Carine Germond

Jean Monnet Fellow

Project: Farmers in Brussels: Agricultural Interests and the Non-Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, 1967-1992

Affiliation: Maastricht University

Office: Villa Pagliaiuola LP041
Tel. [+39] 055 4685 821
Email: Carine.Germond@eui.eu

Biographical note

Carine Germond holds a MA in German Language and Civilization from the University François Rabelais in Tours and a PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Strasbourg. Since 2009, she lectures European integration history at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University (currently on research leave). Prior to joining the History Department at Maastricht University, she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Paris and has held the Clifford Hackett Lecturership in the History of European Integration at Yale University.

Her research interests lie in the field of modern European History and comparative and transnational history. Her main areas of expertise are postwar European (integration) History, Franco-German Relations, the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, and Euroscepticism.

Research project

Farmers in Brussels: Farm Interest Groups and the Common Agricultural Policy, 1967-1992

Agriculture is one of the economic sectors in which European integration has gone furthest. Legally established by the Treaty of Rome of 1957, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the oldest and most contested common policy of today’s European Union (EU). Despite repeated attempts by the European Commission to adjust the CAP from the late 1960s onward, the first major change was agreed and implemented only in 1992 with the MacSharry Reform.

The project focuses on the role and influence of organized farm interest to explore and explain the lack of reform of the CAP prior to 1992. To examine how and why the farmers were able to prevent a reform of the policy, the project will, first, trace any institutional and ideational Europeanization of agricultural interests; second, explore the impact of these changes on farmers’ strategies for collective action; and, third, assess their impact on the (multi-level) policy field.

By taking into account the main agricultural interest groups in France, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherland and two transnationally-constituted umbrella organizations and analyzing how these organizations wielded power collectively in two case studies of agricultural commodities, the project will make a significant contribution to the existing historical, social and in particular political science literature on the influence of interest groups and the exercise of political power in postwar Western Europe.