ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes some relevant findings from works of social historians and sociologists in this regard. The process of land reform and collectivization of agriculture have doubtless been important for patterns of social mobility. Austria, after regaining unity and political independence in 1955, became economically integrated into the Western “capitalist” part of Europe. Austria, even if politically a neutral state, clearly belongs to the Western capitalist societies with a parliamentary democracy, while in Czechoslovakia and Hungary after World War II a revolution of the economic and political order along the model of the Soviet Union took place. In Hungary, agricultural property and class structures were historically most strongly polarized, while in Austria a more even distribution of cultivated area and farms by size was common. The Czech lands have a population of about 10 million, thus corresponding quite closely to Hungary; Slovakia’s population is about 5 million.
