On Parallel Tracks: Agriculture and Transport Policies Since the Late Nineteenth Century

In Europe, there had been important similarities since the late nineteenth century not only in state policies but also in international co-operation in the two fields of agriculture and transport. Before turning to the outcomes at the EEC level and beyond, it is necessary briefly to discuss these similarities. They can be summed up in a two-fold argument: first, on the national level both agriculture and transport had become highly regulated sectors since the late nineteenth century, a key time in the process of state building. The trajectory of international negotiations offers a second central context to these integration efforts. Whereas co-operation had remained patchy until 1945, the post-war years saw ambitious international projects for both sectors, and both agriculture and transport therefore found their way into the EEC Treaty. Thus important similarities coincide on the national and international (regional) levels.

The centrality of transport and agricultural policies in Europe – and beyond – is well known. Both had been supporting pillars in the political, economic and cultural process of state- and nation-building since the nineteenth century. Before the advent of welfare states in the second half of the twentieth century, the capacities and resources of state action and interventionism remained very limited throughout Europe. Governments influenced the military and related industrial sectors, but beyond that any further intervention was very limited.Footnote ⁶

Agriculture was one of these pockets, particularly after protectionism had swept through Europe's agricultural policies from the late 1870s. In Germany, for instance, customs duties amounted to about one half of the Reich's revenues in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the largest contribution to this came from agricultural tariffs.Footnote ⁷ This development was strengthened during two further waves of agricultural interventionism in modern times, the first triggered by the Great Depression after 1929, and the other being one dimension of state reconstruction in the aftermath of the Second World War.Footnote ⁸ Statehood was built around agriculture for many reasons: self-sufficiency in times of crisis was key to the survival of the nation and, partly as a relict of a rural past, agrarian interests were often heavily over-represented politically. At the same time, the centrality of agriculture did not merely translate into budget figures, civil servants and protectionist laws with their effects on producers and consumers. It also had strong cultural overtones. Fed by the ‘agrarian myth’ that had pervaded modern societies since the nineteenth century,Footnote ⁹ the sector held high prestige: the idea of feeding the nation, of being a cradle of national strength, a source of belonging and a residuum of the past in a modern world was current in various European countries. The two world wars did little to diminish the political, economic and cultural importance of the sector in the eyes of politicians. Instead, they demonstrated that a thought-through and encompassing policy was much needed and that it had to combine two elements: both the farmers in one's own country and resilient international networks of trade that would survive moments of crisis. Therefore agriculture was central to the viability of the state not only because it was inherently vital, but also because it was fragile and vulnerable – weather and wars, boycotts and bugs, but also tractors and trade could change the prospects of a country dramatically, for better or for worse.

Transport had also been crucially important to the building of nation states. In particular railways, the new transport mode of the nineteenth century, superseding road and waterway transport, held significant economic, political and strategic promise of which the emerging nation states were well aware. Railways brought a new military instrument and helped to integrate the nation. They were thought to bring about social unification and to break down regional enclaves, and they boosted economic development and industrialisation. Accordingly states concluded that intervention in the railway business was needed. From the end of the nineteenth century until the end of the 1930s, in several steps, almost all private railway companies in Europe became public enterprises.Footnote ¹⁰

This brought new liabilities. Due to the First World War and to subsequent restrictive government policies, railway systems everywhere in Europe had been unable to modernise, to expand the network, or to replace destroyed or run-down equipment and rolling stock. At the same time, ticket prices failed to catch up with rising fuel bills, wages and new pension obligations. Consequently, states not only had to cover the deficits, but also had an interest in mitigating the competition from the arrival of the automobile. In particular during the Great Depression, thousands of small firms using one or two buses and trucks were creaming off traffic, offering their services at places and times where traffic was heavy at prices that undercut the railway, indeed often below the cost price. They offered door-to-door service and tailor-made charges varying with weight, journey and risk of damage. In response, governments shielded railways from road competition. States perceived that they could not afford to lose the railways, even if this raised substantial budgetary problems. Railways were seen as indispensable to the economy of many regions and businesses; neglect would accelerate depression, decline and depopulation. At the same time, steps were taken to constrain the growth of road transport by licensing measures that only increased state involvement even further. Moreover, states stepped in to save inland shipping which was widely regarded as a dying carrier.Footnote ¹¹

During and after the Second World War it was clear that the reconstruction of the transport sector could not be left to the market. There was a broad consensus that transport infrastructures and systems needed fast repair due to war damage and that they had to be modernised in order to stimulate the economy. Moreover, the role of the state became defined in terms of providing welfare, including access to transport. However, at the same time, the now nationalised railway companies were under heavy pressure to reduce rampant deficits, while competition from roads, a revived waterway sector and an expanding air sector was fierce and there to stay. The railway industry therefore sought European solutions to stabilise its position and exploit new opportunities.Footnote ¹²

