ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the East Anglia's Objective 5b project, Ward and Woodward suggest that European policy is becoming increasingly important for rural development actors not only in financial terms, but also in terms of institutional practices and procedures. It draws the rural legacies of communism. The chapter focuses upon the early period of post- communist transformation, which will be called 'the fragmentation period'. It outlines the structural characteristics of rural policy networks, first the agricultural ones, then the regional development and finally rural development network. The chapter argues that in the second half of the 1990s the main mechanism of Europeanisation in Hungarian rural policy-making has been framing integration, that is lacking legal means, the European Union (EU) impacts upon the beliefs and expectations of domestic policy actors. In 1994 the incoming socialist-liberal coalition had considered the National Agricultural Programme (NAP) as a necessary package of measures to settle agrarian issues for the period before the country joined EU.