Legitimating the CAP: Gaining, Maintaining and Regaining Support for Direct Payments After 2013

Agriculture was one of the first domains of European integration in the 1950s and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) remains among the most important European policies today, with still over 40% of the EU budget devoted to it. Discussions on suitable CAP goals and instruments date back almost as far as the policy itself. Instigated by production surpluses, budget crises, international trade pressures, and public opinion the CAP was reformed repeatedly. These pressures also led to changes in policy discourse: with the introduction of the term of ‘multifunctionality’ and increasing attention for the social and environmental aspects of the CAP, European policy makers sought to legitimize the policy. In this paper we use the work of Mark Suchman (1995) to analyse the discursive / rhetoric strategies that are pursued in the (public) debate on the most recent - and still ongoing - CAP reform (2013-2020) to gain, maintain or regain the legitimacy of direct payments to farmers. In our empirical analysis we will focus on the strategies of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council, paying particular attention to Germany, France and the Netherlands.