The Noble or Sour Wine: European Commission’s Competing Discourses on the Main CAP Reforms

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we apply discourse analysis to the European Commission's Communications on reforms of the European Union's Common agricultural policy (CAP). The results of the historical discourse analysis of the European Commission’s strategy documents in the form of Communications on the CAP from 1991 to 2017 showed that the discourse was a hybrid, modified according to the specific political economic context and the European Commission’s need to justify the CAP reforms. In the first two Communications of 1991 and 1997, the neomercantilist and neoliberal discourses dominated to justify the reduction of market price support. In the Communications of the 2000s the neoliberal and multifunctionality discourse dominated to justify further CAP reforms based on decoupling and liberalisation of support. In the last Communication from 2017 the multifunctionality discourse in populist form prevailed to find the new societal argumentation for maintaining the policy.