(CN) — Tractors blocking roads and laying siege to government buildings. Cow dung and animal herds turned into weapons of protest. Sign-waving farmers seething against change and global markets. Cowering politicians giving in to the demands of peasants in revolt over economic hardship.
This is the plot this year in Europe — a drama remarkably reminiscent of other key moments in the turbulent 70-year history of the European Union, a project to integrate the European continent into an economic zone where goods and people move freely across borders.
“What's happening now is not new,” said Venus Bivar, a historian at the University of Oxford and author of “Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France.”
“Farmers in France have been protesting regularly with varying degrees of intensity since the 1950s and they've been protesting about exactly the same things for 75 years at this point,” Bivar said.
It's not just French farmers who've taken to the barricades this year to revolt over perennial gripes: low market prices, inadequate subsidies, red tape and government mandates.
Across the EU, farmers have been throwing dung — literally and rhetorically — at technocrats in Brussels and blocking roads with their tractors in Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, Poland, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands and, of course, France.
And, as in the past, they are winning concessions — at least, as in the past, in the short term. Since a wave of protests started in January, EU bureaucrats and national governments have delayed, nixed or scaled back a crop of environmental rules linked to the EU's Green Deal meant to foster biodiversity and tackle climate change.
A story as old as the EU
Violent farmer protests have been a feature of European politics ever since six European nations began unifying their economies into a single market with the 1957 Treaty of Rome.
In developing a customs-free economic zone across Western Europe, one of the thorniest areas was agriculture.
Postwar Europe, still haunted by food rationing and starvation caused by the war, wanted to ensure it had enough food to feed itself, so getting a policy on agriculture right was fundamental. The loss of colonies and a booming postwar population added to the urgency of boosting food production.
In this equation, any deal to integrate the economies of Germany and France — erstwhile enemies — meant, in effect, a grand bargain between the two powers.
They struck a deal: Germany got access to sell its industrial goods in France, and in exchange Germans agreed to help pay to keep farmers in France, Europe's breadbasket, plowing their fields.
“The French government knew it had this big problem on its hands,” Bivar said. “It had one of the larger agricultural populations in Europe at the end of the war and it had to do something with it.”
So, in the talks around forming the common market, “France played that card,” Bivar said. “The Germans advocated for industrial interests and the French advocated for agricultural interests and compromises were arrived at.”
Back in the countryside, though, French peasants, especially those running smaller poultry and dairy farms, were angry as they struggled to modernize, racked up debts and faced the prospect of bankruptcy in Europe's emerging customs-free agricultural market, which favored larger operations.
In February 1960, violent demonstrations erupted in Amiens against French President Charles de Gaulle's efforts to force farmers to become more efficient. More than 25,000 farmers took to the streets and clashed with police as they threw eggs, tomatoes and rocks. Police responded with tear gas and water cannons. In the violence, about 100 farmers and 55 officers were injured.
A set of scenes was about to repeat itself again and again.
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