For agriculture as well, the post-war situation was unstable and full of difficult trade-offs for state policy makers. Cold War tensions disrupted earlier patterns of production and trade, leading to rather paradoxical effects for western Europe. On the one hand, national or even shared western European self-sufficiency was deemed important in case a potential military conflict should cut off overseas suppliers. This was an important reason for grand schemes of state protectionism for farmers. But, on the other hand, peace also caused problems: agricultural production rates in western Europe rose continuously, and by the late 1950s a surplus crisis was looming. At the same time, suppliers from other parts of the world had become more competitive than their European colleagues, and shutting them out from western European markets could have entailed harmful effects for trade patterns and Europe's industrial exports. Particularly the United States, western Europe's mighty hegemon, soured on European protectionism: the cattlemen of Texas and the grain producers of Iowa dearly needed these foreign markets.Footnote ¹³

The features shared by transport and agriculture on a structural level, due to the central position both sectors had gained within national state policies, were not their only similarity. The trajectories of international negotiations over co-operation, from the late nineteenth century until the Treaties of Rome, also shared important features. For both sectors, a wide but patchy range of European forms of co-operation, agreements and standards emerged over the course of the decades. European road, railway and waterway transport networks were planned and some parts were built. These infrastructure plans were complemented by various initiatives to develop European standards for signalling systems, administrative procedures, length of vehicles, and axle load and so on. For some time, in particular in the earlier 1930s, in the context of the work of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation, these infrastructure plans and standards were perceived by their promoters as the cement of a new Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ The League's Economic and Financial Organisation also became increasingly engaged in agricultural issues, particularly in the wake of the Great Depression. Concepts of European co-operation were discussed in relation to agriculture, and here too the debates about common ideas and shared standards gained momentum and were considered as starting points for new forms of European co-operation. Nazism then brought many of these projects to an end, even if planning on a European level continued.Footnote ¹⁵

After 1945, the trajectories of negotiations for the two sectors looked even more similar. The post-war years opened the way for discussions about paths to deeper European integration for both fields. Plans for the establishment of some form of European collaboration and policy in transport, agriculture, coal, steel and energy production proliferated. In these debates, both sectors became part of the vision that western Europe should integrate either sector by sector or through the creation of a common market (economic integration). The most important discussions on agriculture were the so-called Pool vert debates between 1950 and 1954, negotiated in the Council of Europe (CoE) but mainly conducted in the forum of the Marshall Plan Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), aiming at the creation of a common European market for agricultural products.Footnote ¹⁶ For transport, similar discussions were held in this period, not only by the CoE and the OEEC, but also by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and by the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).Footnote ¹⁷

In the short run, these deliberations did not lead to concrete agreements on integration and were seen as failures, albeit overshadowed by the more prominent defeat in creating a European Defense Community in 1954. At the same time, they helped to clarify diverging and converging interests and positions among a range of stakeholders in both sectors. Subsequently, in the summer of 1955, the idea of transport and agricultural integration was taken up again in the negotiations which eventually led to the signing of the Treaties of Rome two years later. During the debates it turned out to be difficult to reach an agreement. However, action in both sectors was seen as necessary if the general customs union provisions of the EEC Treaty were to work effectively. Consequently, negotiators decided to keep the text open and avoid all technical details. The resulting vagueness was intentional, as research by Guido Thiemeyer or Christian Henrich-Franke has shown.Footnote ¹⁸ It was a clever strategy designed to keep the opposition at bay and to foster the dynamic of the integration process. In the eventual outcome, the respective articles of the EEC Treaty on agriculture and transport were predictably vague. They did not create fully-fledged Common Agricultural and Transport Policies but only paved the way for detailed negotiations on how to integrate after the ink on the Treaty had dried up.

All in all, there were striking similarities in the development of integration policies vis-à-vis the two sectors until 1957, and this made it likely that under the EEC regime their trajectories would also be rather alike. Moreover, agriculture and transport were not negotiated in two completely contained and segregated worlds. As in other instances of integration, it was probable that package deals between the two sectors would become another factor in promoting similar development in the two fields after the Treaty of Rome had been signed. The likelihood of this was even higher because both sectors were inextricably linked to industry: since the late nineteenth century, protectionist measures regarding agriculture had always developed in tandem with changes in industrial interventionism; transport, on the other hand, was a central component of trade, and hence transportation costs were a substantial part of product costs both in industry and agriculture. The nested character of these policy fields made connections – be they propitious or detrimental – highly likely.Footnote ¹⁹

Nonetheless, the next ten years would see agricultural and transport integration in the EEC move in very different directions. Building on the EEC Treaty, and as a result of ten years of intense negotiations, agricultural integration gave birth to the CAP – the most important project of the EEC during the 1960s and much of the 1970s. Agriculture, once a bulwark of nationalism, thus became a beacon of European integration, while the CTP languished in obscurity for much of the first forty years of European integration. In 1985, this inaction even led to a ruling by the European Court of Justice, which blamed the Council for neglect of implementation of this part of the Treaty.Footnote ²⁰ Why then, these differences? This is the issue to which we will now turn.

