Authors

Heidi Hein-Kircher¹;  ¹ Martin-Opitz-Library and Ruhr-University, Germany

Discussion

Land reform has become an integral policy of democratisation, economic empowerment, and social integration, designed to deepen the relationship between rural population and the state by shaping social identities and providing the state with legitimacy. The issue of who should own land is hence one of the core questions across social, economic and political systems around the globe. For modern states, the ability to control land tenure (and agricultural production) has become increasingly linked to national sovereignty. After the two world wars and during post-socialist transitions, far-reaching reforms of property regimes, which combined economic, social and political objectives, were carried out in Eastern Europe. Because of the grosso modo parallel social and ethnic borders, land reforms in the first half of 20th century always concerned not only social strata but also ethnic stratification in multi-ethnic regions like the Baltic sea region. In contrast, land reforms because of Sovietisation concerned the possessing strata, while the reforms after 1991 attempted to re-construct the interwar structures but not really succeeded.
The presentation will discuss how land reforms as key disruptions of social and economic structures have become object of memory cultures and how they shaped subjectivities and collective identities in Eastern Europe with a particular focus on the Baltics. It will offer a conceptual framework and discuss briefly case studies. Land reforms were legitimised through historical and ideological references that were decidedly normative in character, invoking notions of historical justice, morality, Christianity, gender, and modernity. For this reason, land distribution and land reform play a crucial role in social and political transformations as well as for individual and collective identities. The presentation tries to discuss a gap in research, namely the role of land reforms for the shaping of (national) memory cultures.