journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen 131
Guido THIEMEYER. – Vom ‘Pool Vert’ zur Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft.
Europäische Integration, Kalter Krieg und die Anfänge der Gemeinsamen Europäischen
Agrarpolitik. 1950-1957. Oldenburg Verlag, München, 1999, 300 S. – ISBN 3-486-56427-7. –
148,00 DM.
Understanding how agriculture entered the post-war quest for institution building in Western
Europe is not an easy task, particularly in the light of intensive state intervention into the sector,
and dominant national agricultural political elites. Nonetheless, this is the question which the
German historian Guido Thiemeyer has pursued in this book, based on his doctoral dissertation.
The book covers a period of time that spans from the launching of the Green Pool – exploring
both the origins of the French Pflimlin Plan and the Dutch Mansholt Plan – to the miserable
breakdown of the Green Pool negotiations in 1954. It then proceeds to examine the bilateral
Franco-German trade agreements concluded in the aftermath, focusing on agriculture. The Benelux
memorandum should be seen as a response to this apparent return to bilateralism, leading to
the Spaak Committee-process and the writing of the agricultural chapter of the Treaty establishing
the European Economic Community (EEC). It is a period that has been relatively well
researched by historians in general, but so far, there has not existed a coherent study that systematically
explores the position of agriculture in the European context; this is where Thiemeyer’s
book enters the scene. Based on thorough archival studies in the French, German and Dutch
central administrations, the book offers a good view of the process of decision-making that lay
behind the development at European level.
The title of the book – in English, From ‘Green Pool’ to the European Economic Community.
European Integration, Cold War and the beginnings of the Common Agricultural Policy 1950-57 –
suggests the framework within which the study has been conceived. The European integration process,
and the importance assigned to agriculture within that process has to be understood, so the
argument goes, in the context of the way that western European countries were trying to position
themselves during the Cold War. The diplomatic narrative in relation to agriculture in the period
from the Green Pool to the EEC Treaty has been presented several times before (Milward, Griffiths
and Milward, Girvin and Griffiths, Nöel, etc.). Thiemeyer has, nonetheless, carefully gone through
the archival documentation of the whole period again, but, at times, leaves the reader with the
impression that it brings very little new to the understanding of this part of the process. The real
merits of the research effort at this level of the analysis therefore lie much in what happened
‘in-between’ the big events. For instance the position of agriculture in the Franco-German
La-Celle-Saint Cloud negotiations has not been presented this clearly previously, nor has the political
horsetrading that went on during the discussions of the European Defence Community (EDC)
with respect to the important role of agricultural parliamentarians. This approach leads to a finely
shaped explanation of the period which shows that the integrative efforts of the west European
countries were not driven by the efforts to find common solutions for the agricultural sector alone.
However, agriculture always hummed in the background, and at several occasions the reception and
passing of other European projects in national parliaments depended on the political trade-offs that
could be made with the ‘green blocks’ of parliamentarians.
Domestic politics therefore play an important role in this story. A central aspect of the
book is that it dissects the national administrations, and shows that most of the time, the
administrations were split in their opinion on European policy in general, and on the agricultural
aspects of it in particular. Interest representation and domination were at stake here,
and Thiemeyer explains well how these issues were at the heart of the internal political
power struggles of most governments. What often determined the government position was
which ministry had won the right to be ‘federführend’, i.e. to lead the national delegation,
and not consensus about what line to take in the European policy. Evidence of such split
administrations has been shown before in literature, but not in such a systematic and coherent
presentation as this book offers.