Strength Without Numbers: The Political Influence of European Farmers

This dissertation addresses the puzzling persistence of farmers’ influence over politics and policymaking in Europe, despite a dramatic decline in their population and share of economic output. I redeploy theories commonly used to explain welfare state retrenchment to the domain of agricultural policy. Farmers today account for less than 5 percent of Europe’s population, and agriculture’s contribution to GDP is under 2 percent, yet farmers have repeatedly blocked reform initiatives and extracted new commitments of support. My project describes and explains how farmers have both thwarted proposed agricultural policy spending cuts and contained proposed reforms. It also accounts for the conditions that have facilitated limited instances of reform.I contend that contemporary farmer power is grounded in four sources: sophisticated organizations, control of the policy space, sympathetic public opinion, and the unique nature of agricultural production. These updated tools have allowed farmers to remain politically influential despite their declining numbers.Given the resilient power of farmers, I find that reforming agricultural policy is an exercise in managing the claims of farmers. In essence, European agricultural policies are welfare for farmers. In the same way that governments seeking to retrench welfare programs must contend with program claimants, agricultural policy reformers must manage the interests of farmers. A common outcome across reforms is that farmers defend the budget. In exchange for preserving the budget, farmers often accept administrative policy change. Because reformers often use welfare state retrenchment techniques when engaging in Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform, these policy outcomes tend to include compensation for affected claimants, changes to rules and standards, and reforms that seek to improve efficiency and equality of current programs rather than the creation of new programs. Outcomes also depend on how farmers exercise their power. When, for example, their control of the policy space begins to slip, reformers may be able to impose stricter rules and requirements upon farmers.Important also in accounting for the contents of the final reform are the conditions under which reform takes place. When reform coincides with other periods of major negotiation or change, like enlargement or trade talks, changes to the operation of core CAP policies become possible. When such concurrent events are absent, it becomes incredibly difficult for reformers to enact any change at all to existing policy.The dissertation draws on a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence collected over six multi-month fieldwork trips to Belgium, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and brief sojourns to Austria and Ireland. To construct a set of structured case studies, I conducted over one hundred interviews with local, national, and European Union officials. I spoke with current and former members of parliament, government ministers, leaders of farmer organizations, and officials from the European Commission, including several former agricultural commissioners. This unusually rich set of interviews, supplemented by information from EU documents and other data sources, provides the foundation for multiple case studies of major CAP Reform. In these case studies, I systematically analyze the causal processes at work in agricultural reform efforts.The dissertation’s argument and findings deepen the current understanding of how agricultural policy reform occurs and challenges the widely held notion that farmers are politically irrelevant. The findings of the dissertation demonstrate the efficacy of applying welfare state arguments outside of the domain of the traditional social welfare state. Finally, the dissertation has important implications beyond just agricultural policy, including policy making in the European Union, the handling of powerful groups in social welfare policy creation and reform, and the management of social class decline