Switch Stands, Twists and Loops: Reasons for Divergence

Why did the CAP become a policy that turned its particular Directorate-General in the European Commission in Brussels, DG VI, into the Commission's ‘glamour DG’?Footnote ²¹ Why was it a policy that triggered heated reactions from farmers and consumers all over Europe and beyond? And why, in contrast, did most people not even know that the CTP existed? Any monocausal explanation for this divergence would be insufficient. Instead, this article proposes three sets of arguments, and assesses their relevance: first, the difference in timing and boldness of the Commission's proposals; second, the sense of urgency attributed to integration at the time; and third, the role of transnational societies and their visions. Some of these reasons for divergence between the two sectors have already been discussed in the existing literature. However, they almost exclusively belong in the first, and to some extent the second of the three groups of factors identified here. The third dimension – which, in our eyes, is a substantial amendment to the existing literature – will therefore be treated more thoroughly.Footnote ²²

Given their complexity, it was unlikely that the CAP or the CTP could be negotiated and achieved within months. DG VI for Agriculture, however, started with its work right away, and as the Treaty had stipulated, it produced a substantial report and proposal on agricultural integration within the next two years. This document, issued in its draft version in November 1959 and in its final version in June 1960, was soon to be called ‘the Bible’ in the Euro-jargon of Brussels. This nickname, ironic and affectionate at the same time, was well deserved – and it hints at the fact that in the ensuing official negotiations in the Council of Ministers, this document became the central point of reference. Interpretations of the ‘Bible’ were contested and heatedly discussed – but not its basic thrust.Footnote ²³

Moreover, DG VI adopted an interesting style of negotiation. It broke down the various elements of the CAP into separate packages, which were negotiated one after the other. Hence, the CAP evolved incrementally in several consecutive rounds of negotiations, with interlinked and yet separate decisions. In late 1960, the Council of Ministers decided on the variable levy system as the central mechanism of the CAP; in early 1962, several concrete market regulations were finalised with more to follow over the next years, whereas the decisions as to the price level of commodities or the financing of this system only came several years later. This process created a good deal of momentum, but in each round of negotiations, the eventual form of the overall CAP remained unclear. Therefore, all negotiating sides could be pacified rather easily – because they could always hope (and be promised) that a concession today would pay off in the next round.Footnote ²⁴

The strategy of Transport DG VII was completely the opposite. Discussions about fundamentals took a long time, and subsequently the aim was to resolve all issues in one round of negotiations. DG VII used its first four years in office on a far-reaching consultation with the Community institutions and the transport interest groups about the development of a foundation, which was lacking in the Treaty.Footnote ²⁵ In April 1961, it circulated its vision on the future of transport integration, the so-called Schaus Memorandum, named after Lambert Schaus, the Commissioner of Transport at the time.Footnote ²⁶ The Memorandum provoked a fundamental discussion on matters of principle in the Council examining the nature of the CTP. The Commission did not get the agreement it sought on a basic philosophy for managing the transport sector; instead it was asked for more concrete proposals and a timetable.Footnote ²⁷ In response, the Commission submitted in May 1962 a comprehensive action programme that confirmed the principles expressed in the Schaus Memorandum, but with more specificity, yet still with no formal proposals.Footnote ²⁸ The Commission asked the Council to accept the action programme as a guiding framework for future CTP development. After several meetings the Council still could not agree on the fundamentals and therefore asked the Commission in March 1963 to submit a specific proposal. This was done in May 1963. Concrete negotiations between Commission and Council then finally began.

At that point the core elements of the CAP had already been formulated. Agricultural integration took shape in the years from 1960 to 1964, when the member states approached issues with enthusiasm, largely encouraged by the fact that they had overcome the crisis of 1954. Over time, however, things were to change – and not for the better. The Gaullist challenge of the integration process – particularly the French president's first veto against British accession in 1963 – and the hard-nosed bargaining style of other member states led to frustrations, mistrust and increasing tensions. These broke out openly in the ‘empty chair crisis’ on 30 June 1965, setting a new tone in the Community. The general conflicts between the member states on European matters were often driven by the disagreements around the CAP, which dominated most sessions of the Council of Ministers during this period.Footnote ²⁹

Obviously, there is no definite answer to the counterfactual question of what would have happened had CAP negotiations only started in the mid-1960s. But it is quite doubtful that a project with strong supranational dimensions would have been possible, and the fate of the CTP seems to support such an interpretation. The negotiations about transport integration, which only began in 1963, were not easy, but eventually they led to an agreement in the Council on 22 June 1965. However, the French walked out on 30 June, and this rendered this agreement a dead letter; negotiations had to start anew. Hence, the French wish to pursue a strong CAP meant the end of a first agreement on the CTP. In this light, the two integration projects coincided in a significant way.

