In the years before the Second World War agriculture in most European states was carried out on peasant or small family farms using technologies that relied mainly on organic inputs and local knowledge and skills, supplying products into a market that was partly local or national, partly international. The war applied a profound shock to this system. In some countries farms became battlefields, causing the extensive destruction of buildings, crops and livestock. In others, farmers had to respond to calls from the state for increased production to cope with the effects of wartime disruption of international trade. By the end of the war food was rationed when it was obtainable at all. Only fifteen years later the erstwhile enemies were planning ways of bringing about a single agricultural market across much of continental western Europe, as farmers mechanised, motorized, shed labour, invested capital, and adopted new technologies to increase output. This volume brings together scholars working on this period of dramatic technical, commercial and political change in agriculture, from the end of the Second World War to the emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy in the early 1960s. Their work is structured around four themes: the changes in the international political order within which agriculture operated; the emergence of a range of different market regulation schemes that preceded the CAP; changes in technology and the extent to which they were promoted by state policy; and the impact of these political and technical changes on rural societies in western Europe.

Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgements -- European agriculture 1945-1960 : an introduction / Paul Brassley, Carin Martiin and Juan Pan-Montojo -- International politics -- International institutions and European agriculture : from the IIA to the FAO / Juan Pan-Montojo -- Political stability, modernization and reforms during the first years of the Cold War / Emanuele Bernardi -- International agricultural markets after the war, 1945-1960 / Ángel Luis Gonzalez, Vicente Pinilla and Raúl Serrano -- Market regulation and the motives behind it -- The policy of self-sufficiency and its impact upon rural modernization in Greece, 1928-1960 / Socrates D. Petmezas -- British agriculture in transition : food shortages to food surpluses, 1947-1957 / John Martin -- From food surplus to even greater food surplus : agrarian politics and prices in Denmark, 1945-1962 / Thomas Christiansen -- Technical change -- Mechanisation and motorisation : natural resources, knowledge, politics and technology in 19/20th centuries agriculture / Juri Auderset and Peter Moser -- Technology policies in dictatorial contexts : Spain and Portugal / Daniel Lanero and Lourenzo Fernández-Prieto -- Tractorization : France 1946-1955 / Laurent Herment -- Rural society and structural policy -- Structural policy and the state : changing agricultural society in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1945-1960 / Erwin H. Karel and Yves Segers -- From food scarcity to overproduction : saving the German peasant during the miracle years / Gesine Gerhard -- Farm labour in the urban-industrial Swedish state / Carin Martiin -- Similar means to secure postwar food supplies across Western Europe : a conclusion / Juan Pan-Montojo, Carin Martiin and Paul Brassley

This book examines how rural Europe as a hybrid social and natural environment emerged as a key site of local, national and international governance in the interwar years. The post-war need to secure and intensify food production, to protect contested border areas, to improve rural infrastructure and the economic viability of rural regions and to politically integrate rural populations, gave rise to a variety of schemes aimed at modernizing agriculture and remaking rural society. The volume examines discourses, institutions and practices of rural governance from a transnational perspective, revealing striking commonalities across national and political boundaries. From the village town hall to the headquarters of international organizations, local authorities, government officials and politicians, scientific experts and farmers engaged in debates about the social, political and economic future of rural communities. They sought to respond to both real and imagined concerns over poverty and decline, backwardness and insufficient control, by conceptualizing planning and engineering models that would help foster an ideal rural community and develop an efficient agricultural sector. By examining some of these local, national and international schemes and policies, this volume highlights the hitherto under-researched interaction between policymakers, experts and rural inhabitants in the European countryside of the 1920s and '30s.

What is the balance of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy more than half a century after its birth? Does it illustrate the virtues of the European model of coordinated capitalism, as opposed to US-style liberal capitalism? Or is it an incoherent set of instruments that exert diverse negative impacts and, like Frankenstein’s monster, seems to have escaped the control of its designers? The Political Economy of the Common Agricultural Policy does not criticize the CAP from the liberal standpoint that views most public interventions in the economy as bad for efficiency and welfare. The CAP has been costly to Europeans, both as consumers and as taxpayers, and has also generated a number of negative impacts upon third countries, but these costs and impacts have been more moderate than is suggested. This book proposes that the issue with the CAP is not a generic problem of coordinating capitalism but, instead, a more specific problem of low-quality coordination. The text argues that profound reform of the European Union’s institutions and policies is required to counter the rapid rise of a more Eurosceptical state of mind but – in the case of agricultural policy – history casts serious doubts on the capacity of the European network of agriculture-related politicians to lead such a reform. This key work is essential reading for researchers, graduate students, and master’s level docents of the Common Agricultural Policy and – more broadly – European Union policy and reform.