Working Group 5.6

Twenty Years On: Eastern European Countrysides in Processes of Change

Convenors:
Krzysztof Gorlach, Jagiellonian University, Krakow,  kgorlach@interia.pl (contact person)
Vera Majerova, University of Life Sciences, Prague
Rosemarie Siebert, Leibniz Centre for Agriculture and Landscape Research (ZALF), Muenchenberg
Paweł Starosta, Łódź University, socwim@uni.lodz.pl (contact person)

WG website:
http://www.ruralsociology.eu/2009/wg5.6

2009 is an appropriate year to reflect on the post-Communist transformations of Eastern European countrysides, and their diverse outcomes. After the profound political changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, major economic reforms immediately followed that, in turn, resulted in significant social and cultural changes. Much commentary at the time and subsequently implied a common legacy and a uniform political-economic trajectory. However, despite all having been part of the Communist bloc these countries had different agricultural structures: ranging from a largely non-collectivised farming (e.g. in most of Poland); to strongly collectivised systems (e.g. in Romania and East Germany); to a dualistic system (e.g. in Hungary). Moreover, throughout the 1990s (particularly before looming EU membership began to assert a common framework), countries pursued different approaches to privatisation, land restitution, economic liberalisation and rural and agricultural development, which contributed further to divergent development trajectories.

The task of the working group will be to focus on these divergent paths and their current results. That means that we will be interested in as complex as possible a picture of Eastern European countrysides with special stress on governance, agency, and reflexivity. First of all, we will be interested to re-consider the role of particular actors in processes of agricultural and rural change, not only the traditional subjects, like nation-state and farmer organizations, but also rural self-government structures, new social movements, and other initiatives using local knowledge as an important input to developmental  processes. Moreover, can we evaluate the “response” of rural areas and communities facing various modernizing efforts?    

All interested scholars are invited to participate in this working group, to deliver papers and to contribute to the general discussion. We are especially interested in the debate among the scholars from “East” and “West”: the former are able to provide us “inside perspectives” on the above mentioned phenomena and processes, even drawing on their own experience as members of those particular societies; and the latter provide more distanced perspectives on the phenomena and processes under investigation.    
 
Finally, we want to assess the nature of the processes of agricultural and rural change in this region of Europe.  Especially we are interested in exploring whether there is some kind of “advantage of backwardness” effect. Does that mean that Eastern Europe has to follow the modernization path of the Western part of the continent? Or, does Eastern Europe have the privilege to avoid the “dark” sides of the modernization trajectory and agro-industrial development and proceed straight to a post-industrial, consumption-oriented pattern of sustainable development?