The formation of agricultural governance: the interplay between state and civil society in European agriculture, 1870-1940

In this paper, we focus on the relationship between state and agriculture in Europe in the period roughly from 1870 to 1940. Since the crisis of the late nineteenth-century, state intervention had increased into many areas of agricultural markets, and a growing social mobilization within the countryside had also made its mark, with the diffusion of agricultural associations (landowners associations, farmers unions, specialized crop producers’ associations, co-operatives, ...) that led to a much more organized rural society. Already prior to the 1930s, the state had become involved, one way or another, with the development of agriculture, such as the promotion of technical advancement, in the regulation of agricultural markets, and in the development of farm supportive policies. Throughout this period, agricultural associations played a growing role as intermediary institutions, and it is this period that we consider to be the formative period of this interplay between the state and agricultural civil society. The result was a metamorphosis from the mobilization of the peasantry and the representation of agrarian interests to a form of selfgovernment or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level, which reached its highest point only after the Second World War.