1

When Sector Meets Territory: The 2007 Reform of EU Wine Policies

Andy Smith

SPIRIT-Sciences Po Bordeaux

Paper presented at EUSA’s biannual conference in Los Angeles, 23-25th April, 2009 Panel 4H (Malibu room): Territory in the government of the EU: Why theory matters

NB. Work in progress. Please do not cite without author’s permission.

Introduction This paper and panel have been inspired by a considerable hiatus within studies of Europe regarding the concept of territory. On the one hand, for decades social science has convincingly shown that territories throughout the world are not essentialist or immutable categories of thought, practice and action. Rather each and every territory is a categorization of physical and social space that has been institutionalized to varying degrees over time. This finding has been particularly highlighted in Europe. To give just one example, Eugen Weber’s classic Peasants into Frenchmen (sic) underlines that ‘the famous hexagon can itself be seen as a colonial empire shaped over centuries: a complex of territories conquered, annexed and integrated in a political and administrative whole’ (1979: 485)1. On the other hand, studies and theories of European integration tend strongly to conceptualize territory in precisely the manner debunked by the above-mentioned scholarship. The most obvious culprits here are users of rational choice theory for whom territory is simply synonymous with ‘interests’ that are ‘national’ (intergovernmentalism2) and/or ‘regional’ (‘multi-level governance’3). However, it is important to note that the best known ‘opponents’ of such scholarship –neo-functionalists (Haas, 1958) and neo-institutionalists (Sandholtz and Stone-Sweet, 1998)- are just as prone to conceptualizing territory in ways that seriously underplay its constructed and contingent character. Although these latter theories implicitly allow for interests to become ‘supranational’ or ‘European’, and sometimes suggest this is subsuming the nation state, neither systematically analyses the processes through which reproduction and change in conceptions of territory lie at the heart of EU politics. Instead, the ‘core assumptions’ and ‘routine rhetorical practices’ (Billig, 1995: 51) of EU studies continue to perpetuate the ‘common sense’ notion that territories in Europe are ‘already there’ and that one should simply get on with describing and explaining what their representatives ‘do in Brussels’4. This refusal to theorize territory and neglect of the social science cited earlier, has had at least two major consequences for contemporary scholarship on European integration. First, the EU is rarely explicitly thought of as both a territory whose institutionalization is constantly contested, and one within which the reproduction and reshaping of other territories is a simultaneous process. Instead, to borrow a much-used metaphor, territories are seen as solid billiard balls that group together, hit each other and/or get knocked out of play. Second, under-theorizing and

1 Numerous other studies have come to similar conclusions. For example, Anderson (1991), Brubaker (1996), Thiesse (1999). 2 Moravcsik (1998) best captures this approach. For critiques of intergovernmentalism see Webb (1983) and Parsons (2003). 3 Marks, Hooghe and Blank (1996). For a critique see Carter and Smith (2008). 4 As Billig underlines in a book on the different but adjacent topic of nationalism, ‘disciplinary common sense’ engenders ‘habits which are widely unquestioned, for to question them might appear to threaten the very basis of the discipline itself’ (1995: 51).

2

under-studying the role of territory in European integration has contributed to insufficient study of the legitimation challenges this process has constantly raised. Indeed, overlooking the way territory is produced and reproduced is part of the reason why the contested legitimacy of the EU is generally reduced to issues of public opinion and the ratification of its treaties (eg. Moravcsik, 2002). In contrast, relatively little research focuses upon the practices of actors who, on a daily basis, seek to legitimate or delegitimate the constant reterritorializations of politics European integration entails. Rather than simply contesting existing accounts of the relationship between territory and European integration, this paper instead seeks to suggest ways of relaunching research on this topic using other sources of theoretical and conceptual nourishment. Building upon recent collaborative work (Carter and Smith, 2008 & 2009), it does so around the development of a central hypothesis regarding the fundamental contingency of the territories contemporary actors within the EU have both inherited and today seek to reshape. More precisely, as Section 1 sets out in detail, the aim here is to displace the focus of analysis on the relationship between territory and European integration for reasons that are ontological, epistemological and methodological. Ontologically, the EU is conceptualized here as one single government (Smith, 2004). This government of the EU cannot be reduced to one or several public bodies. Instead, it is envisaged as a space for the organization and orientation of social action (Lagroye, 1997: 25) that is populated by all the actors who participate in the definition and institutionalization of EU-wide public problems and policy instruments. Within this space a number of strong cleavages of course exist and, indeed, structure both co-operation and conflict. Building upon general theories of the state (Jobert and Muller, 1987), I propose that the fundamental cleavages within the EU’s government are either territorial or sectoral. This ontology of the EU also stems from a choice of epistemology that combines the central theses of social constructivism and institutionalism. Drawing upon the former means considering that representations of territories and sectors have been built over time around ‘the subset of institutions (practices, symbols, norms, grammars, models, identities) through which people interpret their world’ (Parsons, 2007: 100). Indeed, as representations of territory highlights, these categories of thought and action are not only constructed once, instead they are constantly being reproduced through processes of naturalization and ‘banalization’ (Billig, 1995). Institutionalism provides a second complementary source of theoretical grounding because it emphasizes that these social constructions take place around the building, contesting or reproduction of rules, norms and expectations (Thelen and Steinmo, 1992). More precisely, sociological strands of institutionalism provide tools for grasping how the dialectical process of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization constitutes the key sites within which the contingencies of both territory and sector are temporarily resolved and constantly inter-linked. Finally, my choice to focus upon the interplay between sector and territory also contains a methodological element concerning precisely what one studies and how? The choice made in this paper is to examine this relationship through causal analysis5 of change or reproduction within sectors which, I hypothesize, must give prominence to social constructions of territory. The case study that will be used to illustrate this approach is taken from ongoing research into a radical reform of the EU’s intervention in the wine sector adopted in 2007. Departing from a completed study of why until then the EU had no common wine policy (Smith, De Maillard, Costa: 2007;

5 By this I mean explanation that reveals the ‘causal mechanisms’ behind sectoral change or stasis that ‘pass through individuals (but may not reduce to them) to connect to action’ (Parsons, 2007: 25).

3

Smith, 2008a), Section 2 will recount ongoing research6 that seeks to systematically process trace the 2007 reform and, in so doing, demonstrate the heuristic value of conceptualizing sector, territory and the government of the EU from the angle presented here.

1. Territory and European Integration: ‘The government of the EU’ Approach

Through presenting and articulating together some key concepts, this section first sets out a general argument about the central importance of territory for government (1.1). Upon these foundations, intermediate concepts are then added as a means of translating this line of questioning on territory into empirical investigation of the reproduction, or change, of the institutions through which power is exercised within and through the government of the EU (1.2).

1.1 Territory and the Institutionalization of Government Constructivist political sociologists such as Jacques Lagroye (1997) or Philippe Braud (2000) provide a means of reflecting on government grounded in sociological theory that is resolutely turned towards empirical enquiry. However, the precise steps of research design that are consistent with this theory are rarely spelled out in clear terms. Here I endeavour to tackle this explanatory challenge firstly by underlining the relationship between institutions and legitimacy, then by unpacking what separates, but also links, sectors and territory. Institutionalization and Legitimation At least in contemporary democracies, government essentially takes place through the making, implementation and following of rules. These rules are generally grouped together in the form of ‘policy instruments’ which, in essence, either outlaw certain behaviour or redistribute resources to individual or collective actors (Le Galès and Lascoumes, 2007). Indeed, these instruments of government are intended to govern the behaviour not only of individual citizens but also, and more constantly, that of the public, collective and private organizations which, in different ways and on the basis of different legitimacies, seek to structure and orientate the society in question. When rules and policy instruments stabilize over time they become ‘institutions’. As a wealth of ‘institutionalist’ literature based on different ontologies and epistemologies has of course related in depth (Hall and Taylor, 1996; Parsons, 2007), institutions constitute the government of a society because their general effect is to reduce uncertainties by regularizing social, economic and political behaviour. To give just one example that anticipates this paper’s case study, the EU’s institutions for its wine industry constrain production and marketing behaviours. However, they also make them durably possible by providing the conditions which enable growers, merchants and distributors to engage in, and thus commit themselves to, this industry. Thus far few social scientists would dispute this line of argument. However, disagreement will certainly occur now that I turn to the two vast questions that come next: why are institutions obeyed?; and how do they change? 6 Conducted within a joint research programme on Le gouvernement européen des industries (GEDI) financed by the French Agence nationale de la recherche.