Next to timing, there was the question of the nature of the proposals. Like any good religious document, the ‘Bible’ left much scope for interpretation. Its radicality vis-à-vis the status quo was therefore less visible than in Schaus's proposal. Admittedly, the Commissioner for Agriculture, the Dutch Sicco Mansholt, personally held rather bold views and aimed at a quick modernisation of the agricultural sector. The official proposals, however, were more moderate. The Commission tried to avoid explaining bluntly what the likely effects of integration might be. After receiving a bloody nose in early 1959, when he had stated that over the next years some eight million farmers would have to leave the sector, even Mansholt became less outspoken.Footnote ³⁰ So, the ‘Bible’ did not discuss the larger implications of technical measures or final aims, but instead advanced a consensus among producers at the time: protection of production and trade, which were probably to be based on market organisations for key commodities. The issue of setting producers’ prices as part of these market organisations is a good example for the consensual approach of the Commission: the ‘Bible’ stated that a common price should be achieved after a transition period. But it did not mention the concrete level. This would immediately have raised hell among farmers, only some of whom would have liked higher prices (feed grain being an obvious example: the interests of its producers were quite different from those of farmers raising cattle). Finally, the incremental process through which the CAP slowly emerged – mentioned above – mitigated resistance to its content.

The negotiations on the CTP had a different character. The gestalt became the bone of contention early on. Schaus and his team never stopped emphasising the need to agree on the principle of applying equal competition rules to all three inland transport modes. Although they acknowledged and incorporated the need for a transition phase, the radical nature of the proposals was very clear. For decades the governance of the transport sector had been based on another principle: the so-called ‘special aspects’ that were also explicitly mentioned in the text of the Treaty of Rome (article 75). These special aspects refer to the idea that the transport sector has distinctive characteristics which make it unsuitable for the application of market principles. For example, transport organisations, in particular railways, have to fulfil state-like functions which bring obligations, benefits and costs, and this creates a distortion of the market. Even if all obligations were removed or compensated, competition between modes of transport would not be carried out under equal conditions since many costs cannot be allocated properly to a specific service, and railway companies maintain their own infrastructure while road and waterway transport firms do not pay full costs for theirs.Footnote ³¹ Almost all transport experts working at national ministries in the industry, and in a range of international transport organisations agreed that open competition had to be avoided since it would not recognise these special aspects. Moreover, it would damage state interests and deny opportunities to exploit any (so-called) natural advantages of each system brought about through co-ordination. Open competition was referred to as ruinous competition. The proposal by the Commission was not only radical in its emphasis on open competition and the adoption of one regime for all modes of transport, but also in its ambition to apply the system to both domestic and international transport.Footnote ³²

The first set of arguments we explore not only contains the timing and boldness of the proposals, but also has to do with political leadership. In parts of the literature it is claimed that Mansholt made all the difference. Indeed, this charismatic and indefatigable politician seemed larger than life; and situations in which he alone could understand and explain the details and intricacies of the concrete problems under discussion are well recorded and part of the self-mystification of the Commission's role in the creation of the CAP. Mansholt indeed played a significant role, mainly due to his intimate knowledge of agriculture – but it would certainly be wrong to give him the full credit for the creation of the CAP.Footnote ³³ Schaus, a lawyer who had served in the foreign office, was a newcomer to transport policy. Such a qualification did not create much trust in the sector.Footnote ³⁴ Mansholt managed to align his interest with two extremely influential partners, namely the French and the Dutch delegations, which basically supported his agenda. At the same time, resistance remained diffuse. The Germans were the most outspoken enemies of a supranational CAP, particularly in the crucial negotiations until late 1964, but they were too confused to succeed in opposing it. So an informal but extremely powerful international alliance of leadership, with Mansholt as spokesman, pushed for a joint project in agriculture.Footnote ³⁵

