal with the former first and then, following a corresponding Bundestag resolution, by supporting an extension of the powers of the European Parliament.

Informally, French officials blamed the crisis on - roughly in this order - the Commission, which eschewed a mediating role and refused to modify its original proposals, and the Italians and Dutch, who insisted on treating the proposals as an indivisible whole Newhouse The precipitate declaration of the meeting's failure by Couve de Murville, president of the council at the time, astonished the other delegations, which had reckoned with a continuation of the negotiations.

According to Mansholt, an agreement would have been possible if the French government had wanted one quoted in Freisberg The German delegation argued that progress had been made in the talks and that, if the 'clock' had been stopped as in , an agreement could have been reached in 10 to 14 days Akten De Gaulle had prompted Couve de Murville to disregard the pre-council Franco-German bargain and declare the meeting to have failed Akten In retrospect, it indeed seems very probable that the alleged German 'betrayal' of France in the meeting was used as a pretext to justify the French government's action and that, as Mansholt and others supposed, the aim of the French boycott was rather to curtail the powers of the Commission and thus to stifle a strengthening of the supranational character of the EU quoted in Freisberg This was certainly the ghist of De Gaulle's later - both private and public - remarks on the boycott Peyrefitte The 'empty-chair' crisis boiled down essentially to a battle between France, on the one hand, and the other five member states and the Commission, on the other, over the EU's future constitution rather than over the financing of the CAP, which became a subordinate issue.

The German government calculated that, for economic reasons, France could not afford to leave or destroy the EU and decided in favour of taking a "relaxed" attitude towards the boycott, sticking to its bargaining position hitherto and opposing especially resolutely any French demands to change the Rome Treaty Akten Any sign of weakness towards De Gaulle, argued the German ambassador in Paris, would be likely to raise the cost of the concessions that the five would have to pay to secure France's return Akten The so-called 30 'Luxembourg Compromise', which ended the French boycott, documented the disagreement over what to do in the event of major conflicts in the EU rather than resolving it: On the financing of the CAP, the agreement reached corresponded fairly closely to the French government's aspirations Marjolin There were no changes in the treaty of the kind that De Gaulle wanted to secure at the outset of the conflict.

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However, in practice, to the extent that unanimous voting on fundamental issues remained the norm in the EU during the following two decades, the French government also won the struggle over the constitution of the EU The creation of the CAP in the first half of the s was a politically highly charged process, in which each new policy step unleashed a crisis and France and Germany repeatedly found themselves in opposing camps.

In the first two cases portrayed here, the conflicts between France and Germany were mediated and landmark decisions adopted; in the third, the crisis remained unmediated, plunging the young community into a crisis which was defused only by an 'agreement to disagree' after a six-month stand-off between France and the other member states as well as the EU institutions. What is most striking about the cases is the extent of the divergence of the initial French and German positions and, more so, the extent to which the conflicts were dominated by their antagonism.

In the first two conflicts, the two countries whereby France was supported strongly by Holland represented the two poles, the most extreme positions on the political spectrum, among the member states; in the third, the cleavage ran rather between France, on the one side, and all the other member states, including Germany, on the other. In the first two cases, once the conflict between France and Germany was settled, so, too, practically, was the conflict within the Community as a whole. When, as in the third case, France and Germany could not reach a modus vivendi , a resolution of the conflict between the Six was not possible either.

Thus, the big battles over the creation of the CAP in the first half of the s seem to confirm the hypotheses that when Franco-German divisions on a major agricultural policy issue have not been overcome, the EU is deadlocked and that when they have been settled, the Franco-German position is taken over by the EU as a whole. As there was no case of both states opposing an important agricultural policy proposal, the hypothesis that, in these circumstances, the proposal will fail altogether can be neither confirmed nor refuted.

How plausibly can, by contrast, other models of EU governance account for the pattern of outcomes of the crises concerning the creation of the CAP? The neo-functionalist model emphasizes the centrality of supranational institutions. Of these, however, only the Commission itself played a significant role in these conflicts.

Nothing suggests that these organs played a more important role in the battles over the common cereal price and the financing of the CAP later on. The neo-functionalist case rests wholly on the role in these events played by the Commission. The Commission did secure the adoption of its proposal concerning the common cereals price, but the fact that this was set halfway between the existing French and German prices suggests that, here too, considerations of political feasibility influenced the Commission's stance more strongly than any 'autonomous' Commission ideas as to the 'best' common price In the conflict with France, the Commission, with its bold proposals, seems to have suffered a comprehensive defeat that braked the integration process for the following two decades.

All this is not to say that the Commission was not a critical actor in these conflicts, least of all in the one, but its role was that of a mediator, arbitrator and broker rather than an autonomous supranational agency and when it became too ambitious, as in , it was cut down to size.

The transnational exchange model does not aspire to explain what "specific rules and policies" are adopted in the EU, although the proponents of the model subscribe to the intergovernmentalist view that the larger member states, because they command "greater resources", tend to exercise greater influence on policy outcomes than the small Stone Sweet and Sandholtz In general, the model predicts that political integration will take place fastest in sectors which exhibit the highest levels of cross-border transactions trade.

That is why the EU has moved further towards supranational governance in issue-areas relating to the internal market than, for example, in foreign and security policy Stone Sweet and Sandholtz However, given that agriculture was a sector where there had been very high trade barriers and relatively limited inter-state trade in Europe before the s, the model can not easily explain why political integration should have started earlier and proceeded faster in this sector than in others.