4

Current scholarship contains two competing causal responses to the question of why institutions are generally accepted and followed: Scholars who share an epistemology of rational choice and an ontology of government taken from game theory consider that individuals obey institutions because ‘they see rational individuals channelled to certain choices by a man-made (sic) obstacle course of organizations, rules, and flows of information that alters actor’s cost-benefit calculations about them’ (Parsons, 2007: 67). In contrast, scholars who’s thinking is instead structured by a social constructivist epistemology and ontology of government consider that institutions are generally obeyed because individuals believe in them. More precisely, this approach considers that individuals are socialized into considering that the institutions of their respective society are legitimate, ie. that they have social value. This legitimacy is not however seen as unconditional or spontaneously emerging from ‘culture’. Instead, actors have built the legitimacy of each and every institution through acts of ‘legitimation’ (Lagroye, 1985) which incorporate cognitive ‘theories of action’ (Muller, 1995), but also symbols and gestures which appeal as much to emotions as to cognition (Abélès, 1997; Braud, 1996). Defined by Lagroye as a political activity designed to acquire ‘durable legitimacy, ie. a form of recognition founded both on ‘rational’ argumentation (‘our power is necessary and functional’) and moral imputation (‘our power is right, our power is founded on common values’) (1985: 405), legitimation is a thus an activity around which one can simultaneously study the making of institutions and the ‘assignment’ of power to be involved in the process (Carter and Smith, 2008). As O. Corten has underlined, ‘this means renouncing attempts to define what is fundamentally legitimate in favour of discovering what is presented and perceived to be so’ (2000: 8). Indeed, from this fundamentally social constructivist standpoint, the aim of research becomes to identify what actors do in order to present as legitimate either a government’s existing institutions, or the institutions they themselves want put in place. Indeed, such an approach is particularly salutary when studying European decision-making where struggles to legitimize or delegitimize both EU policies and the EU as a polity are so obviously omnipresent. Of course, not all institutions are obeyed and many are openly contested – a banal but crucially important observation that provides a bridge to the second question that consistently divides self-professed institutionalists: how do institutions change? Again, rational choice theorists and constructivists provide quite distinct causal answers. For the former, institutions change when 1) the interests and preferences of powerful actors modify, 2) causing them to make new cost-benefit calculations about the utility of the rules and norms in question. In contrast, social constructivists reject such analyses because they see the ‘objective environments’ of governments being perpetually structured by ‘ambiguity’ and the ‘a-rationality’ of its stakeholders (Parsons, 2007: 98). Whilst accepting that actors develop preferences and strategies of action, constructivists instead underline that before formulating either, actors have to interpret the situation they consider themselves to be in. As Muller underlines (1995), actors need to ‘decode’ in order to ‘recode’ – a constant process of interpretation and prescription which he unpacks around four terms I return to subsequently: values, theories of action, norms and symbols. In summary, when studying government, the analytical consequences of choosing a social constructivist positioning on institutional allegiance and change are fundamental. As will be further developed below, the key move made in so doing is to focus research not upon

5

institutions per se, but upon the constant processes of institutionalization through which components of government are densified, stabilized and legitimated (Guigner, 2008: 55). Sectors and Territory Institutions do not exist, and thus are not densified, stabilized or legitimated in isolation of each other. Rather they tend strongly to be grouped together in ‘Institutional Orders’ (Berger & Luckman, 1966). Indeed, societies themselves are differentiated by and made up of such Orders (Lagroye, 1997) that are either territorial or sectoral (Jobert & Muller, 1987). Understanding the differences between territory and sector, but also their interplay, is fundamental to a social constructivist approach to government in general, and to that of the EU in particular. Territorial Institutional Orders (TIOs) are composed of institutions whose reach extends throughout a specific geographically and socially restricted polity. As in any Institutional Order, each institution ostensibly fits with its fellow institutions in a hierarchical configuration that Hall and Soskice label ‘institutional complementarity’ (2001). In the case of TIOs, these hierarchical configurations tend strongly to be structured around horizontal and non-specialized sets of rules such as constitutions which delimit formal divisions of authority, accountability and legitimacy. Crucially, within democratic polities, TIOs also take much of their legitimacy from their territory being the basis for elected representation. However, the actual TIO of any particular space (eg. that of the EU) always stems more from how constitutional-type institutions are interpreted and affect the practice of government, in particular the routinized practices of politics, than purely from the constitutional documents or electoral mandates themselves (Carter and Smith, 2009). In the case of the EU, its treaties and its specific relationship with democratic representation are thus key ingredients of an EU wide TIO. But the full content and influence of this Order can only be gauged through empirical study of the way the treaties and the organization of politicians’ behaviour have been transformed into EU-wide governmental tools and processes7. Together with a long tradition of public administration and public policy analysis, I argue that the principal influence upon the actual ordering of TIOs are the Sectoral Institutional Orders (SIOs) which constantly and deeply cross-cut them. In common with TIOs, the Order of each sector is a pattern of interdependent rules, norms, practices and expectations. However, the underlying organizing principle of a sector is specialization around a ‘vertical’ set of activities, in particular industries (eg. wine) and professions (eg. teachers). Consequently the dominant logic of action of actors who seek to govern a sector is twofold:

- regulating behaviour within the industry or profession in question through structuring interest formation and instrument fabrication (eg. rules on the definition of wine);

- protecting their SIO from both the ‘contaminating’ effects of institutions built within other sectors (eg. the impact of health sector rules upon the selling of wine) and trans-sectoral institutions set by, and at the scale of, the TIO (eg. tax rates or EU competition policy).

In short, within any polity at any one time each SIO is governed more or less autonomously from inter-sectoral pressures on the one hand and, on the other, the horizontal institutions or policy instruments of the TIOs that affect it. However, the degree of autonomy achieved is always the result of previous political activity and contemporary efforts to maintain it. Historically, as Jobert and Muller underlined particularly clearly (1987), since the mid-19th century most polities in the Western world have experienced a fundamental shift in equilibria between

7 Often reduced to ‘the Community Method’, many illustrations of this point could be made. To give just one, think of the role played by COREPER within Council decision-making and how this extends considerably beyond treaty provisions (Lewis, 2005).