In transport, Schaus never managed to build such an alliance between the Commission and the vocal Dutch, French and German delegations that were interested in pushing for transport integration. When, by the end of 1964 and early 1965, after years of discussion, it was clear to all parties that a final agreement had to be made, Schaus toured the various capitals to find a compromise. But, being unsuccessful in his endeavour, he instead decided to push for his original proposal, which subsequently did not get enough support in the Council. Consequently, from March 1965 onwards the Council, under French leadership, took negotiations out of the hands of Schaus, and reached the bare outlines of an agreement. The French had come to perceive Schaus as an obstacle. They not only wanted to show that agreement in transport could be reached through intergovernmental negotiation (instead of supranational initiative), but also hoped for an easier settlement in the ongoing CAP discussions when agreement had been reached on transport with the Dutch. Although the French initiative embraced the idea of more open competition, it was successful because it aimed at the development of specific solutions for each means of transport, and accepted the existence of different regimes for the national and the international realms. Schaus, however, had never been prepared to compromise on his principles.Footnote ³⁶

Alongside the difference within the EEC over the timing, boldness and leadership of these policies, there was a second difference, this one in urgency vis-à-vis broader needs, both on the European and on the global level. But how big was this difference?

Finding a solution for the problems of agriculture was pressing indeed. The rural population in western Europe was still vast in the 1950s and 1960s, amounting to about one quarter of the overall working population of the EEC's six original member states.Footnote ³⁷ This implied a large number of votes at the ballot. Economically, more and more peasants and farmers were facing existential problems, with the modernisation of production methods and the globalisation of trade forcing them out of their jobs (and lifestyles). The sector was dominated by small business units that had difficulties dealing with global competition. Even if the economic upswing of the industrial sector absorbed most of the free labour force, these economic changes needed to be moderated. The rural world was shaken by unrest and haunted by the ghosts of the past. Agrarian protest had been one important source of political radicalisation during the 1930s in Germany and beyond, and a repetition of such a situation had to be averted by all means.Footnote ³⁸ But those who stayed in the sector and performed successfully increasingly also became a problem. This was particularly true for France and the Netherlands. The highly subsidised agricultural sectors produced considerable surpluses in both countries, and they were an important part of the two countries’ foreign trade. On the world market, however, these products could hardly compete with cheaper products from non-European nations. The French and Dutch agro-political elites were therefore increasingly attracted by the idea of regional integration in the course of the 1950s – understood as the creation of a common market with shared external tariffs. This would give producers the chance to find and save markets for their surplus production and fence off agricultural competitors from other parts of the world. Politically, integration could Europeanise the high costs of interventionism. As Alan S. Milward famously argued, a ‘European rescue’ of agricultural politics was an attractive choice at least for some EEC member states, and against this backdrop it is not surprising that France and the Netherlands particularly pushed for the creation of a supranational CAP in the long negotiations of the 1960s.Footnote ³⁹

But the urgency of agricultural integration was not just pushed from within the EEC. The Cold War context has to be mentioned. In Communist thinking and politics, agriculture had been a guinea pig of political, social, economic and cultural change already long before 1945. Collective farming, introduced in eastern central Europe and other parts of the world from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, soon turned into a core pillar and a showcase of socialist society. Against this backdrop, the west had to come up with a successful alternative based on private property rights and capitalism. Considering the structure of European agriculture, a laissez-faire approach would have jeopardised most farms, nourishing the eastern claim of superiority. Hence, integration was seen as an appropriate, particularly European answer to balancing economic and ideological needs. This was also the reason why even mandarins such as Raymond Aron cared about the nitty-gritty of agricultural integration. When, at the end of 1963, the EEC finally agreed on market regulations of dairy products and a couple of other things, he went as far as to call this ‘the victory of the idea of Europe’ (‘La victoire de l'idée européenne’).Footnote ⁴⁰ Obviously, this cannot be explained by his love for milk. Rather, agricultural integration was held up as a beacon of European integration during the 1960s and was bound to become a success story because of Cold War tensions.

As with agriculture, albeit for other reasons, the development of a European transport policy was seen as an urgent issue. The economic structure of the transport sector differed substantially from the agricultural one. Transport services were not traded globally, and even within Europe the markets were mainly organised nationally. Within the transport sector, there was heavy competition between the various sectors, but not within the railway sector since it was considered to be a natural monopoly. Yet transport integration was perceived as vital for the functioning of the common market. The obstructions to the free flow of traffic would delay market integration and hence economic development. Just like tariffs, transport charges could be used to discriminate against imports. This created the danger of bringing in protection through the back door: rail freight charges, for instance, represented a significant proportion of the price of many goods.Footnote ⁴¹ European transport integration would not only make the common market function as it should; transport was also seen as a major economic sector, whether measured by employment, capital investment or production, which should expand due to the arrival of the Common Market. Expansion would reduce deficits and facilitate the modernisation and rationalisation of transport systems. Moreover, trains, trucks and ships rolling, driving and navigating across borders were perceived as strong symbols of the free movement of people, services and goods and hence of European unity and understanding. These ideas resonated well with an agenda going back decades and pushed for by the Americans as part of Marshall Aid. For all these reasons both the Council of Ministers and the Commission wanted to create a CTP. Arguably, the perceived urgency of integration in agriculture was slightly higher than for transport, particularly because transport faced no direct equivalent to the global dimension of competition in agriculture, and the economic structure of the sectors differed. But the difference in perceived urgency to integrate was certainly not dramatic, so this factor does not provide a simple explanation of the diverging trajectories of the CAP and the CTP. The main difference was not the perceived need but the way this need was fulfilled. This brings us to our third set of arguments.

