Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 331

The central problem in writing the history of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) is to explain change: how can one simultaneously account for the absence of significant change over many years and its presence in the long run? Numerous reasons have been suggested for both. Resistance to change has been explained by the political power of the farm lobby at a national and EU level, the particular national policies of France and Germany, the difficulty faced by non-specialists in understanding technically-complex policy mechanisms, and the perception of agriculture as something special. Conversely, budget crises, international trade negotiations, EU enlargement and the increasing ability of outsiders to penetrate the formerly closed circuit of agricultural policy negotiators have all been advanced as reasons for change. Political scientists as well as those whose incomes depend on it have therefore both been interested in finding some unified theory to account for the evolution of the CAP in the past and to predict what might occur in the future, and it is with this research that this book is concerned.

Lynggaard argues that all CAP change is determined by what happens in the relevant institutions of the EU, such as the Directorate-General for Agriculture, the European Commission as a whole, the various European pressure groups, the Special Committee for Agriculture, the Agriculture Council, and the European Parliament. He identifies three strands – rational choice, historical, and sociological – in previous attempts to explain changes in CAP institutions, and claims that they all have limitations of one kind or another, often being better at explaining the lack of change than its occurrence. Therefore, he suggests, a new approach is required: the discursive institutional approach. Institutions are ‘bits of discourse, which have obtained some degree of authority and been linked to sanctions’ (p.59). In turn, discourses are based on ideas. Meanings, and conflicts over meanings, appear when ideas are articulated into discourse, so change occurs when new ideas are turned into discourse and discourses attain some degree of authority within institutions. The discursive institutional approach thus suggests that ideas only attain meaning within an institutional and discursive context, and both institutions and discourses can change over time (p.58). This implies an analytical strategy based on the study of texts. Institutional change can be identified by tracing the progress of ideas from less authoritative to more authoritative texts, with EU Regulations being the most authoritative texts of all.

Having set out this methodology in the first three chapters, Lyngaard then applies it to a case study: the incorporation of a policy on organic farming into the CAP. He points out that initial attempts at CAP reform took no account of environmental issues. It was the development of alternative ideas between 1978 and 1985, together with the existence of a CAP funding crisis in the early 1980s, that produced the Environmentally Sensitive Areas policy, which Lynggaard identifies as the first CAP policy involving environmental concern. It was from this point that organic farming began to be seen as a potential solution to CAP problems, or, at least, some of them, and he then goes on to trace the development of organic farming policy in the EU and various member states up to 2005.

This is not a book on organic farming. The term does not appear in the index, and the first significant discussion of organic farming does not appear until page 99. Nor is it intended to be. Organic farming is simply used as a case study to explore the virtues and limitations of a different way of explaining change in the CAP. Lynggaard himself concludes that his study creates more questions than answers. One simple – perhaps over simple – way of describing the discursive institutional approach is that it involves thinking in detail about the meaning and purpose of what individuals and institutions say and do. If this is the case, it is surely no more than the approach always used by historians. On the other hand, it may be argued that model-building economists and political scientists have tended to simplify away some of the detail that Lynggaard argues is important. Equally, his conclusions on what produces CAP change are a mixture of the traditional (change follows crisis) and the less expected (the European Parliament Environment Committee was influential in getting organic farming incorporated into the CAP).

This is not a book to be read for pleasure, because the style, especially in the theoretical chapters, is convoluted to the verges of incomprehensibility. But it asks some interesting questions about the boundaries between political analysis and history, and the methodologies it discusses are by no means irrelevant to changes in other circumstances and periods. Hitherto the history of the CAP has been largely neglected by agricultural (although not political) historians. As they begin to consider it, they will find much in this book to make them think about the various ways of approaching their work.