Family Farmers: From Cooperatives and Voluntary Associations to Political Parties

This chapter looks at how farmers organized. The first section considers the benefits from belonging to a village society and the constraints it imposed on individual behaviour and decision-making. Village society was not static, but rather transformed over time by economic development, changes in political boundaries, and the growth in state capacity. This is followed by explaining why farm cooperatives frequently failed to meet the expectations of contemporaries, and suggests that their relative small size and some commodity-specific characteristics limited their effectiveness, especially in the depressed markets of the interwar years. Section three looks at the relation between cooperatives and the state, with voluntary associations contributing to the creation of competitive farm cooperatives in Denmark, but being used by the government in Romania to extend its control over rural society. The last section argues that the Agrarian parties, despite the large numbers of farm voters in Eastern Europe, suffered politically from the weakness in voluntary associations and the deep cleavages found in most rural societies.