Although Stone Sweet and Sandholtz Of course, it might be argued that the CAP was engineered by two member states - Holland and France - that wanted to be able to sell their surplus agricultural production on other West European markets and that, at least indirectly, the CAP was the product of pressures exerted by 'transnational society' in this case, export-oriented farmers in the two countries.

But the member states whose agricultural sectors were less competitive were equally hostile to agricultural trade liberalisation, so that what has to be explained in the conflict over the foundation of the CAP, and what the transnational exchange model can not account for, is why the former group of member states got the better of the latter.

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The multi-level governance model likewise fails to deliver a plausible retrospective interpretation of the political struggle over the foundation of the CAP. Although the Commission played an important agenda-setting role, given its exclusive right of policy initiation according to the Treaty of Rome, the competence to make decisions lay fairly and squarely in the council, that is to say, it was shared between the national governments and not between national and supranational actors. There is no powerful evidence of the Commission - and much less of other supranational organs - having exercised an independent influence on council decisions.

The available literature does not enable a judgement to be made over the extent, if any, to which national interest groups bypassed their own governments in trying to influence the outcome of the conflicts.


  • Compendio de los felices progresos de la Universidad de Salamanca (Spanish Edition)?
  • German-English translation for "verschlingen".
  • One 4 Me, One for You: Please You!;
  • Gestaltung der GAP bis 2020 und nach 2020.
  • "verschlingen" English translation.
  • Agrarförderung;
  • Lindberg reports that the Commission actively tried to integrate agricultural interests into the process of developing the original CAP. However, it is apparent that the Commission encouraged the formation of a European-level farmers' organisation COPA , presumably to have a single interlocuteur for agricultural policy issues and to avoid the need itself to have to aggregate the interests of the different national farmers' organisations Lindberg The national farmers'organisation most hostile to the CAP, the German, clearly - and rationally, given the unanimity decision-making rule in the council - concentrated its efforts to prevent or shape the CAP on its own national government: Finally, at this early stage of the integration process, national sovereignty had not been eroded to the degree where threats by national governments - or at least France - to withdraw from the organisation were no longer credible.

    An epistemic communities-based explanation of the foundation of CAP would have to identify a network of professional experts and show that it had dominated the decision-making process. In the case of agricultural policy, this could only be the profession of agricultural economists.

    Die grune Hurde Europas. : Deutsche Agrarpolitik und EWG. - Version details - Trove

    However, the agricultural economists have always been sidelined in the EU agricultural policy-making process. Far from having been the policy's architects, they have typically been critics of the CAP and its 'economic irrationality'. To this extent, there are no similarities between this policy area and others in which scientific experts have been observed to exercise a strong influence on EU policy choices.

    It would hardly be plausible to argue that, in the first half of the s, a tight, closed network of national agricultural ministry and Commission DG VI officials dominated CAP decision-making. The conflicts surrounding the foundation of the CAP were not resolved at the level of the civil service; they could be settled only by politically responsible ministers. And, although an arguably important first step towards the formation of a 'closed' agricultural policy community had been taken with the creation in of the SCA to prepare the Agricultural Council meetings in place of the COREPER , the Agricultural Ministers were far from being a law unto themselves at the time that the landmark CAP decisions were reached.

    The decisive negotiations took place in 'Jumbo' council meetings attended not only by agricultural, but also by other typically economics and foreign ministers.

    Europäische Agrarpolitik in der Schieflage

    It is by no means clear that, in France, with its relatively tight process of inter-ministerial coordination, the Agricultural Minister Pisani always had the last word on agricultural issues when there were inter-ministerial conflicts: The looser inter-ministerial coordination process in Germany enabled Pisani's German counterpart to operate more autonomously of other ministers and the Chancellor Peyrefitte In the cereals price conflict, he was bypassed in critical phases - by Erhard negotiating directly with the DBV president and the Economics Minister accepting the cereal price agreement with Erhard's backing while he was absent from the negotiations.

    Altogether, one has the strong impression that French and German behaviour in these three 'high-political' conflicts was strongly shaped by overriding foreign as well as agricultural policy priorities determined more by the foreign ministers, the German Chancellor and the French president than by the agricultural ministers themselves. The primacy of the national governments in the disputes over the foundation of the CAP observed here is compatible with an interpretation based on the institutionalist model.

    However, whilst the subsequent evolution of the CAP is explicable in terms of this model, in as far as the policy, once launched, could be reformed only with the support of all member governments see Scharpf , the institutionalist approach can not easily account for the fact that the CAP was launched at all Given the unanimity voting requirement, the German government could have vetoed the start of the policy - why did it not do so?

    Douglas Webber

    One hypothetical explanation is that, because of its strong initial opposition to the proposals in the first two conflicts and because it could not be outvoted and was therefore in the strongest bargaining position, it was able to mould the policy in its interests and thus had no reason ultimately not to accept it This interpretation is difficult to square with the facts that the common cereal price was set not at the German level, but halfway between the German and French levels and that, quite clearly, important German actors, notably the DBV and the Agricultural Ministry, would have preferred to have no common agricultural policy at all.

    The CAP, in its original guise, corresponded much more closely to French than to German agricultural interests. It might be possible to reconcile an institutionalist interpretation with what happened by arguing that there was a cross-issue trade-off between France and Germany whereby France obtained the CAP in exchange for conceding industrial trade liberalisation to Germany and that issue-linkage thus circumvented a German veto of the CAP To the extent that the CAP decisions fell at the same time as that to make the transition to the second stage of the common industrial market and both France and Holland insisted that they would veto the latter unless the CAP was launched, there was indeed such a trade-off, although the available literature does not show whether fear of the collapse of the common industrial market was in fact the main motive for the German government's ultimate acquiescence in the CAP's launching.