6

their respective TIOs and SIOs. Whereas beforehand most of such countries had been governed around and through trans-sectoral TIOs, the advent of public policies, and thus of an interventionist state, led first to the institutionalization of SIOs and then to their ever-increasing empowerment. Indeed, writing just over two decades ago, Jobert and Muller concluded that we were living in sectoral societies ‘which, by definition, are unstable’, and this because the ‘perpetual disequilibrium’ within and between sectors ‘is a threat for the unity and cohesion of the society concerned’ (1987: 120). For this reason, they proposed an analytical grid which although inciting analysis of ‘global-sectoral relationships’, clearly favoured detailed research on the sector while leaving their notion of ‘the global’ under-theorized and, consequently, under-studied. By revisiting and resuscitating the concept of territory as a replacement for this amorphous and disincarnated ‘global’, the approach developed here attempts both to deepen Jobert and Muller’s line of questioning, whilst better aligning it with certain aspects of the empirically-documented change European politics has undergone since the mid-1980s. Conceptually this means simultaneously embracing the organizational and symbolic dimensions of territory. As has been underlined above when introducing the term Territorial Institutional Order (TIO), a territory is firstly an institutionalized space which actors from different professions (politicians, civil servants, interest group leaders) set out to represent. Based upon this source of legitimacy, they then seek to make and implement institutions in order to regulate behaviours within the territory concerned. In this way, through representing territories actors (eg. National Prime Ministers, the President of the European Commission) attempt to trump the legitimacy of their sectoral interlocutors. But within these ‘contests’, it is important to recall that territorial legitimacy is also striven for through appeals to ‘the public interest’ and the symbols which, through condensing representations of historical time and cultural space (Braud, 1996), provide actors with latent political resources. When used ‘appropriately’ (March and Olsen, 1989), these resources can often vanquish purely cognitively-expressed arguments (ie. those based solely on policy expertise). Consequently, the concept of territory will be employed hereafter to capture both a logic of action that is typically cross-sectoral, but also a logic of argument which depends as much upon the manipulation of symbols as it does on expertise-type reasoning. This attempt to reassert the importance of territory in political analysis has also been inspired by the considerable destabilization experienced by many of the Western world’s TIOs since the 1980s. Put succinctly8, investment in this question has been made more salient by the increasingly overt challenges experienced by the nation-state during this period which mean that it decreasingly corresponds to Jobert and Muller’s ‘global’ sphere of politics. First, the authority and legitimacy of states has been sapped from within either by explicit decentralization reforms (eg. British devolution, French regionalization), or by sector-specific privatizations or liberalizations. Second, and of particular pertinence to this paper, the capacity of nation-states as TIOs to monopolize institution-making and implementation has been sapped from without by the institutionalization of extra-national TIOs such as the EU and the WTO. For both these conceptual and empirical reasons, therefore, a line of questioning on territory-sectoral relationships needs to be systematically built in to research designs which seek to capture how contemporary government takes place, how it gets reproduced or changed and why, at least in general, it continues to be obeyed and thought of as legitimate.

8 And drawing upon a wealth of literature summarized elsewhere (Jullien and Smith, 2008).

7

1.2 Territory, Political Work and Governmental Reproduction or Change Within the governmental processes outlined above, what actors actually do is engage in political work. Building upon our social constructivist ontology, this work is defined as being at the confluence of two constant processes during which the composition of actor alliances and the political construction of ‘social and economic reality’ take place: the transformation of sectoral issues into ‘public problems’ and their politicization (Jullien and Smith, 2008). Indeed, at least in the EU, these are the processes during which most ideological struggles are played out9. Before returning directly to our central hypothesis about territory, these terms will be briefly introduced and successively illustrated with introductory remarks about our case study of the European government of the wine sector. Problematization Contrary to functionalist thinking, ‘sectoral difficulties’ do not arise spontaneously from commercial competition or technological innovation and then automatically become objects of collective or public intervention. In reality, any difficulty only engenders such action through undergoing a process of problematization (Callon, 1986). In order to study this process, it is useful to distinguish between different variants of this dimension of political work through which issues in different parts of a society are defined, institutionalized and legitimized. For example, on a day to day basis companies in the wine industry work within sets of ‘conditions’ which include transport costs, health and safety law, employment and tax law etc. As long as representatives of these companies do not seek to change these conditions they remain ‘flat’ and unproblematized (Kingdon, 1984). In such circumstances the four key aspects of industrial activity (employment, the supply and processing of raw materials, finance, and marketing) are subjects with which actors within companies engage by adopting a logic of action that is essentially mono-organisational and business-centred. However, whenever such actors seek to modify their ‘conditions’, they work to transform them into ‘problems’ of three types:

- collective action problems emerge whenever their definition is shared by an inter-organisational grouping of actors who can claim to be representative of their industry and/or profession. In our case study, interest groups such as the Conseil interprofessionel des vins de Bordeaux (CIVB) are the cornerstone of this collective action. Indeed, much of the regulation of the wine sector takes place around struggles to define problems and strategies within such bodies;

- public problems develop when the process of definition widens to include politicians and civil servants who, at least in theory, are supposed to work for the public interest (Padioleau, 1982: 25). Indeed, the formulation of public problems constitutes an indispensable step in both agenda setting (Rochefort and Cobb, 1994; Campana et. al., 2006) and the formulation of public policy instruments (Lascoumes et Le Galès, 2007). In our case study, representatives of the European Commission’s DG Agriculture and national agricultural ministries are clearly important participants in this process. Indeed, together with the representatives of collective action mentioned above, they make up what we call European wine’s ‘sectoral community’;

- Finally, as we set out below, public problems can also become politicized problems.

9 Such struggles can take the form of left vs right. Most often, however, they take the form of more precise battles over the legitimate role of public authority, eg. interventionist mercantilism vs ordoliberal competition or environmentalism vs intensive agriculture.

8

Politicization and Depoliticization as Strategies of Legitimation Be they collective or public, the problems which structure the organization and the regulation of an industry are never intrinsically ‘political’ or ‘technical’. Instead either of these labels is attached to them over the course of the interactions which give rise to their definition and institutionalization (Dubois and Dulong, 1999; Lagroye, 2003a). Politicization is thus the second dimension of political work that needs to be studied using a social constructivist approach. This perspective is necessary first because one of the fundamental aims of research into the government of a sector is to understand the registers of legitimization and the types of dramatization used to define an issue as ‘political’. Here politicization occurs when actors explicitly employ values either to transform the meaning of an issue or to transfer its regulation to another site of negotiation. For example, representatives of many food and drink industries often argue for support from public authorities by highlighting their respective roots in the ‘traditions’ of a local community. In addition to presenting such discourse in and around decision-making arenas, mediatization can also be used to attain such ends. In many cases the aim of politicization is, quite straightforwardly, ‘to inscribe a problem on the list of issues treated by politicians’, thereby ‘enrolling’ them. In others, the aim is more generally to enable actors to go beyond the limits of each industry in order to influence trans-sectoral policy issues such as competition law (Lagroye, 2003). Indeed, in order to do so, sectoral actors such as the representatives of grape growers seek to plug-into trans-sectoral networks which are favourable to their cause (eg. the French association of members for parliament from wine-growing regions). Importantly, however, when studying politicization it is also just as necessary to analyze its apparent opposite: depoliticization. Often called ‘technicization’, depoliticization is a type of political work which downplays values in favour of arguments based upon ‘expertise’ and ‘efficiency’ (Radaelli, 1999). Although superficially this may appear contradictory, it is analytically vital to consider that strategies of legitimization based upon depoliticization are political.

Figure 1: Political Work as a framework for the causal analysis of sectoral government

Constructing arguments Building alliances

- economic, legal and political ‘aims’ - Interests groups and public authorities

- collective or public theories of action - Sectoral Communities

- symbolic evocation - Trans-sectoral Networks

Activation of arguments and alliances through

- problematization - politicization or technicization

Change or reproduction of institutions: rules, norms and expectations

9

Overall, the concept of political work thus encourages the analysis of sectoral government as a highly structured configuration of processes, relations, representations and expectations which is endogenous to each sector, rather than as a loose ‘policy network’ that is subject to a random range of ‘exogenous factors’ which somehow make up its ‘context’ or ‘environment’ (figure 1). Consequently politicization does not take place outside the web of interdependencies which lie at the heart of the organization and government of a sector. On the contrary, politicization is a tool of political work which is employed in order to modify the state of this dependence. Indeed, and on the basis of all the above, the generic claim made here is that political work is not only omnipresent in the government of sectors; it is its very cause. Territory and Political Work in the EU The second more specific claim made here attempts to link analysis of political work back to this paper and panel’s focus upon the role of territory in the EU’s government of sectors. In claiming that this role is crucial and therefore indispensable to study, the starting point of my reasoning is to reassert the unsettled and ambiguous status of territory in general, and in the EU in particular. Indeed, as shown earlier, all territories, no matter how institutionalized, are constantly being produced or reproduced through thought and action that is either conscious or unconscious (Billig, 1995). The EU itself is a territory that possesses a Territorial Institutional Order (TIO) which for some actors, eg. Commission officials, is institutionalized and legitimate, whereas for many others, eg. Eurosceptic wine growers, both of these qualities –and therefore the TIO itself- are contested. Although the institutionalization and the legitimacy of the territory and TIOs of many of the EU’s member states and regions are not so overtly contested, it is important to remember that they are all still the constant objects of reproduction through political work10. Indeed, participating in the government of the EU in the name of a state or a region constitutes particularly evident illustrations of the contemporary political work that reproducing territory in Europe entails on a daily basis. The second part of this claim about territory entails injecting the first into research design on the political work that causes the EU government of sectors. As we have begun to show previously (Carter and Smith 2008 and 2009), in order to capture the way Sectoral Institutional Orders are shaped by territory, three empirical lines of questioning are necessary: The first concerns how representations of territory have been mobilized within the making of the geographical and social frontiers of an SIO’s policy instruments. More specifically, the aim of research is to grasp the scales at which a sector is governed. The proposal made here is to adopt the concept of ‘jurisdiction’ that is so central to specialists of the law and adapt it to fit with social science questions and research techniques. According to legal scholars, jurisdiction means both the power to hear a case and the geographical area which is subject to the power of a court (Mcleod, 2006: 127). In other words, jurisdictions delimit authority to rule (here defined in terms of legal competence) and the territorial frontiers of that rule. This concept can nonetheless be usefully translated and imported into social science by considering that:

- jurisdictions apply to sectors rather than to polities as a whole; - the competence of jurisdictions (ie. its right to rule) is always liable to be contested

through political activity which may or may not involve the judiciary.