LABOR MIGRATION AND INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN POSTSOCIALIST RURAL ROMANIA

The processes of industrialization and modernization, as well as those emerging from them, have produced radical changes in the lifestyle of the peasantry. These transformations went hand in hand with the degradation of community lifestyle and of the customs it contained. Among the many rituals performed by rural communities, this dissertation focuses on mummers\u27 plays. The present paper is an attempt to outline a brief history of mummers\u27 plays beginning with an age when they were simple community rituals and going to the recent decades when they entered a rapid decline, and when state institutions together with international organizations such as UNESCO introduced projects meant to safeguard them. Based on an extensive field research in Iași County, Eastern Romania, where peasant customary communities are still active today this dissertation takes a path different from most of the peasant studies that preceded it. It focuses on peasant mummers’ plays in two rural settlements and scrutinizes them in relation to the peasant economy and the peasant system of values specific to the rural universe. It analyzes their role in cementing peasant social networks and their contribution to the dynamic of peasant communities and culture. At the same time, this dissertation embraces a global perspective and observes closely the transformation of rural customary communities\u27 forms of culture under the great transformations inflicted during the last seven decades by modernization and the advent of modern forms of entertainment (sports competitions, TV, internet, computer games). Being more appealing to people, these have replaced mummers’ plays in the human consciousness despite mummers\u27 success in small-scale agricultural societies throughout centuries. Nevertheless, of all the realities produced by the Industrial Revolution, international labor migration has proven to be the most corrosive, leading not only to the erosion of rural customary communities but also of their forms of culture such as mummers\u27 plays. These transformations of rural culture have become very visible and have been observed by folklorists, state authorities, and the peasants themselves. Unfortunately, the methods implemented for safeguarding rural culture are not always appropriate to the rural culture intended to be safeguarded, or to rural communities themselves. At least in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, the methods most often used to patrimonialize mummers\u27 plays have been folklore festivals (Cash 2012). Far from being perfect tools, these festivals involve political, economic, and power relations to which peasants are always subordinate. The close follow-up of these processes shows that, just as peasants take the path of cities in search of better resources, their traditions, too, migrate to the cities through three processes: festivalization, urbanization, mass-mediatization. Thus, peasants\u27 rituals like mummers\u27 plays turn into simple consumer items devoured by spectators through TV broadcasts and Facebook-like social networks. I used the Bourdieuan symbolic violence concept to show how, by participating in such festivals, the peasants themselves not only become the victims of an external aggression directed against their own culture but also active agents of this transformation and of the processes that lead to their subordination. In contrast to this type of patrimonialization, accompanied by symbolic violence, the dissipation of peasant culture through international labor migration has actually spread this culture across all the major cities and countries of the world. Through the story - a companion of human life and culture for millennia, people living in peasant cultures become involuntary agents of safeguarding rural culture in general and mummers\u27 plays in particular and make their traditions cross the borders of the small rural locality where they were born, to finally become transnational cultural forms. Employing a series of anthropological methods and strategies - ranging from historical analysis, archive study, participant observation, unstructured interviews, life histories, to visual methods such as filming, taking pictures of winter rural rituals, and photo elicitation, I aim at analyzing and understanding a “social arena” (Bourdieu 1993) mined by the ambiguities and ambivalences of peasants’ commitments and apprehensions concerning the promotion/practices of intangible cultural heritage forms. Simultaneously, I aim at understanding the way intangible cultural heritage is produced, promoted and contested in a postsocialist landscape of inequalities, the restructuring of the old community values, and the intensive labor migration to Western Europe, dramatically depleting the local peasant populations and the social fabric where such rituals used to be anchored in the past

Visions of Popular Financial Internationalism in Europe and the United States During the Interwar Years

This dissertation examines how European and American banking institutions catering to middle- and working-class people sought to mobilize their capital to challenge the predominant model of international financial capitalism during the interwar years. Focusing on four sets of financial institutions whose identities were intimately linked with the “popular” clientele they served—savings banks, cooperative banks, trade union banks, and their communist analogues—I chart how influential actors within these institutions engaged in transnational efforts to challenge the entrenched position of private banks in international finance, though in pursuit of divergent political and commercial objectives. Drawing upon politicized attitudes towards popular capital and motivated by the opportunities and pressures of post-World War I internationalism, they attempted to build parallel institutional channels that could mobilize the modest financial assets of the masses to compete with or even displace capitalist banking. This study reconstructs formal and informal networks of debate and activism in which savings bankers, cooperators, and labor activists developed projects for international financial action based on popular ownership and participation. To uncover these networks, I draw on an eclectic range of sources including national and international archives, periodicals produced by syndical, cooperative, communist, and savings bank movements, and private correspondence of American and European leaders in these movements. I argue for a more capacious understanding of the political valence of financialization in this period. Far from being accepted as a neutral outcome of economic development, lamented as a depoliticizing penetration of capitalist logic into the social life of the masses, or turned to narrowly nationalistic ends, popular financial ownership—whether by individuals or institutions claiming to represent them—was recognized as a foundation on which to enact transnational solidarity. However, the political content of this solidarity varied considerably between these projects of international popular finance. Some of them sought to moralize capitalism within liberal or fascist political structures, while others aimed to strengthen cooperative or socialist alternatives. My dissertation presents an institutional history of projects of popular financial power and their limits which will be of interest to scholars of modern Europe and the U.S., international institutions, transnationalism, and global capitalism. I also hope to offer historical perspective on ongoing debates about the potential for collective action by workers, consumers, and investors in our own financialized era

The European Experience

The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000). This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline

Leap into Modernity – Political Economy of Growth on the Periphery, 1943–1980

This book describes struggles of different countries and their development after World War II. It presents a panorama of different ideologies of accelerated development, which dominated the world just before the war and in the next 40 years. The author explains why in the 1970s global and local elites began to turn away from the state, exchanging statism for the belief in the «invisible hand of the market» as a panacea for underdevelopment. He focuses not only on the genesis of underdevelopment, but also on the causes of popularity of economic planning, and the advent of neoliberalism in the discourse of development economics. This book evaluates the power of state as a vehicle of progress and focuses in detail on the Soviet Union, China, Poland, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Korea

