Suchergebnisse

An exemplary study in comparative contemporary history, this monograph looks at rural change in six countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. In the 1990s most of these nations experienced a fourth radical restructuring of agricultural relations in the twentieth century, and all went through the dramatic transition from communism to capitalism. The author analyzes attempts to activate democracy on a local level and recreate farming structures and non-agricultural businesses based on private ownership and private enterprise. He describes the emergence of a new business class that seeks to dominate local government structures; the recuperation of former communist farming entities by former managers; and the transformation of peasants into rural citizens, who nevertheless remain the underdogs. Swain exposes common features as well as specific divergences between the six countries; he portrays the winners, losers and engineers of transformations. He situates his themes in a wider context that will appeal to a broad range of social scientists and historians

The above quotations from two of the books under review here took me back to the early 1970s and my first weeks in Hungary. As a graduate student in sociology, struggling to get to grips with my surroundings, I distinctly remember thinking that what was needed was an anthropology for large-scale industrial society to explain their foreignness and remoteness. Everything in the metropolis of Budapest followed a different logic, and in the academic division of labour, anthropologists are those with the skills to interpret the meanings of societies which operate according to a logic different to that of industrialised West. But in those days anthropologists still tended to focus on pre-industrial societies outside Europe. I had not yet readThe Good Soldier Švejk, but a Hungarian sociologist told me was that I would never understand communist Eastern Europe without readingŠvejk. I did, and he was right.

AbstractThe article first argues that we live in a neo‐liberal world in that neo‐liberalism has become the economic orthodoxy which informs policy‐making, but that the commitment of the European Union and its Common Agricultural Policy to neo‐liberalism is somewhat ambiguous. It then examines the impact of that ambiguous Common Agricultural Policy on Eastern European rurality in the decade or so since the New Member States joined. In many respects it has resulted in scenarios similar to developments in western Europe, but in one respect a phenomenon that is present throughout the European Union has been amplified dramatically in its eastern half. Overall, the weaknesses that many have identified in the Common Agricultural Policy have been reproduced in the east, but in a more extreme form.

AbstractThis article explores some of the ambiguities inherent in applying a model of Western European agriculture (the model implicit within the tried and tested modalities of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)) to the very different agrarian structures of Central and Eastern Europe. It identifies first the dramatic and long‐standing differences in agrarian structures between these two European regions before considering some of the policy consequences of applying an agricultural support model based on the former to the latter as the CAP (albeit in a slightly modified form initially) was extended to the Accession States. The effect was to exacerbate what many see as perverse features of the CAP. A greater degree of reflexivity on the part of policymakers might have avoided some of these anomalies, but the research agenda of the last half century has left much relating to the CAP unexplored, including agriculture 'east of the Elbe'.