10 For example, Billig’s thesis on ‘banal nationalism’ highlights the use of both ‘the waved and the unwaved flag’ (1995: chap. 3). Moreover, citing Renan, he underlines the importance of the dialectical relationship between remembering and forgetting for the daily legitimation of even ‘established’ nation states (1995: 37-8).

10

Of course, issues of jurisdictional ‘competence’ within an SIO are inseparable from the legitimacy of the actors who work within it. For this reason, the second part of our research design entails examining how territory-linked legitimacies render certain actors ‘eligible’ to participate in an SIO, but also affect the position they hold within its hierarchy. Finally, for the definition of policy instruments, jurisdictions and actor eligibility, our research design attempts to capture how territory has been evoked as part of strategies of legitimation. Within the EU government of sectors, we hypothesize that territory plays a crucial role in the political work that either politicizes or depoliticizes policy ‘problems’. Indeed, given the importance in EU politics of striking an ‘appropriate’ balance between the two strategies (Radaelli, 1999), a focus upon usages of territory provides a means of deepening analysis of the key issue of legitimation.

2. A Case of Wine: The EU’s 2007 Reform Adopted by the EU’s Council of Agriculture Ministers in December 2007, the reform of the EU’s policy instruments for the wine sector is generally interpreted by practitioners as being its most radical change ever (Feredj, 2007; Clavel, 2008). Indeed, seen from the angle of Peter Hall’s well-known typology (1993), this reform clearly constitutes a ‘third order change’ because it incorporates not only a recalibration of policy instruments (1st order) and their partial replacement (2nd order), but also change in both the sector’s hierarchy of objectives, as well as the values around which they are justified. Using the approach introduced above, this section endeavours to analyze this change in two stages. First, it synthesizes findings on the political work which caused policy continuity throughout the period 1992-2006. Second, it concentrates upon the political work carried out around the reform itself. In both parts to this story, the relationship between sector and territory is proposed as the central explanatory hypothesis. More precisely, it will be shown that the 2007 reform would not have taken the path it did without significant change having been wrought to this vital relationship.

2.1 Territory and Institutional Continuity (1992-2006) After years of negotiation, in 1992 the EU’s Agriculture Ministers legally and politically committed themselves to changing the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) through what was commonly called ‘the MacSharry reform’11 (Smith, 2004: chap. 3). Over the following years, the basic principles of this reform (cuts in price support and export aids, increases in rural development spending, etc.) were progressively to be applied to each agricultural sector through modifications of their respective ‘Common Market Organization’ (CMO). In the case of wine, however, the Commission met with such stiff resistance from sectoral interest groups, national delegations and extra-sectoral networks that it was not until 2007 that the underlying logic of the MacSharry reform –ie. a transformation validated by the EU’s Territorial Institutional Order (TIO)- was actually translated into legislation and practice within European wine’s Sectoral Institutional Order (SIO). Before presenting my version of the causality behind this institutional continuity, three frequently mooted explanations need firmly rebutting. First, structuralist and functionalist accounts which

11 After the Commissioner for agriculture from 1989 to 1992, Ray MacSharry.

11

either point to the expansion of European wine’s volumes and exports in the late 1990s, and/or underline the importance of ‘globalized’ competition from new world producers (Deroudille, 2003), ignore both the timing of the 2007 reform and the process through which it came about. In particular, such theories fail to explain why, when the profits of European wine producers began to fall from 2001-2, their representatives only accepted reform half a decade later. More fundamentally still, analysis of ‘market conditions’ alone, in particular their fluctuations and uncertainties, does nothing to explain the political activity undertaken to counter institutional change throughout the 1992-2006 period. A second explanation of institutional continuity to be rejected would point to the electoral strength of wine makers in Europe’s producing countries and their links to political parties (Amable, 2003). According to this commonly held view of politics, a majority of the EU’s agricultural ministers were reluctant to alienate a powerful block of voters and thus made wine an exception as regards the rest of CAP reform. As the record of grape growers for violence and the disruption of public life in some European regions clearly testifies, it would be a mistake to completely disregard this explanation in terms of sectoral resistance to a TIO imposed reform. However, neither the threat of demonstrations nor the vastly weakened electoral strength of grape growers constitutes on their own explanations of institutional inertia. Moreover, as with the structuralist-functionalist fallacy, it totally fails to account for why reform did actually take place in 2007. Finally, a third explanation of non-change as a ‘collective action failure’ is also insufficient. Put forward by a well known American specialist of this sector, Tyler Colman (aka. Dr Vino), this viewpoint on resistance to reform privileges what it sees as the difficulty of reaching collective agreement within European wine’s key organizations, such as the French Institut National des Appellations d’Origine (Colman, 2008: 64). Colman is certainly right to focus upon such organizations. However, accounts in terms of the difficulty of achieving collective decisions again fail to capture episodes of political work, such as 2006-07, where new strategies were adopted and negotiated outcomes did change existing institutions. In contrast to all three of these explanations, our focus on political work within the government of the EU around sector-territory dialectics will be used to structure a two-stage argument as to why the EU’s SIO for wine did not reform until 2007. First, it is important to set out the institutional legacy of previous periods and how it was politically worked. Second, one needs to look closely at the detail of the political work carried out by partisans of change between 1992 and 2006 in order to explain why it so consistently failed. The Institutional Legacy and Political Work Much of the continuity of the EU’s policies for wine over this period must be traced back to the moment when the key rules of this SIO were constructed and began to harden into institutions. Given that many of these rules were transposed from existing ones in the first six member states (in particular France), full analysis of this point merits deeper historical analysis we have begun elsewhere (Smith, de Maillard, Costa, 2007: chap. 2). For our purposes here, however, it is sufficient first to revisit the negotiations which in 1970 produced the EC’s first Common Market Organization (CMO), then a period of conflict during the 1970s and 1980s during which its keys instruments were fully institutionalized. The 1970 negotiation featured two major controversies which split both national governments and the EC’s socioprofessional representatives of wine (Colman, 2001). The first of these

