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NATIONALISM, MODERNIZATION AND SOCIETY IN CROATIAN LONG CENTURY
the community, which, in practice, breeds corruption as a social system. The
agrarian crisis would, until 1895, change the poorly productive relations in
production in the countryside. Fallow land, as well as the rotational system of
farming would abate. While in Western Europe, the crisis caused a reduction
of wheat fields, and a transition to intensive livestock farming our country
increased wheat farming, especially wheat, maize, potatoes and forage plants.
Some of the land began to be better cultivated; until the crisis seven to eight
owners used the same plow in some districts. The custom of winter plowing
in some Slavonian districts did not exist not even until the mid-20" century.”°
CUTS IN THE MODERNIZATION PROCESSES
If the agrarian crisis represented a failure in the structure of the traditional
peasant economy, the political changes caused by the end of the First World
War would represent a cut in the modernization continuity. However, the
crisis destroyed the poor, and the survivors represented the transition of
quantity into quality. Many rural households in Croatia and Slavonia met
the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy almost without debt, mostly
due to inflation. Yet the demographic growth and shortage of arable land
caused a new scramble for arable land. Agrarian reform created a break in
the process of improving agricultural production, and this cut led to the first
discontinuity.”
The peasant economy became, in 1918, a general state policy; the criteria
for the distribution of land to the individual producer did not result from the
superiority of one’s production, but from ethnic-national-religious reasons.
Arable land was divided by nationality (war merit) with the aim of creating
loyal voters, and even for purposes of national security. All of those had nothing
to do with the quality of the farming. A scattered, technically unequipped
peasant property, with a labor force that generally had no knowledge of the
agrarian economy, could not help feed the surplus population. The locals
bought land from impoverished or nationally undesirable nobility, while at
the same time settlers from Serbia received land from the state based on the
nationalization of estates in Croatia. In such conditions, the agrarian reform,
as a significant social measure of agrarian societies, produced a national
intolerance. If we also add that the price of wheat fell after 1925 from 4.17
20 Bi¢ani¢: Agrarna kriza u Hrvatskoj, 30-32; Zvonimir Kulundzi¢: Politika i korupcija u
Kraljevskoj Jugoslaviji, Zagreb, 1968, 51 id.
21 Zdenka Simonéié-Bobetko: Agrarna reforma i kolonizacija u Hrvatskoj 1918-1941, Zagreb,
AGM, 1997, 25-30; John R. Lampe — Marvin R. Jackson: Balkan Economic History 1550¬
1950, From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations, Bloomington, Indiana University
Press, 1982, 331-333.
e 143"