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spending projects were much less likely to result in the formation of future anti-reform rent- seeking special interest groups in the new member states, and the supporters of reform certainly did not want to create new opponents. Therefore, not extending the direct payments would have resulted in more flexible future budget negotiations at the Community level. Secondly, by the same token, not extending direct payments to the new member states would have put countries such as France and Spain in a precarious position. As time went by, these anti-reform countries would have had trouble justifying the direct payments in their own countries and would have been left with few allies at the Community level should reform of the CAP come up again, as indeed it did in 2008 with the CAP Health Check. On the other hand, the extension of direct payments to the new member states promised to create some natural allies for the French- Spanish group. Iraq War as an exogenous catalyst for community level coalition building While neither Jacques Chirac’s administration in France nor Gerhard Schröder’s cabinet in Germany was interested in the no-agreement scenario, there was no good reason why they would agree to cooperate in the CAP reform. Change to this, however, was prompted by an entirely unrelated issue: the build-up to the Iraq War. For Schröder, whose domestic support included relatively sceptical social-democrats and the overtly pacifist Green Party (with whom he was in government), supporting the US-led Iraq invasion build-up was not an option. However, as a result, he had found himself internationally isolated to a certain extent and maintaining good Franco--German relations became far more important than it otherwise would have been. “International political coalition [with France] because of the Iraq war and 39