For transport and agriculture EEC-level negotiations differed in the way they related to other integration fora, and the various transnational societies of experts and lobbyists interested in these issues. This article contends that a transnational society consists of a network (or community) of actors, coalitions and interactions across state boundaries and beyond the full control of official policies seeking to organise circulations, flows and connections. Some of these actors might hold state functions but this is not the main or only means through which they exert power. These networks often stabilise over time, and aim at the creation of a regime which frames the orientation, learning processes and interactions of the various players through the creation of a common language, procedures, standards and infrastructures. The networks are often managed by a dedicated actor, or a non-governmental or governmental international organisation, the prime ambition of which is to make the regime work.Footnote ⁴²

Before the Second World War, each transport mode had developed its own sector-specific solution for organising border crossing. The railway system was taken care of by railway companies themselves through international co-operation, financial clearing-house arrangements, and the standardisation of technology and procedures. Several organisations had been set up towards this aim. After the war, the railway companies decided that the International Railway Union (known by its French title, Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer, UIC) should become the leading and co-ordinating body. For inland shipping, frontier crossing on the Rhine as the main west-European artery was regulated by the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine (CCNR) which was the oldest international institution responsible for transport, set up and agreed at the Congress of Vienna in 1816. Here, a regime of freedom of navigation was created for the ships of all nations, equality of treatment for domestic and foreign vessels, uniform administrations and elimination of all tolls, custom restrictions or other taxes. For road transport the situation was completely different. International road haulage and traffic were severely restricted. Bilateral agreements between states regulated how the exchange of carriers’ licences for border-crossings were governed, while the League of Nations became the obligatory negotiation site for development of rules on how to cross borders.Footnote ⁴³

After the war, the League of Nations gave way in the development of European transport policy to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe International Transport Committee (UNECE-ITC), which became very active and delivered many results, not only for road but also for railways, often in collaboration with the UIC. These results include the development of a standardised European highway network of E-roads, the Transports Internationaux Routiers (TIR) scheme abolishing custom duties for goods in transit transported by road, and the EUROP-pool for railway wagons.Footnote ⁴⁴ There was definitely some substance to the remark of ECE Secretary-General Gunnar Myrdal at a 1954 UN meeting that the ITC had been ‘the centre for practically all the real work of European integration in the transport field accomplished since the war’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Although the UNECE-ITC did valuable work, discussions on new transport integration initiatives lingered on. These led to the foundation of the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) in October 1953.Footnote ⁴⁶ At first, the UNECE-ITC had questioned the creation of the ECMT and lobbied against it, but eventually it acknowledged the importance of more direct involvement by transport ministries at international level because it might provide political back-up for the plans developed by the ITC and other international organisations. The tacit agreement was that the ECMT would use the existing transnational transport society as its technical arm, while the ECMT itself would serve as a political channel helping to put its recommendations into practice much faster in western Europe.Footnote ⁴⁷ As a consequence, the ECMT became the main forum for the development of a western European transport policy beyond the Six from 1953 onwards. It should come as no surprise that when the Treaty of Rome negotiations began, the ECMT declared its own platform flexible enough to incorporate the concerns and issues under discussion.Footnote ⁴⁸ During the subsequent negotiations many national transport experts and international transport organisations rejected the establishment of a separate High Transport Authority, as well as the idea of creating a common European transport market – encompassing not only various national transport markets but also the rail, road and waterway sectors. The participants argued that co-ordination among the many European transport organisations was expedient, and envisaged the ECMT as a particularly appropriate platform. One important argument was that the establishment of a common transport policy just for the Six – excluding, for example, Switzerland and Austria – did not make sense.

