ABSTRACT
Introduction The history of the European farming and food industry in the interwar period is usually painted in shades of black and grey. There are good reasons for this in economic terms, and the same holds true for politics as the years of crisis made many farmers an easy prey to ultra-right-wing movements and parties throughout Europe.1 In many countries agriculture was also strongly divided along political, religious, linguistic or geographical lines. In the three Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden – the crisis held on as hard as anywhere else. Prices in 1931-32 were only half those of 1927. Many farmers went bankrupt, and in Denmark there were almost 5 000 forced sales of farms in the period 1931-33 (out of a total of 200 000 farms).2 One reaction was the establishment of several crisis movements such as the LS movement that was formed in Denmark at the end of 1931. Within a year it claimed to have 100 000 members, or about half of all Danish farmers.3 In Norway a similar movement, Bygdefolkets Krisehjelp (Rural Crisis Help), also gained a widespread membership from the end of the 1920s, but lost most of this support as market conditions improved from the mid-1930s and as the protest movements in both countries turned more and more to the extreme right. However, the three Scandinavian countries did not experience any fundamental threat to democracy. The political parties of the extreme right received only a few per cent of the votes, as did Communist parties. Another distinctive Scandinavian trait was that the existing agricultural organisations remained in the lead and out-competed attempts to create new and more radical ones. In this way agricultural organisations became a stable democratic institution in society and, contrary to some other countries, especially France, the countryside was not split by harsh ideological confrontations.4 From the middle of the decade agriculture slowly recovered: it is a remarkable and often neglected fact that the agribusiness sector as a whole was more influential at the end of the decade than it had been at the beginning. The two main arguments in this chapter are (a) that the crisis regulations favoured a cooperative organisation of food processing and sales, which meant that agriculture extended its influence in relation to other sectors of the economy and in relation
to society in general, and (b) that as a result of the crisis negotiations farmers’ organisations became some of the leading actors for governments in the post-war years in the permanently negotiated rural economy. At the same time the coordination of rural interests in strong system-preserving organisations in itself became a democratic bulwark against extreme political ideologies. This chapter investigates how and why such strong cooperative organisations came into existence, and also to establish why Scandinavia followed this Sonderweg. What would the alternatives have been? The chapter will conclude by showing how the decisions made in the 1930s still have importance for the food industry. Methodologically, the chapter will be based on literature from all three countries as well as more general studies. The theoretical point of departure will be an historical institutional approach. This means putting the emphasis not so much on single actors as on the tracks laid down through former processes creating specific values, negotiation arenas, and institutional set-ups. Such an approach at the same time indicates that it is important also to investigate the ‘paths’ leading up to the outcomes of the 1930s.5 These assumptions will be investigated by looking at the interplay between agriculture and state in the period 1880-1950 in the three Scandinavian countries: Norway with heavily subsidised agriculture and import restrictions, Denmark with a large export and a small degree of subsidy, and Sweden in a middle position with farmers protected against the world market but not from internal competition, and with a rather interventionist state.
