Oldal 144 [144]
OCR
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 15501950, From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, 331-333. e 143"
