•  
  •  
 

Washington Law Review

Abstract

The future of this common agricultural policy, as well as that of the European Economic Community itself, however, has been made somewhat uncertain by France's decree, on July 1, 1965, of a "temporary boycott" of the meetings of the Council of Ministers of the Community due to a failure to agree upon the method of financing the Community's agricultural policy. This boycott may well have "triggered the most serious crisis in the bloc's seven year history," because the dispute is thought by some to be a mere symptom of a more fundamental conflict between France and her Common Market partners. The issue in that conflict is whether the Common Market is to become an integrated entity of member nations, or is rather to be only a loosely-knit organization of states as envisioned by French President De Gaulle. Because the integration of planned agricultural economies requires a greater degree of supranationalism than does the integration of freemarket industrial economies, it is natural that the political differences between De Gaulle and his partners should clash most vividly in the execution of the common agricultural policy. The purpose of this article is to review this common agricultural policy and its implementation. Apart from considerations of European unity, the common agricultural policy is of significance to exporters of American agricultural products. The value of annual exports of these products amounts to about five billion dollars, of which one and three-tenths billion dollars has been sold to Common Market countries alone. The common agricultural policy should also concern legal scholars because it is probably the most highly developed form of "supranational" law and institutional regulation in the world.'"

First Page

685

Download

Share

COinS