Recently the European public was caught by surprise by the agricultural dimension of the present economic crisis. Rising food prices induced by an increased demand for agrarian products at international stock exchanges teach us not to take cheap groceries for granted and seem to endanger the adequate supply with various raw materials even for industrialized Western countries. What is more, land as an asset is losing relevance when taking into consideration the need to spread seeds and fertilizers in order to fight malnutrition. Although, in times of globalization this means that the rural masses in backward agrarian countries become dependent on the intellectual property of big companies and, thus, victims of modernization. Social unrest threatens democratization processes as well as the stabilization of conflict areas.
It is easily forgotten that similar processes had been ongoing in East Central Europe already during the interwar period. A closer look at this region, covering the historically interconnected regions between Serbia and Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria, might be helpful. Although, a systematic analysis of all processes mentioned above would break up the time table. Therefore, this conference concentrates on the interrelations between changing property regimes and so called agrarianist development strategies ending up in authoritarian regimes.
Agrarianism as an ideology put agriculture at the centre of production within the national economy, and took village communities as the basic cells in the structures of state and society. It had a decisive and long-lasting impact on the backward societies of East Central Europe and shaped not only their economic culture but also influenced the regions’ political practices to a significant extent. In 1923 the Green International in Prague was founded as a spokesman of democratic peasant parties, which profited extraordinarily of the newly introduced universal suffrage. The Green International emerged as a significant political player in most parts of the region. It could have served as a counterbalance against the Communist International in Moscow, but faded away during the 1930s, because most of its members shifted towards socialism or fascism respectively.
This shift was closely connected with propertization processes. There had been property changes in an enormous dimension. The expropriation of the former feudal classes starting in 1918 was combined with a massive nationalist mobilization of the rural masses, thus threatening the property of ethnic minorities, too, and causing the rise of fascism and national chauvinism. In connection with missing improvements in rural production and the break up of traditional social bonds, the peasants’ standard of living deteriorated and they often turned against modernization as such. After World War II these reforms considerably influenced the degree of collectivization in communist times as well as the redistribution of formerly expropriated land and the social and intellectual transformation process in the 1990’s.
This conference attempts a comparative analysis of these processes by bringing together historians specialized in East Central Europe and coming from both Eastern and Western parts of the continent. They are associated with two research projects financed by the VolkwagenFoundation in Leipzig and Frankfurt (Oder) dealing with rural property and agrarianism respectively.