Bulgaria's Macedonia: Nation-Building and State Building, Centralization and Autonomy in Pirin Macedonia, 1903-1952

This dissertation explores the intersection between rival forms of consciousness in Pirin Macedonia: national and local, from the anti-Ottoman Ilinden Uprising in Macedonia in 1903 to the end of the Communist "Macedonianization" campaign in 1952. Bulgarian, Macedonian and English-language historiographies have each portrayed this period as one in which a centralized state extended its power into the region and codified a Bulgarian national consciousness among its inhabitants. This dissertation finds that a rival, local consciousness existed through this period as well. The inability of the Bulgarian state in 1878 to secure the annexation of all geographic Macedonia, however, had led in the late nineteenth century to the emergence of a local paramilitary organization, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO). VMRO is generally portrayed as a nationalist organization. But in leading Macedonians within a struggle against first the Ottoman Empire, then against Greece, Serbia (later, Yugoslavia) and even factions within Bulgaria, it provided an alternative experience of mobilization. The Organization took on functions of the state, able to do this as the Bulgarian state was weakened by internal crises and external enemies. This period thus saw a lengthy struggle between VMRO and the central state to consolidate control over Pirin, a conflict that continued between local elites and the state even after the paramilitary organization was driven underground in 1934. The "Macedonian Question" has been portrayed as a wedge issue by which external actors -- particularly the Communist International, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany -- could seek to divide Southeastern Europe. This dissertation goes farther in arguing that Macedonia was a divisive issue within national politics as well. Even in the post-1934 Zveno and royal dictatorships, then the Communist-dominated regime after 1944, Pirin remained a divisive issue and one in which a weak central state was forced to find compromise with local interests. The "Macedonianization" campaign that followed the Second World War was the vehicle by which Pirin was subordinated to the Bulgarian state. As such, the campaign appears less as a Soviet-directed campaign for the benefit of Yugoslavia, and more as a means by which Sofia was able to establish control over the district

Brave new world

After the First World War, Britain faced a number of challenges as it sought to adapt to domestic conditions of mass democracy while maintaining its position in the empire in the face of national independence movements. As politicians at home and abroad sought to legitimize their position, new efforts were made to conceptualize nationality and citizenship, with attempts to engage the public using mass media and greater emphasis on governing in the public interest. Brave New World reappraises the domestic and imperial history of Britain in the inter-war period, investigating how 'nation building' was given renewed impetus by the upheavals of the First World War. The essays in this collection address how new technologies and approaches to governance were used to forge new national identities both at home and in the empire, covering a wide range of issues from the representation of empire on film to the convergence of politics and 'star culture'. The book is an invaluable resource for scholars of British social, political and imperial history, as well as being of interest to the general reader

The Operation Successful, But the Patient Died. The Gradual Elimination of the Central European Peasantry in the Light of Globalization and Interwar Processes

In terms of “depeasantisation, it was with the EU accession in 2004 when Central Europe – including Hungary – reached the stage where England had already arrived in the 18th and Germany in the 19th century. The gradual disappearance of the peasantry in the continent is doubtless in connection with the tendencies of globalization, a phenomenon that could not be stopped even by the authoritarian regimes of the interwar period – the time period examined by the dissertation. However, in a latent way, the question had already arisen at the time: is peasantry necessary at all? Nevertheless, as a consequence of the defeat in World War I, there were important national political arguments for the preservation of peasantry in the region, together with the rise of peasant ideologies. After 1945 – as Barrington Moore, the ideologist of the Cold War, pointed out – the huge peasant masses meant the precondition for not only the creation of fascism but also for Eastern European socialism. Therefore, many problems had to be swept under the carpet. But the issue can be better understood once it is examined along the “development slope. In this aspect, many experts in new comparisons drew attention to the key role of Germany. Following the footsteps of the Canadian historian Scott M. Eddie, the author of this article compares the agrarian societies of two areas dominated by large estates, Pomerania and Somogy county, with a special focus on the significance of identity. The research questions were the following: what were the chances of the peasantry in those areas in the grip of modernity and large estates? To what extent had this process altered identity? In order to map the latter methodologically, the study required a wide interdisciplinary examination