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The CAP will be ‘muddling through’ Application of the Multi-Level Games Theory to various future scenarios that the CAP’s reform path points towards first of them, which can be alternatively labelled as the ‘muddling through’ scenario. Maintaining direct payments for the time being is supported by the general perception among the EU and national decision makers that past efforts, which have resulted 23 in significant decrease of the actual WTO Aggregate Measurement of Support from €72 billion (the EU ceiling) to some €10 billion, have not been matched by other countries. Indeed, Butault, Bureau, Witzke, & Heckele (2012, 22) show that government subsidies that are in one or another way linked to the quantity of products produced by farmers have grown significantly in emerging countries such as China, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine and even Brazil. Furthermore, one of the most important international negotiation partners’—the United States—is also regressing towards a more trade distorting agricultural policy due to its large-scale insurance programme (Bureau 2012, 78). As long as decisions in the EU are made at the multi-level bargaining game, which manifests itself in intergovernmentalism, then a major overhaul of the EU’s budget and the CAP spending will encounter firm opposition in the Council. This is so because “the balance of payments transfers are far from negligible [and] farm ministers and sometimes heads of states are prone to take positions on the CAP, which are biased by short-run national interests” (Mahe, Naudet and Roussillon-Montfort 2010, 105). After all, as MLGT implies, chief executives mostly maximize their re-election chances, not the aggregate welfare of the society they are governing. It is therefore not so surprising that national chief negotiators prefer non-agreement to major 23 Numbers 72 and 10 billion refer only to the total effect of trade distorting instruments as defined by the WTO under as Aggregate Measures of Support. For example, the value of market protection does not figure on any government balance sheet, but transfers significant amount of money from domestic consumers and foreign producers to domestic producers of goods. On the other hand, decouple direct payments are not trade distorting. 65