Bodeneigentum und Institutionenwandel in Ostmittel-und Südosteuropa 1918 -1945 - 1989
Land Ownership and Institutional Change in East Central and South Eastern Europe 1918 – 1945 – 1989

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on agricultural reform and land ownership as key tools for modernisation projects and as the driving forces of social change in Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia in the 20th century. Using methods of cultural history, the change in the conception and empirical practice of property is analysed as a process in which expectations and the behaviour of participants in the countryside began to shift towards state action. The reason for this is the significant turning away on the part of the elites from the 19th century liberal conception of property and its national-collective encroachement especially with regard to the ownership of land in the agricultural reforms of the interwar period as well as that of the popular front governments which were characterised by marked forms of (ethnonational) state and nation building. Using sociological and economic methods the institutions and professions associated with land ownership (land registry, property register, land survey information, notaries, solicitors) are analysed as relatively weak intermediary instances which were hardly able to provide any security concerning legal matters or confidence for the future. In the period of state socialism the communist-collectivist revision of the concept of property together with the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation led to liberal-individualistic property rights to tangible things like land in Eastern Europe being displaced – much the same as in Western Europe – by legal claims of social insurance funds as the most significant source of social reproduction.

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