Creating a unified European Community in the late 1950s and early 1960s from a context of national boundaries, wars and political fragmentation required a communal space and common meanings. Because of its importance for food supply, consumer costs and political importance, agriculture was the primary vehicle for the construction of European communal space and the integration of the member states (see Bowler 1985:10–12).^[1] Its three guiding principles were: 1) a single market, with no internal tariff protection imposed by member states, which allowed labour, capital and agricultural products to circulate freely throughout the community at comparable costs; 2) a community preference for agricultural goods backed by an external tariff on products imported into the community; and 3) a sharing of the financial burdens and benefits of the CAP by the community as a distinct entity, rather than by distributional procedures to and from member states.

While these principles were overtly economic in character, they also identified the types of practices that would produce the internal nature and geographical limits of a distinct European space. The unified market, free internal movement of agricultural products and common prices and common financial responsibility de-emphasised the national partitioning of the European Community epitomised by pre-existing import levies of member states to protect their agricultural industry and by separate financial responsibility for their national agricultural sectors. Simultaneously, the uniform external tariff and the sharing of the financial burden of the CAP was the boundary that marked the limits of the European Community.

Within this European space, a major difficulty in formulating agricultural policy was the diversity of farming in member states in terms of resource endowment, the range and average size of farms, the density of population, the level of food self-sufficiency and the importance of agriculture in national politics. There were, however, two similarities on which a commonness could be ‘codified’ (see Bourdieu 1990:80) in formulating a European agricultural policy. First, all prospective member states had established tariff mechanisms to protect their farmers’ incomes and their agricultural sectors from cheaper imported agricultural products and, remembering the privations during and after World War II, to maintain strategic self-sufficiency in food supplies. Second, in all member states there was an image of rural society portraying people and their agricultural way of life in the countryside that had cultural value and political significance. The five objectives of European Community’s agricultural policy^[2] that emerged from these two points of convergence addressed issues of economic efficiency of the agricultural sector and stability of prices, political issues of national self-sufficiency of food supplies and reasonable prices for consumers, and social issues of the equitable distribution of income to farmers. The two most important objectives for understanding the effect of the CAP on rural landscapes and concepts of rurality relate to the incompatible aims of achieving social equity for individual farmers and promoting economic efficiency in the agricultural sector. With respect to the former, the Treaty of Rome set as an explicit objective for the CAP ‘to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural population, particularly by increasing the individual earnings of persons engaged in agriculture’ (Article 39[1b]). With respect to the economic efficiency of farming, the Treaty of Rome set the objective of increasing ‘agricultural productivity by promoting technical progress and by ensuring the national development of agricultural production and the optimum utilisation of all factors of production, particularly labour’ (Article 39[1a]).^[3]

The social equity objective of maintaining farmers’ standard of living was vital to an abiding goal of CAP—to preserve the image of rurality and the family farm as the major feature of agriculture that in turn was the condition for rural society—even if this inhibited the process of increasing economic efficiency in the agricultural sector. At the Stresa Conference in 1958, where the European Community’s original objectives for agricultural policy were defined, it was explicitly stated that ‘the structures of European agriculture were to be reformed and become more competitive, without any threat to family farms’ (CEC [1958], quoted by Folmer et al. 1995:12; see also Pearce 1981:7). This implied causal link between family farming and the preservation of rural society continued to be central to the European image of rurality throughout the 1980s. The 1987 Green Paper, Perspective for the Common Agricultural Policy, states that its aim is ‘to maintain the social tissue in the rural regions’ by ensuring continued employment opportunities in agriculture. Moreover, the paper presents the community’s image of rural space: ‘An agriculture on the model of the USA, with vast spaces of land and few farmers, is neither possible nor desirable in European conditions, in which the basic concept remains the family farm’ (European Commission 1985:II). The same aim and image of rural space were reaffirmed a year later in the European Commission’s paper ‘The future of rural society’: ‘This communication…reflects the Commission’s concern to avoid serious economic and social disruption [caused by structural measures] and to preserve a European rural development model based on the promotion of family farms’ (CEC 1988:67).^[4]

In these statements, EC policy represented a rurality in which agriculture was the encompassing activity defining the nature and values pervading the whole of rural space.^[5] Rural space is a function of and is constituted by farming, family-based production units and a specific form of social life. While there is little specification of the attributes of farm, family and social life, family-based agriculture and rural society are portrayed as mutually constitutive: farming carried out by family production units is the condition for the kind of landscapes and social life characteristic of rural space (Marsh 1991:16) and rural space is the condition for and outcome of family farming.

This representation of ruralism as agricultural and vice versa is a version of ‘rural fundamentalism’, an urban-based and edifying image of agrarian society pervasive in the member states of the European Community at the time: ‘farm people…were thought to make a special contribution to political, economic and social stability, economic growth and social justice’ and the ownership of small parcels of land characteristic of the family-sized farm was considered to be ‘the basis of a vigorous democracy’ (Bowler 1985:16).^[6] In this image, agriculture, rural space and society are relatively homogeneous—it is where agriculture is carried out predominantly on small-sized farms managed by families. In addition, there is a causal relation between a specific form of agricultural production and exemplary society. Family farming creates the kind of space where rural society can flourish and where the ideals of wider society are nurtured and preserved. Family farming sustains not just rural society, but society as a whole, characterised by the ideals of stability, justice and equality. Thus despite the claimed academic marginality of such romantic representations of peripheral rural farming communities (Macdonald 1993:10–11), it was this morally charged image of rurality that was codified in the CAP. The link between material (agricultural) production and moral reproduction that is characteristic of this image of rural space continues through the progressive development of the CAP.