Land Reform and Farming in Interwar Europe

Why are some land reforms more successful than others? Interwar Europe provides an opportunity to answer this question as many countries, often at different levels of economic development, carried out major reforms. In agrarian societies in Eastern Europe, the pro-poor redistributive land reforms transferred a fifth of agricultural land and were expected to transform not just farming, but political life. Although farmers struggled because of insufficient land and weak markets, land reform allowed families to maintain food consumption in the 1930s by increasing selfsufficiency. By contrast, policy makers in transforming economies such as Czechoslovakia or Spain were divided between meeting the economic and political needs of those farmers living in acute poverty and responding to the struggling familyoperated commercial farmers. Land reform strengthened agrarian political parties, but these were generally too divided along nationalist cleavages to influence policy in the new successor states, and by regional differences created by uneven economic development in transforming economies.