ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the constituent power of Dutch discourses concerning rurality and European (EU) discourses concerning rural policies. The European Commission responded to the 1996 Cork Declaration by introducing the so-called 'Model of European Agriculture'. From the perspective of the Dutch actors in rural development, it is clear that the EU is an important, although not always easily accessible and sometimes even weak, democratic institution that functions de facto as the fourth level of government. The EU has to play an extremely complex role as political mediator between global institutions and domestic governance scales in the member states. The chapter reconstructs the (main shifts in) EU policies since the Cork Declaration concerning rural development. It investigates whether there is a congruency or a contradiction between the dominant political EU discourses and the (dominant) discourses concerning rurality in the Netherlands. The data is interpreted from the perspective of different types of power: resource-based episodical power, dispositional power and structural/systemic power.
