Political greatness does not always require conquest or unambiguous triumph. Most leaders are not Bonaparte. Greatness can come from keeping a small fire burning, or even from admitting to being wrong. It’s a rare politician who openly admits to an error, especially after turning sixty.
Sicco Mansholt was an old-growth socialist who studied tropical agriculture, but rejected colonialism after moving to Indonesia to farm tobacco. Returning to the Netherlands in 1936, he farmed in Wieringermeer, a lowland area reclaimed from the North Sea that relied on intense state intervention for its smooth management. The Nazis detonated the dike and flooded the polder. Mansholt’s experience organizing food distribution during the occupation was a crucial prelude to his career in politics.
Already I see in Mansholt’s biography a drastically different type of experience than what happens on the much-mythologized American “family farm.” The imperatives of globalism required study and travel. The hardships of wartime led to collectivism and resistance. Mansholt’s farming was not bound to a narrow idea of private property, and certainly not to a patrilineal or aristocratic estate model. He moved around and encountered political economies of varying effectiveness. European farmers of the postwar era were responding to the convulsions of history in ways that Montana ranchers have never had to.
Mansholt emerged from the Dutch Labor Party to become the first European Commissioner for Agriculture. The regional bloc then called the “European Community” comprised six countries, each with strong interventions in their own agricultural sectors. Although most of Europe’s socialist parties had a Euroskeptic bent, Mansholt believed in integration and strengthening supranational competences while remaining left-of-center. Sensing that the capitalists were leading the development of Europe, Mansholt took pains to convince socialist leaders at the national level to surrender their influence to a new bureaucracy.
Regional self-sufficiency and famine-avoidance were the touchstones of the early Common Agricultural Policy, which persisted until Mansholt’s “hippie” conversion at the end of the sixties. Despite subsidies, many small farms in the European Community were not viable and farmers’ standard of living lagged. Mansholt urged modernization and consolidation, and thought that five million farmers should quit their jobs. The graying socialist, previously focused on preventing food shortages, was now motivated by ecological concerns, as well as a goal of avoiding trade imbalances with developing countries. The 1968 Mansholt Plan criticized the “butter mountains and wine lakes” of the old protectionist and inefficient regime, which encouraged unnecessary surpluses.
Mansholt was a farmer and made his career protecting and advancing the interests of farmers, and yet the Mansholt Plan proposed radically shrinking the number of workers in Europe’s agricultural sector. It’s a rare type of leader that can balance the narrow welfare of one constituency with a common good that looks radically different from the status quo. The contradiction of a farm policy that disciplined farmers was not appreciated by the protestors who descended en masse on Brussels in March 1971.
The old socialist dream of a world revolution may have seemed achievable to Mansholt at some point. After all, he urged European integration to keep up with, and perhaps eventually undermine, the capitalists. But this commitment did not prevent Mansholt from adhering to principles of equity and global justice. For his trouble he was threatened with castration by farmers clinging to their subsidized, unprofitable holdings.
Mansholt’s conversion reminds me a little bit of the great radical trade unionist Eddie Sadlowski, who defied the steel industry’s consensus and foresaw a world where “no man will have to be subjected to the blast furnace.” For a labor leader, the most radical position of all might be to say that certain forms of labor should no longer exist. That’s a tremendously difficult pivot from a movement that works towards security and dignity in labor.
The oil shocks of 1973 went some way to vindicating the nonconformist de-growth advocate. The vision of leaders like Mansholt can energize the European project. But securing political coalitions across borders remains as tough today as it was then.
Further reading:
Neil Warner, “Constructing ‘Social Europe’,” Phenomenal World, July 27, 2023.
Aurélie Dianara Andry, Social Europe, The Road Not Taken, 2023.
Sicco Mansholt, farmer, resistance fighter, and a true European, from the official website of the European Union.
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