Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Lithuania: An Overview
- List of Tables and Figures
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Small-Scale Farmers at the Geopolitical Return to Europe, 1990–2004
- Chapter 3 Paradoxes of Aging: On Aging Farmers and Aging Politicians
- Chapter 4 Effects of and Responses to the EU Programs in the Countryside
- Chapter 5 The Insiders and the Outsiders: EUropeanization of Products and People in the Marketplace
- Chapter 6 “If you wish your son bad luck, give him your land”: EUropeanization, Demographic Change and Social Security
- Chapter 7 “They told us we would be getting up on the high mountain”: Concluding Remarks
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Paradoxes of Aging: On Aging Farmers and Aging Politicians
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Lithuania: An Overview
- List of Tables and Figures
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Small-Scale Farmers at the Geopolitical Return to Europe, 1990–2004
- Chapter 3 Paradoxes of Aging: On Aging Farmers and Aging Politicians
- Chapter 4 Effects of and Responses to the EU Programs in the Countryside
- Chapter 5 The Insiders and the Outsiders: EUropeanization of Products and People in the Marketplace
- Chapter 6 “If you wish your son bad luck, give him your land”: EUropeanization, Demographic Change and Social Security
- Chapter 7 “They told us we would be getting up on the high mountain”: Concluding Remarks
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the light of the entrance into the EU, implementation of uniform practices according to the Acquis grew in importance in the new member countries. On the agricultural front, this meant securing comparability of production between the various member countries (Barry 2001; Dunn 2004, 2005). The EU, achieving the status of a “suprastate,” worked through the premises of legitimizing power through vertical encompassment (Gupta and Ferguson 2005), especially for new member countries that first had to fulfill requirements in areas of law, economy and democracy in order to geopolitically return to Europe. In the early phase of membership, reaching out to the rural population and informing them about EU requirements, standards and options for funding was required of the state, and via the state, of all municipal administrations. The goals were to further the restructurings of the agricultural sector and encourage people working the land to become EU-minded farmers. In this way, Lithuania was to become competitive on the agricultural front and eventually match the production of the old EU member countries. This process of creating Europe inside the expanded territory of the union was referred to as “Europe-building” (Bellier and Wilson 2000). If the EU was thus successfully being built in every corner of the union, every region and every village would ideally become a metonym of the EU. Hence, the EU would be recognizable everywhere inside its own territory.
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- Information
- New Lithuania in Old HandsEffects and Outcomes of EUropeanization in Rural Lithuania, pp. 63 - 86Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012