LAND REFORM.

Land reform may be understood here as the transfer of land from one owner or group of owners to another for political, social, or ideological purposes. Throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth it was thought that land reform would solve an array of political and social problems. The range of issues land reform was used to address included strengthening of political power, change of patterns of ethnicity, prevention of emigration from rural areas, economic support of poor people, and settlements for refugees or homecoming soldiers. Land reform always included other measures, such as the establishment of rural settlements and the extension of agricultural land, which generally meant forest clearances or other changes to the landscape. Sometimes the previous owners were compensated, but quite often they were simply dispossessed.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BACKGROUND

An intense political discussion about land reform issues took place in the first half of the nineteenth century, most prominently in the reform movement of the Chartists in Great Britain. One of their speakers, James O'Brien (1805–1864), called for total socialization of private property. Their main argument was that the unequal distribution of land was the root of many social problems.

These claims became influential within the rising socialist movement in Europe. Authors, politicians, and philosophers such as Karl Marx (1818–1883), Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), and Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) were critical of private landownership, and many called for the nationalization of land. An important book was Progress and Poverty (1877–1879) by the American economist Henry George (1839–1897), which was translated into a number of European languages. He argued not against the private ownership of land per se but that all landowners should pay taxes on the income they received from rents. In line with his thinking, numerous books and articles appeared in which the authors allowed private property but argued that the land should be seen as a finite resource that must be protected against misuse, speculation, and monopoly. For this purpose many different tax systems were devised. In 1890 the Austrian author Theodor Hertzka (1845–1927) published a utopian novel with the title Freiland, ein soziales Zukunftsbild (Freiland: A Social Anticipation). In this book he formulated the idea that land should be owned by rural cooperatives. The land and cooperatives should be accessible to everyone and serve as an economic foundation for egalitarian settlements. These settlements should be established in the European colonies abroad. This was tried; most attempts failed. In 1894 the German economist Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943) published Freiland in Deutschland, in which he formulated a close relationship among collective ownership, rural cooperatives, and collective settlements. Oppenheimer's ideas strongly influenced the Zionist movement. Impressed with Oppenheimer's book, the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) published Altneuland (Old new land) in 1902, and in 1911 the Zionist Congress assigned Oppenheimer to plan a settlement cooperative near Nazareth. Oppenheimer was one of the most prominent representatives of a third way between communism and capitalism. (One of his students, Ludwig Erhard, was a leading theorist of a social market economy after World War II and second chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.)

The year 1888 in Germany saw the founding of the Bund für Bodenbesitzreform, a powerful land reform organization that proposed a land reform without the abolition of private property. It was led first by the factory owner Michael Flürscheim (1844–1912) and later by the teacher Adolf Damaschke (1865–1935), who wrote a popular book about land reform entitled Die Bodenreform (Land reform). Published in 1902, it was reprinted many times through the 1920s.

LAND REFORM SINCE 1914

Twentieth-century Europe saw three periods in which the politics of land reform wrought vast changes on the Continent. All of these periods were times of economic crisis and political transformation. The first was the interwar period between World War I and World War II, especially in its early years. The second was the postwar period after World War II. The third was the period after the end of the Cold War, beginning in 1989.

The end of World War I was an era of social and political turmoil and radical change. In Russia, Germany, and the new countries within the territories of the old Austro-Hungarian Monarchy land reforms were a result of revolutions and newly established political systems.

The deepest change in rural society and land property rights took place in Russia and the later Soviet Union after the end of World War I. With land reform under the control of the tsarist prime minister and secretary of interior Peter Stolypin (1862–1911), the mir system, the collective ownership of land by all village inhabitants, was replaced by private landownership in 1905. Thus emerged a new type of farmer, the kulak, a wealthy middle-class farmer who now hired other village inhabitants as wage laborers. With the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, however, the new Soviet government in 1918 abolished private land property. The process of dispossessing the kulaks became increasingly radical after 1929 and was one of Joseph Stalin's core issues as he consolidated power as leader of the Soviet Union. The process was not finished until 1940, when more than 96 percent of the land was collectivized and cultivated in the form of huge farms. The result of this campaign was an economic and human catastrophe. Several million people in the rural areas died of hunger, and the level of agrarian production in 1940 was lower than in 1913. But this change enabled the Soviet government to obtain better control over the huge rural areas.

