In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the European Community began to revise the representation of ruralism and the revisions appeared to appropriate the changes the CAP had wrought on rural locations: regional diversification of rural space, intensified production and agricultural diversification. I begin my analysis of this newly formulated representation of ruralism with the 1988 European Community Commission report, ‘The future of rural society’. This report is a reflective portrayal of rural space that describes the effects of the CAP on farming (brought about by the actions of farmers in appropriating policy measures into their farming practices), the current problems facing rural society and strategies for addressing these problems.
The report begins with the following description of rurality, which I quote at length not only because it highlights the emerging autonomy of ruralism from agriculture and the different types of spaces that now exist within it, but because it still recognises: 1) the need to support farming in rural areas to offset the effects of structural change on rural society; and 2) the mutually constitutive relation between human activities in rural space and forms of social life—a more general version of rural fundamentalism.
The concepts of the countryside or of rural society are by no means merely geographic in scope, since economic and social life outside our towns and cities is of great complexity, embracing a wide range of activities… (CEC 1988:5)
Rural society [as locality], as it is generally understood in Europe, extends over regions and areas presenting a variety of activities and landscapes comprising natural countryside, farmland, villages, small towns, regional centres and industrialised rural areas. It accounts for about half of the population and a little over 80% of the territory of the Community.
But the concept of rural society [as representation] implies more than geographical limits. It refers to a complex economic and social fabric made up of a wide range of activities: farming, small trades and businesses, small and medium-sized industries, commerce and services. Furthermore, it acts as a buffer and provides a regenerative environment which is essential for ecological balance. Finally, it is assuming an increasingly important role as a place of relaxation and leisure.
[After the expansions of the European Community in 1973 and 1987,] the Community has acquired a distinctly higher proportion of areas the structures of which militate against proper economic—and social—development. Most of these areas are rural in the extreme, sometimes with 20–30% of the population still employed in farming. (p. 15)
Notable in this description is the change in the relation between agriculture and rurality. Agriculture exists within and is encompassed by rural space and society rather than the other way around, as it was in the earlier representation. This change foreshadows a major theme of the report: the decrease in the importance of agriculture in rural regions. It proposes an urban-centric spatial model that identifies three types of rural regions. Each of these regions is defined by its relation to large conurbations; each is described as experiencing a different problem brought about by the overall decrease in the importance of agriculture within the European Community; and together these are referred to in the report as the ‘three standard problems’ (CEC 1988:28–9). First, there are areas close to cities experiencing ‘the pressure of modern life’ due to an influx of population and competition for the use of land where agriculture is least important and where there is a diversification of land uses between agriculture, industry and leisure. Second, there are ‘outlying regions’ experiencing ‘rural decline’ due to out-migration where agriculture remains relatively important but with decreasing employment opportunities because of technological improvements in production. Third, there are the ‘very marginal areas’ experiencing more marked rural decline and depopulation where agriculture remains the most important sector of the local economy and where there is little potential for economic diversification because of the difficulty of providing services and infrastructure. The second and third standard problems portray rural areas experiencing what Kearney earlier called the ‘rural problem’ (1991:126). In this sense, the report appropriates into its revised representation of rural space the effects of the structural adjustments brought about by the implementation of the CAP.
The last paragraph of the quote is also significant to the revised representation of ruralism. It describes a reconfiguration of the relation between agriculture based on family production units and rurality. Now in relation to the large, technologically advanced agribusiness farms, leisure areas and environmental buffer zones, the spaces ‘furthest from the mainstream of Community life’ (CEC 1988:7)—where small family farming of the rural fundamentalist image continues—are ‘rural in the extreme’: remote, depopulated and economically marginal because of their heavy dependence on agriculture. The word ‘extreme’ is important in the paragraph because it is a narrative form of distanciation as well as authenticity. Its use makes poorer agricultural regions, the Less Favoured Areas like those of the hill sheep farming area of the Scottish Borders, into a kind of distanced and marginal landscape—a museum-like place portraying the original image of rural space where family farming and a valued form of society continue to exist.
Overall, then, ‘The future of rural society’ records the marginalisation of agriculture—especially small family-based farming—into the European Community’s revised representation of rurality. Unlike the original ‘agrarian’ (Bonanno 1991) configuration, rurality is now portrayed as incorporating heterogeneous activities and types of spaces. The nature of rural space is not defined only by agriculture, even a diversified agriculture. Instead, the rural is also a place for small industry and leisure activities in those areas where structural adjustment mechanisms of the CAP have lead to a rural decline; and it is also a place for environmental preservation in those areas where the price-support mechanisms have led to farmers adopting intensive but ecologically damaging methods of agricultural production as a means of maximising income from subsidies. This representation of rural areas for leisure and environmental preservation continued the moral-reproductive function of the earlier rural fundamentalist image that the CAP originally envisioned for farming in rural society. In the former case, there is rural space for relaxation and recreation necessary for regenerating the human spirit for people throughout the entire European Community; and, in the latter case, there is rural space for regenerating the environment essential to the ecological balance of the entire community. Rural locations should be preserved not just for the farmers living there but for the benefit of society as a whole.
Another implication of representing the rural as constituted by a diversity of activities and spaces is that it also has a diversity of endogenous resources—not just land for agriculture—that can be developed to expand and reinvigorate the economy and society of rural areas. Instead of local farmers relying on CAP price-support mechanisms to produce agricultural commodities for people outside their rural locality, rural localities are now places that people from outside come into to consume the diversity of things that now constitute rural localities: the environment, heritage, beautiful natural landscapes, local customs and artefacts.