Preliminary Programme

With a population that by 1900 was 37 percent German and 62 percent Czech, Bohemia was the site of inten-sive national conflict. It was also one of the most advanced provinces of the Habsburg monarchy, experiencing rapid industrialization and urbanization during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Credit coop-eratives played a significant role in both economic development and national conflict in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Czech and German nationalist parties relied on a network of small-town confidants and organizers that included the managers and supervisors of local credit cooperatives and savings banks. As a result, local cooperatives were highly politicized.
This paper will focus on the nationalist activities of two types of cooperatives: those based on the ideas of Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch (1808-83) and those based on the ideas of Wilhelm Raiffeisen (1818-88). Both conceptions were imported from neighboring Germany into Bohemia. The German population of Bohemia embraced self-help primarily for its economic and social benefits; self-help did not have the strong national and political connotations it held for the Czechs. Schulze’s ideas were introduced to Czech readers by František Šimácek (1834-85). Šimácek was interested in the practical effects of cooperation and anticipated that an in-crease in economic strength would led to political benefits for the Czech nation. Making short-term personal credit available was a first step toward full economic self-sufficiency, and Šimácek believed cooperation would strengthen the ties binding the nation together.
Wilhelm Raiffeisen’s cooperatives were designed to provide rural credit. Among the Czechs, František Cyrill Kampelík (1805-72) advocated the creation of these small agricultural cooperatives, which became known as kampelicky. Kampelicky and Raiffeisenkassen began to be founded in the late 1880s and 1890s in Bohemia. Czech nationalist organizations promoted kampelicky for both national and economic ends. Because of their small size and the ease with which they could be organized, kampelicky were particularly well suited for the border regions of the province, where Czechs were a minority.
Beginning with the creation of the Živnostenská banka (Credit Bank) by Czech cooperatives in 1869, coopera-tives organized central associations to represent their interests and central banks to finance their activities. This tendency increased after 1900 as central banks were founded by Czech and German savings banks, and Ger-man cooperatives formed the Kreditanstalt der Deutschen. These central banks and associations played an even more significant role in national economic competition than did local cooperatives.
The dense network of local banks and agricultural cooperatives introduced national concerns into local finan-cial markets. This nationalism was reinforced by the central associations, national defense associations, and large banks in Prague, all of which sought deliberately to strengthen the Czech or German national community through their lending policies. At the same time, however, business considerations drove investments, and nationalist concerns, while reflected in the rhetoric of credit cooperatives, rarely overrode financial calculations in lending decisions. The paper will assess the relationship of nationalist rhetoric and economic decision-making in credit cooperatives and their central banks. It will also compare the positions and activities of Czech and German cooperatives, which developed differently in response to the different economic and social needs of the two populations. (Show less)

Cooperatives emerged in the Hungarian crownlands as a movement imposed „from above“ and were dependent on state support. Each branch of the cooperative movement had its own central association on the state level and the leadership of each association was recruited partially from the aristocracy. Under those circumstances cooperatives fulfilled functions, which were not congruent with cooperative principles: They served as a means of social and political control over the village and became a tool of Hungarian nationalities policy.
Slovak cooperatives in contrast emerged „from below“, without state support. They were built by a national intelligentsia, mainly by teachers and priests. We can distinguish four different stages of their development:
1. Before 1848: Credit cooperatives were the only form of cooperatives that emerged. Influences came from Ireland, Germany and Switzerland. The revolution ended this period, and all cooperatives were liquidated.
2. The 1860s: Influences mainly came from Schulze-Delitzsch and Raiffeisen. Most of the emerging cooperatives fell victim to counter measures of the state. There was a first attempt to establish a Slovak cooperative central.
3. The 1890s: New forms of cooperatives emerged, some of them already with a political character. In consequence of the encyclical „Rerum novarum“ priests took actively part in the movement. The Romanian cooperative movement served as a model.
4. The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of the first Slovak cooperative association and agrarian congresses. The Slovak cooperative movement received help from the Czech movement, which provided personnel and funds to compensate for the lack of interest of the state. The cooperative movement became engaged in political conflict.
In those years, Slovak cooperatives fulfilled the following functions: Social, national-educational (instruction, reading, moral education) and political (as an economic basis of political struggle, struggle for the village). The cooperative principles were questioned. (Show less)

In the Baltic countries, the national movement coincided in time with the creation of a owner-occupier peasantry in the late 19th century. An important part of the movement was the peas-ant organisations. Since political organisations were closely supervised by the imperial police, they were typically double-faced. In times of harder repression, the economic sections held prominence, and from these, the cooperative movement developed. In times of lesser political pressure, the activities were more overtly political.
When the Baltic countries became independent in 1919, the cooperatives concentrated on productive tasks, relatively successfully processing dairy products. Agrarian parties were im-portant in politics, and particularly after the coups in 1934 in Estonia and Latvia, the authori-tarian states favoured cooperatives on the expense of private enterprises in agriculture. At the same time, the cooperatives lost their independence, they were centralised and supervised. (Show less)

When they emerged in Prussian Poland in the 1860s, cooperatives were organized in accor-dance with economic and social rather than national principles. At the same time, the transi-tion from insurrectionism to organic work in Polish political thought took place and efforts to gain national independence shifted from the political to the economic sphere. Thus, a trend towards ethnic separation was inherent to the development of cooperatives in the Prussian East.
After the inauguration of the Prussian settlement policy, the cooperative movement became increasingly entangled in the intensifying nationality struggle. The decades after 1886 saw an enormous rise of cooperatives, their functional differentiation and the emergence of new types of cooperative enterprises, set up exclusively for nationality struggle. For each of the conflict-ing groups, cooperatives served as a measure to protect “national property” against the “at-tacks” of the other. In this way, nationalism came to determine economic action of coopera-tives. At the same time Polish cooperatives established themselves in the state-like set of na-tional institutions. This was not least due to the fact, that on the provincial and on the local level many cooperators held important positions in the national movement. Nationality strug-gle thus contributed to the development of the cooperative movement in general as well as to the nationalization of already existing cooperatives.
In business, however, cooperatives never became independent of ‘the other’. In some cases, nationality struggle rather seems to have reinforced the dependency on a variety of individuals and institutions belonging to the ethnic other. So, cooperatives demonstrated, that in ethnic borderlands the striving for the creation of separate national economies was impracticable and in many cases led to economic failure.
Leaving the well-trodden paths of German and Polish research on the cooperative movement, the paper tries to reassess the development of the Polish and German cooperatives in the Prus-sian East in close connection to that of the national movements and to evaluate the conse-quences of cooperatives’ engagement in nationality struggle. (Show less)