12

concerned the definition of accepted oenological practices, above all the adding of sugar during fermentation (chaptalisation). Despite strong resistance from their opposite numbers, representatives from Germany held out for the right to continue this practice. In order to reach an overall agreement, this right was eventually granted but only in exchange for German concessions regarding the second object of controversy: the categorization of wine. Representatives of France and French wines were particularly committed to institutionalizing a distinction between vins de table and vins d’appellation d’origine controlee (AOC) throughout the EC. This goal was eventually achieved but only with a particular twist that subsequently has had numerous effects: the new CMO did indeed apply in full to all the EC’s vins de table, but most of the regulation of AOC wines remained in the hands of national and sub-national bodies. In analytical terms, it is crucially important to realize that this ‘founding compromise’ upon which EC then EU wine measures have been built owed as much to territorially-driven political work as it did to the sectoral logic of action that motivated the completion of a single market for wine. Not only did the 1970 agreement create two separate ‘jurisdictions’ for different categories of wine (one EU-wide, one ‘national’), in so doing it also impacted heavily upon the type of actor eligible to participate in the regulation of either. Moreover, and more fundamentally, through institutionalizing at the scale of the EC practices that had been argued for in the name of protecting territorialized ‘traditions’ (ie. German chaptalisation, or the AOC’s of France’s terroirs), this initial CMO also contained a set of underlying values and symbols which became central to its legitimation. This CMO was soon put to the test by the surpluses and price fluctuations which struck the EC’s vins de table particularly hard as of 1972-3. The EC-wide instruments brought to bear on this market situation were used intensively (price intervention, stockage aids, distillation subsidies, export subsidies). Indeed, through this activation of EC policy instruments and the almost constant round of sectoral negotiations it entailed, the CMO gained in density, deepened the engagement in an EC-wide SIO of Commission officials and public and socioprofessional actors from a range of vin de table producing regions and, thereby, developed its legitimacy. Of course, this process of institutionalization was not free from controversy. On the contrary, over the period 1972-84, the EC’s CMO for wine came to be contested first by extra-sectoral actors, then by the very stakeholders who had participated in its initial establishment. Politicized contestation began with the heads of government of certain member states, in particular the UK, protesting against both the budgetary cost and interventionist logic of the CMO. Meanwhile, and whilst participating in politicized contestations of their own, in the early 1980s socioprofessional leaders of certain vin de table-producing regions, in particular the French Midi (Genieys, 1998), began to argue more technocratically for the recalibration of the EC’s policy instruments in their sector. Rather than wanting open-ended and unconditional price support to continue, they argued instead for measures that would both encourage the ‘conversion’ of vins de table into better quality wines, but also safeguard production in their respective regions. Sectoral-logic based arguments about the ‘efficiency’ of better quality wines were clearly mobilized by these actors and their allies in the Commission and national administrations. But territorial-based arguments were just as important to the construction of the new or renewed policy instruments that were put forward as ‘solutions’ to the SIO’s ‘European problem’. Firstly, the conversion of vins de table was to occur essentially in response to EC grants to grub out and replace ‘outdated’ vines on the one hand and, on the other, to encouragements to produce either AOC wines or a new category of Vins de Pays. Although less constraining than that of AOC wines, the rules of Vins de Pays nevertheless contained similar restrictions based on territory and the same logic of legitimation (le terroir: Hinnewinckel, 2004). Secondly, these territorial ‘rents’ were to be safeguarded by the EC’s institutionalization of a system of plantation rights which meant that expansion of the sector

13

could not be delocalized away from territories such as the Midi in favour of Europe’s most profitable wine regions (eg. Bordeaux). The precise causal effects of the 1984 reform of the EC’s wine CMO have never been clearly evaluated. What is clear, however, is that improved market conditions did transpire throughout nearly all Europe’s wine regions in the late 1980s and early 1990s and, in so doing, further legitimated both policy change and its artisans. More generally, by this period an EU wide- sectoral community of actors was institutionalized within which political work took place around an ordering of institutions heavily inspired by a deeply territorial logic of action. ‘Inappropriate’ Political Work by the Partisans of Change Notwithstanding the period of relatively stable market stability experienced by European growers and merchants at this time, a certain number of actors within the sector sought to introduce further change. In particular, officials within the Commission’s DG Agriculture attempted to become a vanguard for reform. Although over the next fifteen years this group of actors did achieve a certain number of significant successes, until 2006-8 their overall project failed almost completely (de Maillard, 2001). The explanation favoured here concerns the political work conducted by these actors, and in particular their incapacity to build themselves legitimacy using territory-based argumentation and alliance-making. Indeed, to paraphrase March and Olsen’s key term (1989), their work did not bring about change to EU wine’s SIO because it was not judged ‘appropriate’ by other, and more powerful, members of this order. In particular, actors from DG Agriculture proved themselves unwilling or unable to engage effectively with the territorial logics of action that had by then become so firmly institutionalized within the EU’s government of the wine sector. The failure of these Commission officials constitutes a particular puzzle when one considers that in the early 1990s two extra-sectoral changes appeared to offer resources to them in their quest to reproblematize the European problem of wine and, on this basis, propose new policy instruments. As mentioned above, the first of these extra-sectoral changes concerned the 1992 CAP reform as a whole, and its accent upon reducing the EU’s intervention in markets in particular. Although since 1984 European policy instruments for wine had considerably changed in emphasis, the EU was continuing to spend vast sums upon the distillation of surplus wine, thereby perpetuating a type of market intervention that had been widely delegitimated in other sectors. The second extra-sectoral change concerned the rules governing external trade. In 1993 agreement had been reached during the GATT’s Uruguay round to reduce or abandon a wide range of import tariffs. Commission officials anticipated that this change would increase imports of wine into the EU and therefore make markets even more competitive. Rather than simply underline the importance of both these developments in general terms, the officials in DG Agriculture went further by including a pessimistic forecasting of high production levels, reduced EU exports and falling wine prices in the Commission’s draft reform of the CMO. More precisely, on the basis of these developments and these figures, this legislative proposal argued for policy change that would reduce plantation rights in the member states and, by curbing supply in this way, bring about a market equilibrium which would end up reducing the EU’s recourse to distillation aids and other such subsidies. If DG Agriculture’s officials managed to convince themselves, their fellow civil servants in the Commission and their commissioners of the pertinence of their political and market analysis, this was clearly not the case for the rest of the members of European wine’s SIO. Instead, a campaign of strong resistance by socioprofessional interest groups was rapidly mounted throughout the EU

14

using the media, violence, and a sustained political discourse against this ‘Europe of constraints’ and, more precisely still, the ‘technocratic’ attempt by the Commission to ‘dictate’ to growers and merchants what they should be doing12. The remarkable unity achieved amongst representatives of these interest groups was matched by the mobilization of extra-sectoral networks (eg. the Association des regions européennes viticoles and an ‘intergroup’ of European parliamentarians) and, crucially, among public representatives of all the wine producing member states. Indeed, the Commission’s failure to even get their proposed reform of wine’s CMO firmly onto the Council’s agenda can be attributed to three parts of the political work conducted by its agents between 1992 and 1995. First, the wine unit in DG Agriculture not only decided to publish a highly contestable analysis and forecast of markets, they also neglected to discuss this at all with socioprofessional actors before making these figures public. If expertise of this type is invariably contestable, the method of presentation chosen clearly exacerbated resistance. Indeed, in this instance it caused socioprofessional actors to seek to represent market conditions as no longer a public problem, and certainly not an EU one. Second, the officials from this unit, but also their commissioner René Steichen, appear to have made virtually no effort to create themselves allies within either the professions concerned or the national delegations who actually sit in the Council. Finally, the isolation of the Commission was made complete by the virtual absence of political discourse, either through speech-making or press interviews, by the commissioner for agriculture. Instead, the ground for political rhetoric, value-based arguments and the brandishing of symbols was left to the opponents of reform to occupy. Needless to say, in so doing any attempt to legitimate the reform by invoking references to territory were also left entirely to actors who wanted to reproduce the status quo. Officially dropped in January 1995, some of the Commission’s proposals resurfaced again in 1998-99. However, this time its officials and commissioner for agriculture took great care to consult widely before sending their proposal to the Council and the EP. Moreover, this time a relatively brief period of rising prices sparked by the opening up of Asian markets also helped take some of the heat out of socio-professional reactions. Nevertheless, most of the significant proposals in this reform were defeated during negotiations in the Council. First, rather than reduce plantation rights to 1% per year for 1999-2003, the Council actually voted to increase them by 2.3%. Second, the Commission achieved no increase in its powers to authorize oenological practices as a means of ‘simplifying’ the EU’s supply of wine. Finally, although actors from DG VI had attempted to link CMO reform to a trans-sectoral programme of reform - ‘Agenda 2000’- this tactic of desectoralization also failed to give them more legitimacy and power within wine’s SIO. On the contrary, the 1999 reform ultimately further reinforced the legitimacy of growers’ representatives, as well as their commitment to resisting more EU government of wine policies in their respective regions and member states. Indeed, this episode confirmed the continued strength and importance of neo-corporatist arrangements within these territories in which representatives of growers remained at least the coproducers of wine’s institutions and at most their hegemonic ‘owners’. In summary, it is important to reiterate that neither the strength of this neo-corporatism nor the failures of Commission-led reforms can be explained using structuralist, electoralist or collective action theories. Instead, unpacking both the sectoral and the territorial dimensions of the political work carried out in favour of change or the reproduction of existing practices is the only means of explaining these phenomena. As has been shown from this viewpoint, during all the period analyzed here most EU policy instruments for regulating wine continued to have territorial boundaries on their respective ‘jurisdiction’ which growers in particular were reluctant to change. Moreover, these boundaries were invariably reinforced by regional and national certification

12 See in particular the full page advertisements taken out in Le Monde by the interprofessional organizations of Bordeaux and the Bourgogne on the 5th and 11th of October 1994.