Apart from these transnational groups of experts wishing to avoid an extended amount of institutional competition, their vision of how to create an integrated Europe also diverged from the debates in the EEC forum. The dominant view within the flourishing transnational transport society was fuelled by technocratic internationalism. In such thinking, developed during the nineteenth century and given a boost in the inter-war years due to the work of the League of Nations, transport was promoted – as were energy and communication networks – as a means to overcome economic nationalism and political disagreement in Europe. It also entailed the view that experts should be the ones to agree on networks and standards, and they should strongly oppose the meddling of politicians, diplomats or any other external interests.Footnote ⁴⁹ The technocratic internationalist views are visible in the work of the experts collaborating in the ECMT who feared that transport integration would be misused for a political purpose, and that supranational European integration could lead to wasteful or ruinous competition. Instead, the transnational society of experts promoted the ideal of non-political, rational efficiency.

The power of this transnational society in transport was emphasised by the fact that they received special treatment in the Treaty. Article 83 provided for the establishment of a consultative committee, composed of experts appointed by national governments, who might be consulted by the Commission whenever it deemed this desirable. However, Schaus never gave this committee an important place in his preparations and negotiations. He was not interested in integrating them into the various consultations. Hence the experts used the negotiations between Council and Commission to block the development of CTP based on Schaus's liberal vision.Footnote ⁵⁰

Contrary to transport, in agriculture deliberations in international forums other than the EEC, such as the UNECE or the OEEC, played a secondary role. Still, there were other options too, at least theoretically. But the European Free Trade Association, as the most important alternative to the EEC in western Europe during the 1960s, was rather defensive on issues of agricultural trade and hardly dealt with agricultural production. The various GATT rounds since 1947 aimed at liberalising trade, and given the low competitiveness of most agricultural producers in western Europe, it was also not very attractive. Bi- and multilateral trade agreements as other forms of co-operation, finally, had a long prehistory, but producers increasingly saw the limits of these tools. Unlike in transport, after decades of deliberation and at the end of a large trial-and-error process, there was no institutional alternative (such as the ECMT) to agricultural integration under the auspices of the EEC, at least for its member states. All this added momentum to the CAP negotiations.Footnote ⁵¹

Moreover, while Schaus alienated the transnational transport society of experts, Mansholt and his Directorate-General were very efficient in drawing these actors into support. As early as 1958, the Commission had encouraged the lobby groups of the sector to form a new, specifically EEC-wide, interest group for agriculture – and insisted that it would not negotiate with any other transnational group. In doing so, Mansholt had a double aim: on the one hand, he wanted to give voice to the transnational society of agricultural experts and lobbyists, whereas on the other hand he also hoped that the need to find a consensus within this platform would make negotiations more efficient and easier for the Commission. Hence, the formation of the Comité des organisations professionnelles agricoles (COPA) retailored the transnational world according to the specific needs of the EEC. That the DG VI maintained close contacts with the national representatives of this sector eased potential tensions even further. Mansholt could claim to be part of this world – a farmer who knew how to use a plough, and not merely a bureaucratic outsider to the sector and its European networks; the Commission could therefore claim that its 1960 proposal was deeply embedded in the debates of the sector, and this added tremendously to its authority.Footnote ⁵² The rise during the 1960s of the EEC-specific comitology – a system which allowed transnational experts to be directly involved in the implementation of CAP measures – had its origin and stronghold in agricultural policy. Thus the Commission's attempts to forge close links with the transnational society were far from ephemeral.Footnote ⁵³

This was also possible because the existing transnational world of experts and lobbyists could not propose a shared alternative vision, as had been the case for transport. Certainly, they had managed to stall the Pool vert negotiations during the early 1950s, just as the transport experts had killed similar discussions on a transport pool run by a supranational High Authority. However, the status quo was not satisfactory for transnational and national actors either. Common platforms, such as the Confédération Européenne de l'Agriculture, founded in 1948, generated some ideas but not a clear-cut and encompassing programme on how to overcome the crisis of the sector.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, the EEC and its member states agreed on a vision that was highly acceptable to the sector. Its ideological centrepiece became the family farm – a vague formula that resonated well with the ‘agrarian myth’ all member states had cultivated and that served as a compelling umbrella term covering divergent interests. Through its use, competition and competitiveness, as well as the need to adjust to modernisation and globalisation, were de-emphasised, even if the CAP did little to stop these seminal processes.Footnote ⁵⁵

Success and Failure Revisited

A comparison between the CAP and CTP is revealing insofar as both sectors were singled out in the Treaty of Rome as areas that would require the adoption of European-level policies applying everywhere and replacing national policies. Here the nascent new political entity would not only eliminate internal trade barriers, and apply a common tariff for non-members, but it would also remove distortions to the free market induced by the diverging policies of member states. National policies had to be harmonised in areas where government intervention was rampant but differed considerably from country to country. There were high hopes that both sectors would be able to absorb regulatory initiatives, and a long history of ambitious projects showed that demand for integration could be responded to. Both sectors had apparently similar starting points. How, then, can we explain the different outcomes at the end of the first decade of EEC history? The above analysis suggests that the failure of the CTP can be attributed to a range of causes, from a combination of bad timing, misplaced boldness and misguided leadership by the Commission to the availability of a viable alternative outside the EEC that matched the perceived urgent need for a European solution in transport. The success of the CAP, however, may be ascribed to perfect timing, appropriate boldness, as well as leadership and the lack of an alternative; this generated an urgent need for a European solution for agriculture, which in turn became expressed through the CAP.

