ABSTRACT
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the first decade of the 21st century is operating in a very different international setting from that which prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s when the policy was first devised and set up. The conventional wisdom is that the CAP rested on a deal between France and Germany. The designers of the CAP could vividly recall the state of Europe at the end of the Second World War when many people did not have enough food available to them to constitute a healthy diet. The CAP relied in large part, until it was reformed from the 1990s onwards, on a system of intervention prices, backed up by variable import levies which ensured that the European Community (EC) price could not be undercut. The CAP has operated for most of its life in a way that fits well into intergovernmentalist theoretical accounts of the EU, although again there have been changes in the 21st century.