15

authorities, themselves heavily structured by the coproduction of rules between collective and public actors. This unequal capacity to mobilize territory to legitimize policy arguments consistently spilled over onto the question of actor eligibility. Whereas growers used territory to render themselves omnipresent in the regulation of this sector, merchants and Commission officials frequently marginalized themselves through their unwillingness or incapacity to construct territory-linked legitimacies.

2.2 Territory and Reinstitutionalization (2006-8) As a consequence of the above, the EU wine SIO of the mid-2000s closely resembled that of 1992. Indeed, it differed only marginally from that of 1984 or even 1970. Of course, to return to Hall’s typology (1993), over this period some policy instruments, eg. price intervention and stockage, had certainly been recalibrated thus constituting first order change. But the theory of action, the hierarchy of objectives and the values behind these instruments remained largely intact. In order to explain why the 2007 reform of the EU’s wine CMO did change these phenomena, thereby meeting Hall’s criteria of second and third order change, it will be shown that this time the partisans of change largely succeeded in both deinstitutionalizing the SIO whilst simultaneously laying the foundations for its reinstitutionalization. Rather than simply describe this ‘success’ (see figure 2), the political work these actors engaged in will successively be unpacked around the long and sustained processes of argumentation and alliance building which together changed the EU government of this sector. In so doing, it will also be argued that territorial logics of action and references to territory were critical to the political work under study because of the role they played in modifying the frontiers of policy instruments, fluidifying the question of actor eligibility and providing resources for the legitimation of a reordered SIO13. A new line of argumentation Indeed, the importance of territory to this reform becomes apparent as soon as one attempts to go beyond noting a change in the theory of action that, at least in rhetorical terms, constituted its driving force. Whereas previous CMOs had been structured around projections of the supply of grapes and wines, and thence their likely competitivity, the new CMO proposed by the Commission in 2006-7 essentially inverted this line of reasoning. Starting this time with trends in wine consumption and market competition, commercial considerations were thus put forward as the point from which a new theory of action should be built (within which questions of production would become of secondary importance). Of course, such reasoning is far from new even in the wine sector. General discourse about the need to improve the ‘quality’ of European wines in order to recapture market share had slowly been gathering force since the 1980s if not before. However, at least in the context of EU negotiations, the strategy for the EUs government of wines now mapped out by actors from the Commission rehierarchized a certain number of elements in a way that was to have significant effects upon actor discourse and behaviour. More precisely, this time representatives of the Commission produced documents, made speeches and more generally engaged in public communication which opened a space for negotiation rather than encouraged their interlocutors in the SIO to simply and defensively close ranks. But the new theory of action and line of argumentation was not merely pursued in general fashion. Instead, it appears to have emerged alongside many years of work invested in the change of specific policy instruments. Two of the most obvious of these that were fundamental to the 2007 reform concerned aids for the distillation of surplus wines and plantation rights. In the case 13 This part of the paper is based upon research in progress that will be completed over the coming months.

16

of the former, Commission officials further hardened their criticism of the ‘economic efficiency’ and political justness of these measures that had been made since at least the failed 1994 reform. As regards plantation rights, by 2006 representatives of the Commission clearly despaired of the Council ever agreeing to their reduction. Consequently they decided to displace debate over this issue by proposing the complete abandonment of this policy instrument. In both cases, these actors underlined that without change the annual surplus of EU wine would reach 15% by 201014. Figure 2: A comparison of the Commission’s proposal and of the Regulation adopted by the Council and EP

The Initial Proposal15 Regulation 479/2008 Rules concerning production:

- Banning enrichment through the addition of sugar

- Reintroducing a subidy for grubbing out 200.00016 ha of vines over 5 years

- introduction of a single payment for each farm

- ending plantation rights as of 1st January 2014

- transferring the authorisation of œnological practices to the Commission

- authorisation of practices permitted by the OIV

Rules concerning marketing:

- ending distillation aids

- ending export restitutions - introduction of a new categorisation of

wine: with or without Geographical Indication (GI)

- authorisation of wines without GIs to bear mention of grape varietals and year of harvest

- establishment of a budget of 120 million euros (cofinanced 50% by the EU) to promote EU wines in third countries

Rules concerning production and marketing :

- authorisation for member states to create ‘national envelopes’ with which to aid the adjustment of their growers and merchants

- transfer of wine spending to rural development, eg. for assisting young farmers, training, marketing aids etc.

- not obtained but the maximum level

of enrichment will be reduced - obtained but the objective is changed

to 175.000 ha over three years - obtained - obtained but delayed until 2015-18

- obtained

- obtained

- obtained: distillation will be phased out between 2008-9 and 2011-12

- obtained - obtained

- obtained

- not obtained

- obtained (consequently, for example, in 2011 France will receive 280 million euro from the EU as cofinancing)

- obtained

14 The European Commission, ‘L’économie du secteur’, ‘working document’, February 2006. 15 Com(2007)372, European Commission, 4th July, 2007.

17

Notwithstanding the importance of the new argumentation developed around these two issues, in order to fully grasp how Commission officials managed to change the very theory of action of the CMO one needs to examine two other apparently more technical changes made by the reform concerning the categorization of wine and its labelling. As was shown earlier, the EU’s SIO for wine was largely built upon a dichotomy: tables wines regulated at the scale of the EU vs. AOC vines (and subsequently Vins de Pays) regulated essentially at national and regional scales. From the point of view of Commission representatives, over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s this distinction became increasingly problematic because during this time AOC wines and Vins de Pays rapidly expanded, thus leaving the majority of EU wines largely outside their jurisdiction. Indeed, this time they explicitly sought to a frame the whole of the wine sector in Europe as a ‘European problem’ that only ‘un régime communautaire avec des règles simples, claires et efficaces’17 would be capable of resolving. In addition, analysts of wine markets had become increasingly critical of the quality of many AOC/Vin de pay wines and thus of the illusory rationale behind the market segmentation it had generated18. Indeed, many experts went further to denounce the complexity of wine categories in the EU as one of the reasons many European wines were failing to compete effectively with challengers from the New World who were unfettered by such ‘complexity’. To summarize a multi-layered debate which includes a major controversy within the WTO (Smith, 2008b), the Commission’s proposal in 2006-7 was to shift from framing wine categories around rules governing their production and expecting the consumer to understand them, towards categories which were instead designed first and foremost with a less specialist consumer in mind. This proposal was largely accepted in the final version of the reform and has provided a vector around which the practices of many wine merchants, but also numerous growers, appear already to be changing significantly. The issue of labelling is obviously linked to that of categorization but nevertheless needs unpacking separately. First it acts as a reminder that some of the apparently minor changes enacted in 1999 have since been built upon by partisans of wider change. Here the 1999 regulation changed the axiom upon which labelling restrictions were made to ‘everything that is not forbidden is permitted’ (de Maillard, 2001: 83). In the name of ‘simplification’, since then Commission officials have progressively sought to remove restrictions through a highly depoliticized process which, in the 2007 reform, peaked by allowing what once were vins de table to feature wine varietals and years of harvest on their bottles. Second, links were made between the labelling ‘problem’ and the Commission’s long-held goal of achieving control over the authorization of oenological practices. Again, a discourse of ‘consumer friendly simplification’ participated greatly in the realisation of this goal in 2007. In purely quantitative terms, most of the change argued for in this reform was legitimated in this depoliticized and technicized manner. However, it is important to underline that the partisans of change, and Commission representatives in particular, also politicized certain aspects of their argumentation. As has been alluded to above, the figure of ‘the consumer’ was at the centre of this political work19. Indeed, the consumer of the Commission was no longer ‘the connaisseur’,