More specifically, this article proposes that it was the perceived availability of an alternative that mattered most. If such an alternative had existed for the CAP, Mansholt might have failed, while without such an option various countries would have worked harder with Schaus to turn the CTP into a success since the perceived need was there. The agreement reached in 1965 made it clear that such a solution was possible, by stripping the radical edges off Schaus's proposal. The importance of this factor becomes visible only through the comparison between CAP and CTP, and is therefore missing in other analyses of the CAP's success.

But why did such an alternative exist in transport but not in agriculture? The specific structure of transnational societies, and the policy-learning processes they went through, had begun for these sectors in the late nineteenth century, and were a key factor here.Footnote ⁵⁶ The lessons learned in the field of transport had resulted in a specific technocratic vision of how to collaborate internationally, which in turn found its institutional expression in several organisations, in particular the UNECE-ITC and the ECMT. In agriculture, no such consensus or strong organisational core had been established by the 1950s. The emphasis here is not only on the importance of the process of articulation of ideas, beliefs and discourse, which helps to frame interests and induce and capture the search for solutions, but also on the notion of path-dependency, which is applied by some political scientists in their interpretation of European integration. The CTP had to confront an already entrenched path of integration, while the CAP could emerge in a more open environment, with less resistance from the transnational agricultural society.Footnote ⁵⁷

This conclusion bears an important implication for European integration history. Recent research has stressed that the dynamics of European integration cannot be explained sufficiently by focusing on the policies of the larger member states only or by privileging the Commission's view. European co-operation and integration has been shaped by many actors and on several levels simultaneously.Footnote ⁵⁸ Our analysis is consistent with this plea, but also pushes it beyond the current tendency to limit the focus of analysis to what might be called the integration process proper. The basic idea in much of the current literature still is that the integration process really began with the ECSC and the EEC, after some false starts such as the CoE or the OEEC. Our analysis questions this interpretative framework at a fundamental level. Forms of European co-operation and integration were developed by multiple trans- and international actors at various stages, and they meant different things to different people at different times. Research should therefore stop privileging the EU and its predecessors, and refrain from insulating and isolating them as the sole agents of action and analysis, distinct and separate from other forums. Instead, multiple visions and projects, institutional expressions, and their interdependencies need to be explored. At the same time, fragmentation and discontinuity are part and parcel of these developments; several ‘Europes’ emerged simultaneously in a wide range of institutional settings, each experiencing its own ebbs and flows.Footnote ⁵⁹

More fundamentally, any analysis of ‘European unification’ should be very careful when using normative concepts such as success and failure. While these concepts unveil the analytical angle and judgement of the beholder, they often also simply replicate the language of the sources. Factoring in a longer historical perspective as well as a multiplicity of European levels of analysis helps to avoid easy conclusions. This is particularly true for the two cases studied here.

By the 1970s, the CAP sparked problematic effects, such as skyrocketing costs, surplus production and detrimental consequences for producers in non-member states. Real reforms only commenced during the early 1990s. At that time, these changes were driven by various factors such as the liberalisation of markets following the end of the Cold War that took place in the midst of a new round of globalisation, with growing pressure from the United States as well as from within the member states and their societies. The problems with the CAP were paralleled by some changes in the transnational world due to several consecutive rounds of enlargement.Footnote ⁶⁰ By contrast, in the 1970s, after it was clear that the CTP efforts had led to nothing, a new course was set. The Commission began to rebuild connections with transnational society, for example with ECMT and UNECE. It also changed the nature of its policy. It put more emphasis on sector-specific measures and, more importantly, on structural policies.Footnote ⁶¹ This implied a focus on infrastructure policy and the modernisation of railways by the introduction of high-speed railways and the development of new infrastructure initiatives, which eventually led to the inclusion of the Trans-European Network Initiative for Transport into the Treaty of Maastricht.Footnote ⁶² These developments suggest that the CAP appeared to be a ‘success’ and the CTP a ‘failure’ in the 1970s – if adopting and implementing a policy for an economic sector and integrating the respective sectors through these means are the only yardsticks. Seen from the end of the twentieth century, the picture was different, however, particularly if one takes the consequences of integration for those affected into account. Sometimes, success and failure lie very close together indeed. And sometimes it might even be better to refrain from using these normative categories.