"Europeanizing patriarchy: The EU's Common Agricultural Policy"

Prugl, Elisabeth. (2001) "Europeanizing patriarchy: The EU's Common Agricultural Policy". In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This paper starts from the presumption that gender politics in European agriculture are part of a larger process of patriarchal rule operating at the level of the European Union. It probes how and why the family farm came to be the unquestioned anchor of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and how the commitment to the family farm contributes to a European formation of patriarchy. I first provide an overview of the changing social organization of farming in Europe. Second, I probe the meanings that the family farm assumed in national discourses and the rhetorical purposes for which it was deployed. I focus my treatment on debates in the 1950s and 60s in the two countries which have been instrumental in formulating the CAP, namely Germany and France. In a final step, I argue that a confluence of ambiguous meanings in national discourses on family farming made for easy agreement at the international level, which affirming concordance about the legitimacy of patriarchal family farms within an EEC network of elites.

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