By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Farmers

From late 2023 until the spring of 2024, farmers across Europe flooded capitals to voice their disapproval of national and European Union policies. Tractors rolled down boulevards as protesters blocked streets and caused havoc. The anger reached the heart of the EU, where demonstrators brought the Brussels city center to a standstill and pelted the European Parliament building with eggs.

The protesters had a multitude of concerns, but chief among them was the European Green Deal, launched by the European Commission in 2019, a package of policy initiatives that included new restrictions on the use of pesticides, bans on combustion engines, and the protection of biodiversity—all measures that came with costs for farmers. Many farmers also saw the possibility of more stringent demands on the agricultural sector to cut greenhouse gas emissions as a threat to their livelihoods. With EU parliamentary elections slated for June, the protests unnerved many politicians and led to the rollback of some planned legislative changes.

But the demonstrations did not just take the measure of farmers’ unhappiness. They were also a manifestation of a deeper problem, a widening divide between Europe’s rural areas and its cities. This divide may not be a chasm yet, but it is steadily growing wider as discontent mounts in rural communities, which constitute a quarter of Europe’s population.

Scholars have extensively documented the economic factors fueling the drift of rural areas away from cities. They include long-standing economic inequalities, exacerbated by poorly conceived or poorly implemented policies that have left rural residents often feeling ignored or disrespected. Globalization has reshaped the geography of where people work, and cities have drawn young talent and labor from rural areas, leading to the withering and ageing of rural societies. As a result, the income and employment gap between rural and urban areas widened in the last decade. Lower income levels and a lack of employment opportunities have exacerbated rural discontent. And Europe’s recent cost-of-living crisis, which has seen a rise in the cost of many essential items including food and fuel, has served to further deepen these persistent disparities.

But politicians and elites have paid less attention to the growing political and cultural divide between rural and urban populations in Europe. Many rural residents do not feel that their governments recognize or care about their needs. This widening “recognition gap” (as one of us, Lamont, has described it) has potentially serious consequences. It fosters discontent among rural residents, weakens social cohesion, and provides fertile soil for the growth of far-right populism among a population that already tends to harbor more traditional and conservative values. A similar gap is evident in the United States, where tensions between urban and rural populations contribute to political and cultural polarization—on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and views on presidential candidate Donald Trump. This erosion of social cohesion presents a critical challenge to the stability of many Western democracies, and it will only grow more dangerous if left unaddressed.

 

The Recognition Gap

Recent research conducted by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions has revealed that rural residents of the EU are more likely than their urban counterparts to believe that the government acts unfairly toward them, ignores or cares less about people like them, and cares less about people in their area relative to other parts of the country. For instance, 51 percent of rural residents perceive disrespect toward their communities, while only 42 percent of urban residents do. Around 65 percent of those living in rural areas believe that their governments do not respect people like them, compared with 58 percent of those living in cities. These differences between people in the countryside and the cities hold even after accounting for a broad range of other sociodemographic characteristics, including, age, gender, employment status, and income.

Rural communities in many parts of Europe have long suffered due to national policies that have left many parts of the countryside struggling with poor infrastructure and limited access to essential public services, such as health care and public transport. But people in rural communities increasingly view this underinvestment as not simply a failure of policy but as an indication that they are less valued, a perception that only deepens their sense of marginalization.

These are the cultural factors, often ignored by analysts, that feed polarization. They exist beyond the economic factors, such as disparities in income levels. For instance, policies that seem to favor urban populations, such as subsidies for electric vehicles, anger rural residents who see such handouts as evidence that the government favors wealthier people in large metropolitan agglomerations. And policies that try to reduce transport emissions by disincentivizing the use of private cars do not account for the lack of viable transport alternatives outside of urban centers. Rural communities see such policies as responsible for reinforcing the privilege of wealthier segments of the population in national and European hierarchies—and as a measure of whose needs and sufferings matter most, who is most worthy and deserving of attention and care.

Additionally, people in rural areas perceive policymaking as a top-down exercise that does not allow for their input. For example, although governments should make the expansion of digital connectivity an important goal, they should understand that rural areas might need different solutions than do urban ones; satellite broadband might be more appropriate for some remote rural areas than fixed broadband infrastructure. Consider the vast differences between the speed and quality of Internet connections in rural and urban areas. According to data from 2022, for example, France’s average broadband speed for fixed networks in urban areas was 219.07 megabytes per second. In rural areas, the average speed was little more than half of that, at 128.6 megabytes per second. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that these disparities seem to be increasing over time. In the great majority of EU member states, the gap in fixed network broadband speed between rural and urban areas increased from 2019 to 2022, in some cases more than doubling. These disparities, and the policies underlying them, further embitter rural populations and stoke political discontent.

