The Challenges of Enlargement and GATT Trade Negotiations: Explaining the Resilience of the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy in the 1970s

Both a flagship policy and a costly and wasteful liability – since its inception in the 1960s, the common agricultural policy (CAP) of the European Community (EC) has been controversial. This article investigates why the CAP survived largely unchanged through the 1970s, a decade of economic and political crisis and transformation, and maintained its centrality in the Community. The article focuses first on the entrenched institutional interests in the Council of Ministers and the Commission before analyzing two key events that could have led to a shift of interests in the EC and a reform of the policy: the accession of the United Kingdom to the EC in 1973 and the Tokyo Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (1973-9). The decision of the Community to protect the CAP against these challenges is revealing with regard to the state and outlook of the Community in the 1970s. The article argues that in a period of uncertainty and transformation, the CAP maintained a reluctant centrality in the EC, underscoring European unity and commitment to European integration. Internal challenges such as enlargement with the UK and external ones such as the GATT trade negotiations were thus met with the determination to keep the CAP intact