Looking back, there scarcely seems to have been a time when television news broadcasts were not sporadically punctuated by shots of protesting farmers or fishermen. I am sure that we all recall the scenes of Belgian farmers unloading rotting vegetables into the streets, of French fishermen emptying their catch on the floor of market halls, or of town centres blocked by slow-moving convoys of tractors. Particularly poignant were the scenes of the ancient ‘parlement de Bretagne’ in Rennes engulfed in flames in February 1994 after riots over the price of fish. These are part of the images of farm protest in Europe today.

Equally, there hardly seems to have been a time when these protests, or at least the more usual forms of interest group representation, by agrarian pressure groups do not appear to have been successful. It was not that long ago that the Uruguay Round, an international trade agreement worth many billions of dollars, was held to ransom at the very last moment so that, inter alia, the agricultural requirements of a member state of the European Union could be dealt with in a way satisfactory for the national farming lobby. These incidents, and many like them, have originated over the years from a sector of the economy whose contribution to employment and national income is now, in percentage terms, in single digits.

To understand the strength of the agricultural sector in domestic and international politics, it is necessary to go back almost a hundred years. However, most of my focus will be on the post-war developments, leading to the insertion of agricultural clauses into the Treaty of Rome. Already, by that date, the main tendencies were apparent that would leave their mark on the development of a common agricultural policy (CAP) until the early 1980s. Over that period, the CAP became more than a sectoral policy. In the 1960s it was often credited with being the ‘driving force’ behind European integration. After the enlargement of the EEC in the 1970s, because of the pattern of UK trade and the way the policy was financed, the CAP became the source of continuous controversy that sometimes threatened to pull the Community apart.