 

Centering The Hinterland

Unfortunately, many policymakers and the media hold urban-centric biases that lead them to deprioritize rural areas, which in turn fuels a sense in the countryside that it counts for little among those in power in the big cities. Governments in Europe will be able to address the growing disquiet in rural communities only by adopting more policies that target the needs of specific communities, account for the demands and needs of rural residents, and include these residents in decision-making processes. Indeed, such an approach would align well with the EU’s principle of subsidiarity, which holds that a central authority should perform only those tasks that cannot be performed better at a more local level.

The EU has always hoped to achieve greater territorial cohesion by minimizing inequities between different parts of the continent. The COVID-19 pandemic produced some trends that have provided new opportunities to rural areas, including increased remote and hybrid work as well as the digital provision of health care and governance. But to make all areas of Europe attractive places to live and work, governments will need to make large-scale investments in infrastructure and services. Rural areas will not be able to take advantage of the growing predilection for remote work, for instance, in the absence of high-quality digital connectivity and public services.

This is undoubtedly a fiscal challenge. It is more expensive per capita to deliver health care, for example, in rural areas than in urban ones. As a result, health-care facilities tend to be less widely available in rural areas, a particularly thorny challenge given that rural residents tend to be older and in greater need of such services. But governments and nongovernmental organizations are putting in place innovative solutions across Europe. To deal with an insufficient number of doctors in rural areas, for example, the Netherlands has expanded the number of medical services that can be performed by nurses. In other parts of Europe, governments have widened the responsibilities of pharmacists and ensured that mobile health units and telehealth facilities can bring care to underserved communities.

But such place-based solutions need to be accompanied by “people-based” policies designed to address the challenges faced by specific populations within rural areas. Young people in many rural areas, for example, have to grapple with greater impediments in their transitions to adulthood compared to their urban counterparts. They live more often in economically deprived areas, have lower levels of education, have less access to educational resources, and tend to enter the labor market earlier with fewer qualifications, resulting in their being more likely to take up precarious or informal work. Over the past decade, the NEET rate (the percentage of young people not in employment, education, or training), which currently stands at 11.2 percent across the EU, has been consistently higher in rural areas. As of 2023, 12.3 percent of young people in rural areas of the EU were NEET, compared to 10.3 percent of those living in cities. But average figures mask particularly extreme challenges in some countries. In Romania, the NEET rate is eight percent in cities but 27 percent in rural areas. Similarly wide gaps exist in Bulgaria and Hungary. Ensuring that young people in rural areas can more easily find opportunities to learn, work, and meaningfully participate in economic activity is essential to stemming rural depopulation, boosting social capital, and maintaining social cohesion.

Similarly, women in rural areas experience specific challenges. EU data from 2021 show that although rural women have higher levels of education than their male counterparts, the gap between male and female rates of employment in rural areas stands at 12.3 percent. This compares to a gender employment gap of 10.8 percent for the overall population. This discrepancy may partly reflect traditional gender norms in rural areas, but policy intervention can make a difference. Ensuring good quality childcare and public transportation in rural areas can help women increase their participation in the labor market. Making it easier for women to work would in turn have positive spillovers by increasing rural household incomes and purchasing power.

 

Bridging The Divide

Addressing these rural-urban inequalities will not be straightforward. Some policymakers may resist the imperative to prioritize rural issues and tackle complex problems in the countryside. The traditional urban-centric bias, along with bureaucratic hurdles and complex governance structures, could slow the implementation of new policies. Finding sufficient funding may be tricky and may require the reallocation of resources from other policy areas. As a result, the EU and its member states will have to summon sufficient political will to address the divide between cities and rural areas.

That effort will also require the coordinated intervention of many actors, including policymakers at both the national and EU levels. These government actors need to be more sensitive to the way processes of centralized decision-making alienate people in rural areas. Local and national policymakers need to collaborate with rural communities to design and implement effective solutions so that rural residents feel a sense of ownership over new policy initiatives. EU institutions also have an important role to play in providing both the knowledge and funding to ensure that the most effective solutions are well implemented on the correct scale. Furthermore, in today’s world of declining trust, EU institutions and national governments must improve their communication with citizens by fostering open and transparent dialogue, for instance by better including citizens in policymaking, listening to their concerns, addressing them through place-based policies, and ensuring clear and consistent messaging on key policies and decisions. The threat to social cohesion posed by the rural-urban recognition gap is so great that Europe’s governments must overcome these challenges.

It will not be easy to rebuild trust in rural communities and to address their perceptions of neglect. But the potential benefits of a sustained effort to do so are manifold. Balanced development across regions can boost overall economic prosperity. Targeted labor market initiatives can help improve gender equality, offset the economic impact of aging populations, raise employment levels, and reduce labor shortages. Improving access to public services will not just help address the logistical needs of rural dwellers but also make them feel better recognized by the state and their fellow citizens who live in cities. Most important, bridging the rural-urban divide in a meaningful way will help lower the tensions now roiling many societies in the West.

 

 

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