Farmers and the Politics of Interwar Europe

This chapter shows when farmers became interested in national politics, and how material interests and cultural identities influenced voting behaviour. Agrarianism as a political movement failed because small farmers faced high costs to build effective mass political parties and because it was divided over the contradictory demands of protecting traditional rural society and improving living standards by encouraging market-orientated farming. Section 3 looks at why socialist parties struggled to attract the farm vote, even when their electoral manifestos did not threaten the family farm. Section 4 describes how family farmers in France and the UK created lobbies which successfully influenced governments, regardless of the party in power. Farm parties in Scandinavia formed governments with Social Democrats, supporting social transfers for urban workers in exchange for farm help. The final section considers how the National Socialists in Nazi Germany attracted wide support in the 1933 elections by appealing to the cultural and material interests of small farmers. Yet, while the needs of heavy industry and rearmament quickly turned government policy against farmer, the need for more land could only be found with war, and Lebensraum or the colonial settlement of Eastern Europe.