In the new Baltic countries, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, the old, partly German landed elite too was dispossessed; in this case the land was not collectivized but given to private farmers. Land reforms in many other European countries were organized at the same time.

In Germany, the German Reich Settlement Act (Reichssiedlungsgesetz) came into force in 1919. It was aimed at assisting returning war veterans and landless people as well as refugees from the eastern parts of Germany, which became Polish territory. The idea was to buy extensively cultivated land from big estates, to intensify cultivation efforts, and to reclaim wastelands. New settlement agencies, established in all the German territories, were in charge of parceling out the land, laying out new fields, and constructing farm buildings. In the 1930s some authoritarian regimes such as those of Germany, Italy, and Spain organized huge programs for rural reconstruction and reclamation of wastelands, such as the Bonifica Integrale in Italy under Benito Mussolini. But in most of these cases private property was not affected.

The most radical land reforms took place after 1945 in the countries of central and Eastern Europe that came under Soviet rule. At the end of World War II it was a common political opinion among the Allies that land reform needed to be carried out in Germany in order to break the political power of the Junker (a member of the Prussian landed aristocracy). The economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron (1904–1968) argued in his book Bread and Democracy in Germany (1943) that disempowerment of the landed elite was a crucial step in the process of democratization. But as tensions increased between the Western and the Soviet zones of occupation, ideas about land reform became an area of conflict in the emergent Cold War. In 1945 Stalin ordered the German Communist Party to organize land reform in the Soviet zone of occupation. All landowners with property of more than 100 hectares as well as all those who were considered Nazi activists were dispossessed. More than 3.3 million hectares of arable land were redistributed to refugees and small farmers and farmworkers. In this process more than 210,000 new farms were founded. The problem was that most of these new farmers had no machinery, seed, pesticides, or farm buildings and so were unable to produce enough food for the population of the Soviet zone. At the beginning of the 1950s the agricultural crisis became so severe that the Communist Party decided to collectivize all these farms. At the beginningt of the 1960s, in a period that was called the "socialist spring," all private land was in the hands of the Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften (LPG; agricultural production cooperatives). In the Western zones of occupation some early attempts at land reform were soon dropped after witnessing the results in the Soviet zone.

Similar processes took place in the other countries of Eastern Europe. A particularly radical program of land reform took place in Romania. Collectivization began in 1950 and was finished at the beginning of the 1960s. Subsequently Nicolae Ceau?escu, the general secretary of the Communist Party, initiated a "program for the systematization of the villages" (sistematizarea satelor), a plan wherein eight thousand small villages would be destroyed in favor of "agroindustrial centers" that would house the rural population in large tenement blocks with no infrastructure. This program was not yet finished by the time of Ceau?escu's death in 1989.

In Western Europe ideas of land reform essentially vanished in the 1950s and 1960s. With the development of the common market of the European Union, questions of land reform were superseded by issues such as overproduction, migration, and integrated management of rural areas.

After 1989 the land reform programs in all the former Warsaw Pact countries were more or less rescinded. The large state-owned farms and collectivized land were reprivatized. This process caused conflicts among the state, the new owners, and those who had owned the land before 1945. In Germany several organizations of landowners initiated a legal battle against the decision of the federal government not to give the land back to the old owners of the prewar period but instead sell it to new owners. Under this decision the only rights granted to the old owners were preferential terms if they were willing to buy back their estates and farms.

See alsoAgriculture; Collectivization .

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Andreas Dix