Preliminary Programme

Our objective in this paper is to look into the parallel action of the agricultural associations and the politicization process in the rural space of Spain and Greece in the first third of the 20th century. Firstly, we will present the different historiographical approaches to the concept of agrarian politicization and we will give our own interpretative point of view. Then, we will outline the course of the collective action in the Spanish and Greek countryside in the early twentieth century and we will also examine the social and political actors which tried to establish collective organizations in the two countries, exploring, at the same time, their characteristics. We will particularly focus on the structural problems of the two rural societies during the period under study and show how they were related to the evolution of the collective phenomenon. In this context, we will examine the extent to which the agricultural associations operated as protest vehicles and the basic demands they put forward. Through the comparative overview of the two cases, we want to find out how social polarization affected the development of collective action in the two countries. Answering the question concerning the geographical range of the agricultural associations, we will try to shed light on the role of the local networks in the agrarian mobilization in Spain and Greece in the first decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, we will examine the way in which the form of collective action in the rural space of Spain and Greece was interconnected with the peasant electoral behaviour. Finally, it will be very interesting to study comparatively the efforts made in the two countries towards the formation of a purely agricultural party and trace the role played in these initiatives by the collective organizations.
Keywords: agricultural associations, politicization, social protest, Spain, Greece
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This paper proposes to explain the process of transforming associations into political parties in the late nineteenth century. It seeks to explore the process and consequences for rural and national politics of this process. It will compare the emergence of the Irish Farmers’ Party in Ireland, with the emergence of the National Peasant Party (PN?) in Romania. In the case of Romania it will focus on the emergence of the Romanian National Party in Transylvania which dominated its successor PN?. These cases have been chosen because they represent the different paths that elites took during the foundation period. In both cases, rural politics was closely linked to the national question and the desire for national independence. However, in Ireland the party that emerged saw itself as the defender of the economic and political interests of rural society and explicitly saw itself as non-national. In contrast, the Transylvanian Romanian national movement understood itself in national terms subordinating rural economic questions and interests to minor importance behind advancing the ethnic community. This paper will explore why these paths were chosen and what the consequences of these choices were for rural politics. (Show less)

Despite the demographic and economic ravages of the Great Irish Famine, its latter years and the immediate post-Famine period saw the emergence of the first large-scale agrarian reform movement in Ireland, the Tenant League. This paper charts the emergence of the movement in the northern province of Ulster, the central role played there by the radical legislator and writer William Sharman Crawford, and its relations with the Catholic-led agrarian movement in southern Ireland. It will consider the reasons for the League’s defeat and decline – including its failed electoral insurgency in 1852, the eclipse of agrarianism by sectarian and partisan politics, and the impact of the short-lived economic recovery of the mid-1850s, and conclude with a consideration of the legacy of the Tenant League movement for the better known and more successful Irish agrarian movements of the 1870s-90s. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to address the role of agricultural associations in the transition to mass politics in the Catalan countryside in the early twentieth century. Since the approval of the male universal suffrage in Spain in 1890, the political parties had to try to retain the support of peasants and increase their influence in the countryside. Even if an undemocratic electoral system dominated by the local power bosses (caciquismo) persisted after the universal suffrage, it was progressively weakened by the social and political mobilization that went on not only in urban areas, but also in the countryside. Landowners associations, agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ unions played a prominent role as agents in the politicization process, which we examine from the approval of the universal suffrage in Spain in 1890 until the outburst of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. (Show less)