| The aim of this contribution is to examine how the French and the German positions on agricultural policy have developed since the foundation of the EEC and what the driving forces were behind. The “general consensus” underlying the EEC treaty, and according to which the common market would be “conquered” by France in the case of the classical agricultural products, could not be translated into practice; for what emerged for these products was not a customs union but a “price support union”. As a consequence French intra-community agricultural exports had to be redirected to the world market. Thus initial positive French income transfers via intracommunity trade were transformed into transfers from the EC budget, an evolution that can be interpreted as a... |