16 In an initial document, the Commission had even evoked the figure of 400.000 ha. Vin. Organisation commune de marché, ‘document de travail’, February 2006. 17 The goal of the Commission as it has subsequently been expressed on the wine page of its web site (as it appeared on 29th January 2009. 18 For example, these categorization of wines were stigmatized in the following way: ‘ils paraissent davantage orientés vers la protection d’intérêts de producteur d’une zone donnée ou d’une catégorie de vin donnée que vers l’information des consommateurs’. European Commission, op. cit, February, 2006, p. 57. 19 See on this point the powerpoint presentation prepared by the Commission on the political agreement reached by the Council on 19th December, 2007: ‘La réforme de l’organisation commune du marché vitivinicole’ (http://ec.europa.eui/comm/agriculture/capreform/wine/index_fr.htm).

18

nor even the committed wine drinker. Instead, this consumer was seen as new, ‘confused’20 and, very often, non-European. Here an intersection between legitimation around the consumer and defending ‘European territory’ within external trade negotiations was made in Commission documents and speeches21. New or Renewed Alliances Of course, as our social constructivist approach underlines, the argumentation dimension of political work can only be fully understood by grasping its deployment within actor interactions and interdependencies. In this instance, and structured throughout by new Commission-wide practices22, four key spaces of alliance-building appear to have been forged: within the Commission, with wine merchants, a dissident sub-section of grower representatives and with representatives of ‘consumer’ member states. Detailed preparation of the Commission’s reform proposals unsurprisingly took place within DG Agriculture’s ‘Wine and Spirits’ unit. From this apparently solid base, support was then built up within the DG as a whole, in particular by underlining that reform of the wine CMO was completely in line with, and thus essentially the implementation of, the 2003 reform of the CAP. This process was supplemented by the enrolment of Commissioner Fisher-Boël who, in contrast to certain of her predecessors, quickly became a committed spokesperson for reform23. Of course, in order to legitimate their proposals, all the Commission’s representatives had to develop support within the EU’s wine SIO itself. Here important links were built first with representatives of Europe’s wine merchants ostensibly committed to ‘more coherent and flexible EU policies’24. Throughout the negotiation process this alliance was rarely made public for two reasons. First, just as in other parts of agriculture, within the wine sector references to ‘industry’ are rarely made because this term can easily be transformed into a stigma with which to denounce policy change as ‘industrialization’. Second, and more fundamentally, even within the Wine unit of DG Agriculture committed to a new policy rationale, reasoning in terms of producers and sharing their values appears to remain a deeply institutionalized set of norms and practices25. Nevertheless, through their European federation -the Comité Vin- representatives of wine merchants were able to both access and support the Commission more effectively than hitherto. Support for their proposals was obviously also sought by Commission representatives from their interlocutors amongst growers, and particularly those who make and sell at least part of their own wine (les viticulteurs). Again, this alliance was generally discrete because many such representatives considered that they could not isolate themselves from their respective electors. However, some public support was certainly forthcoming. For example, the Director General of the wine of Bordeaux’s principal governing body –le Conseil interprofessionnel des vins de Bordeaux: CIVB- went as far as to applaud the draft reform as offering the possibility for the ‘renaissance’ of Europe’s wines and ‘and a lot of fresh air for the sector’ (Féredj, 2007: 18). For its part, Commission

20 Speech by commissioner Mariann Fisher-Boel, Press conference, Bruxelles, 22nd June, 2006. 21 For example, Commissioner Fisher-Boël underlined repeatedly that ‘Our labelling rules are inflexible for producers, confusing for consumers and not fully in line with international rules’ (Press conference, 22nd June, 2006). 22 Here the consultation procedures enshrined in the Commission’s Better Regulation Strategy were particularly in evidence. Impact assessments were made, consultation periods respected etc. 23 Between the publication of the Commission’s communication on reforming the wine CMO (22nd June, 2006) and the Council decision (December, 2007), this commissioner made no less than 12 written and internet-published speeches to push for reform. In addition, many other visits, talks and interviews with the press were made. 24 See for example www.ceev.com. 25 For example, a 156 page Commission report on « L’économie du secteur » published in February 2006 contains virtually no reference to European wine merchants.

19

representatives took pains to underline their respect of wine-growing regions using territory-laden discourse. For example, in her public speechs commissioner Mariann Fisher-Boel did not hesitate to politicize the reform using value judgements, but also by underlining that it would not cause any ‘delocalization’ of production26. Moreover, in her preface to the Commission’s Communication of June 2006, Fisher-Boel underlined her desire to ‘mettre en place un régime qui préserve les meilleures traditions de la production vitivinicole européenne et renforce son rôle social et environnemental dans beaucoup de zones rurales’27. Last but not least, one must also take into account the point of view of representatives of non-wine producing member states who, although not directly affected by the reform, of course were still able to vote on it in Council. Legitimating reform of wine’s CMO as the implementation of previously agreed CAP reform clearly acted as a resource for Commission representatives when making alliances with their opposite numbers from these national delegations28. But one also needs to bear in mind that actors within some of these states (eg. the European committee of the British House of Lords) took it upon themselves to engage more proactively in supporting policy change. More research clearly needs to be made on both the argument and alliance-making aspects of the political work outlined above, as well as their interpenetration. Moreover, complete analysis of the 2007 reform in terms of reinstitutionalization must incorporate change to practices within states and wine regions (Smith, 2009). Notwithstanding the limits of the analysis presented here, however, it should at least have illustrated the heuristic advantages of approaching sectoral change in terms of an EU government of sectors that is constantly cross-cut by territorial references and logics of action. Conclusion In closing I will briefly reiterate the added-value of studying the government of the EU around sector-territory dialectics in the way this paper has advocated. This will be outlined firstly for analyzing sectoral change and secondly for theories of European integration. From the point of view of analyzing change in the EU’s government of a sector such as wine, unpacking its evolving relationship to territory enables research to deepen analysis of three inter-related phenomena. First it extends classical public-policy questions on ‘public problems’ and ‘policy instruments’ to generate knowledge not only about the frontiers of both, but also the different ‘jurisdictions’ that may exist within a single Sectoral Institutional Order (SIO). As the case of wine examined here has highlighted, the development of an EU-wide jurisdiction for wine has spanned over more than four decades of political work. This conceptualization of jurisdiction then spills over into the second aspect of sectoral government that a focus on territory enlightens: actor eligibility and hierarchy. As the 2007 reform of the EU’s government of wine illustrates, the Commission has enhanced its role within this SIO in part by recasting how its representatives have evoked the territory of ‘Europe’ and the wine-regions it encompasses. More generally, by directing attention to mechanisms of legitimation within the EU’s government of sectors, such uses of territory underline the third and final analytical advantage of conceptualizing territory in the way I have here. In the case of wine, this has enabled analysis to focus on how

26 In its document « L’économie du secteur », the Commission underlined that in numerous regions wine accounted for 30% of agricultural production (2006, p. 11). It also underlines the problematic nature of any ‘delocalization’ of this production (p. 144). 27 Vers un secteur vitivinicole européen durable, juin 2006, p. 2. (‘brochure’ that accompanies com(2006)319). 28 ‘Instead of throwing away money disposing of unwanted surpluses, we can spend it on improving our wine and getting producers fit to face the competition’. Commissioner Fisher-Boel’s blog, 21st December, 2007 (www.europa.com).

