ABSTRACT
Rural research seems to have been polarized across two extreme ends: the first being the investigation of internal mechanisms and characteristics of past rural society and the second concerning the changes triggered by rural society's increasing integration into wider contemporary society. For French as well as for British rural sociology, agriculture has comprised a large part of what constitutes the rural. The chapter argues that as regards the identification of the rural with the 'peasant question' and 'rural community' there are some similarities between Southern Europe and the French rural tradition. The intensified trends of agricultural modernization, resulting from the growing pace of European integration processes as well as from national economies' integration into the world economy, have caused significant strains in the rural restructuring in Southern European countries. The globalization processes as well as the European integration process have been set long ago and any thought of countervailing those processes may be considered an 'ideological issue'.