20

constructions of territory, including that of ‘Europe’ itself, are frequently used to either politicize or depoliticize sectoral ‘public problems’ and ‘policy instruments’29. From the point of view of theories of European integration, and building upon previous collaborative work (Carter and Smith 2008 & 2009), the approach developed here has sought to make three principal contributions. First, through its conceptualization of Institutional Orders and political work, it allows one to considerably strengthen analysis of the EU’s government as an alternative to ‘grand theories’ of why the EU is integrating. In so doing, it goes beyond loose and excessively descriptive accounts of ‘governance’ or ‘policy-making’ to assert the need for conceptually structured study of the everyday institutionalization of the EU. Second, the approach’s dual focus on sectors and territory enables analysis of this government not to lose sight of the key issue of its legitimation and the precise challenges this raises for the actors concerned. Finally, and more generally, by borrowing findings and questions from analysis of the social construction of territory made outside the realm of ‘European studies’, it has attempted to close the regrettable gap that has developed between much of this field and the acquis of social science. References

Abélès M. (1997) ‘La mise en representation du politique’, in M. Abélès et H-P. Jeudy, eds., Anthropologie du politique,

Paris: Armand Colin.

Amable, B. (2003) The Diversity of Modern Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anderson B. (1991) Imagined Communities, London: Virago.

Berger P., Luckmann T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality, New York: Doubleday.

Billig M. (1995) Banal Nationalism, London: Sage.

Braud, P. (1996), Emotion en politique, Paris: Presses des Sciences Po.

Braud P. (2000) La Sociologie Politique, Paris: LGDJ.

Brubaker R. (1996) Nationalism reframed. Nations and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Boyer R. (2003) ‘Les analyses historiques du changement institutionnel : quels enseignements pour la théorie de la

régulation’, L’Année de la Régulation, volume 7: 167-203.

Callon M. (1986) ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of

St. Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Campana A., Henry E. et Rowell J., dir. (2006) La construction des problèmes publics en Europe, Strasbourg: PUS, p. 155-

174.

Carter C. and Smith A. (2008) ‘Revitalizing Public Policy approaches to the EU: Territorial institutionalism, fisheries

and wine’, Journal of European Public Policy, 15 (2).

Carter, C. and Smith, A. (2009) ‘What has Scottish Devolution changed? Sectors, territory and polity-building’, British

Politics (forthcoming).

29 To give one final example from our case study, the Commission sought to establish a considerable EU budget for the promotion of European wines in third countries by politicizing this issue. Since its defeat in the Council, however, commissioner Fisher-Boël has taken pains to depoliticize the question of promotion: ‘in the reform negotiations we had to accept certain political realities. There are member-states which produce significant volumes of wine but don’t export much. We would have been punishing them if we had set up a ring-fenced promotion budget’. Speech to conference of the CEEV, Brussels, 18th March, 2008.

21

Clavel J. (2008) Mondialisation des vins. Vins INOQ ou vin OMC?, Bordeaux: Féret.

Colman T. (2001) ‘Assessing convergence: The case of European wine’, paper presented to a conference of the

European Community Studies Association, Madison, May.

Colman T. (2008) Wine Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Corten O. (2000) ‘Réflexions épistémologiques et méthodologiques sur les spécificités d’une étude politologique de la

légitimité’, Cahiers européens de Bruxelles, n°1.

Deroudille J-P. (2003) Le vin face à la mondialisation, Paris: Hachette.

Dubois V., Dulong D., dir. (1999) La question technocratique : de l’invention d’une figure aux transformations de l’action publique,

Strasbourg : Presses universitaires de Strasbourg.

Feredj R. (2007) O.P.A sur la viticulture. Entre fatalité et espoir, Bordeaux: Editions Féret.

Fligstein N. (2001) The Architecture of Markets. An Economic Sociology of 21st Century Capitalist Societies, Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

Friedberg E. (1993) Le pouvoir et la règle, Paris: Seuil.

Genieys W. (1998) ‘La grande transformation du Midi viticole’, Pôle Sud, 9: 7-25.

Haas E. (1958) The Uniting of Europe. Political, Social and Economic Forces, 1950-57, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hall P. (1986) Governing the Economy, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hall P. (1993) ‘Policy paradigms, social learning and the state. The case of economic policymaking in Britain’,

Comparative Politics, 20 (2), avril, p. 275-296.

Hall P., Soskice D. eds. (2001) Varieties of Capitalism. The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Hinnewinkel, J-C. (2004) Les terroirs viticoles. Origines et devenirs, Bordeaux, Editions Féret.

Jobert B., Muller P. (1987) L’Etat en Action. Politiques publiques et corporatismes, Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Jullien B, Smith A., eds. (2008) Industries and Globalization : The Political Causality of Difference, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Kingdon J. (1984) Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, Boston: Little Brown.

Lagroye J. (1997) Sociologie Politique, Paris: Dalloz-Presses de la FNSP.

Lagroye, J. (1985) ‘La légitimation’, in M. Grawitz et J. Leca, eds., Traité de science politique, Paris: Presses universitaires

de France.

Lagroye J. (2003) ‘Les processus de politisation’, in Lagroye J., ed., La politisation, Paris: Belin.

Lascoumes, P. and Le Galès, P. (2007) ‘Introduction: Understanding Public Policy through its Instruments’,

Governance, 20 (1): 1-21

Lewis J. (2005) ‘The Janus face of Brussels: Socialization and Everyday Decision-making in the European Union’,

International Organization, 59 (3): 937-971.

Maillard (de), J. (2001) ‘La Commission, le vin et la réforme’, Politique européenne, n° 5: 70-86.

March J., Olsen J. (1989) Rediscovering Institutions, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marks, G., Hooghe, L., and Blank, K. (1996) ‘European integration from the 1980s: State-Centric versus Multi-Level

Governance’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 34 (3): 341-378.

Mcleod, I. (2006) Key Concepts in Law, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Moravcsik A. (1998) The Choice for Europe, Ithaca, N-Y.: Cornell University Press.

Moravcsik A. (2002 ‘In defence of ‘the democratic deficit’: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union’, Journal of

Common Market Studies, 40 (4): 603-624.

22

Muller P. (1995) ‘Les politiques publiques comme construction d'un rapport au monde’, in A. Faure, G. Pollet, Ph.

Warin, eds. La construction du sens dans les politiques publiques, Paris: l'Harmattan.

Parsons C. (2003) A Certain Idea of Europe, Ithaca, N-Y.: Cornell University Press.

Parsons C. (2007) How to Map Arguments in Political Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Radaelli C. (1999) Technocracy in the European Union, London: Longman.

Rochefort, D., Cobb R. (1994) The Politics of Problem Definition, Lawrence, University Press of Kansas.

Sandholtz W., Stone-Sweet A., eds. (1998) European Integration and Supranational Governance, Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Smith, A. (2004) Le gouvernement de l’Union européenne. Une sociologie politique, Paris: LGDJ.

Smith A. (2008a) ‘Globalization within the European Wine Industry: Commercial challenges but Producer

Domination’, in B. Jullien & A. Smith, eds., Industries and Globalization: The Political Causality of Difference, Basingstoke:

Palgrave.

Smith A. (2008b) ‘The politics of food labelling: Europe, the New World and the WTO’, in W. Genieys and M.

Smyrl, eds., Elites, ideas and the evolution of public policy, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Smith A. (2009) ‘Vers le gouvernement européen de l’industrie vitivinicole?’, in J-C. Hinnewinkel, ed., La gouvernance

des terroirs du vin, (forthcoming).

Smith, A., (de) Maillard, J., Costa O. (2007) Vin et politique. Bordeaux, la France et la mondialisation, Paris: Presses de

Science Po.

Thelen K., Steinmo S. (1992) ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics’, in S. Steinmo, K. Thelen and K.

Longstreth, eds. Structuring politics. Historical institutionalism in comparative analysis, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press.

Thiesse A-M. (1999) La création des identités nationales, Paris: Seuil.

Webb, C. (1983) ‘Theoretical Perspectives and Problems’, in H. Wallace, W. Wallace and C. Webb (eds.), Policy-

making in the European Community, 2nd edition, London: J. Wiley.

Weber E. (1979) Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914, London: Chatto & Windus.