Part I: Positioning in Global Entanglements

2

Eastern Europe in the Wheat Crises of Globalization and Deglobalization (1870–1939)

Uwe Müller

1 Introduction

From Shortage to Overproduction: Changing Agricultural Crises

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, agricultural crises were understood to be phases of low-level food production that led to inadequate nutrition and famine. These crises were caused by crop failures due to natural factors, such as changes in climate and weather as well as plant diseases or livestock epidemics. The last major famine crisis of this kind occurred in Western and Central Europe in 1846/47, when potato blight and exceptionally cold weather caused an almost complete failure of the potato harvest in the summer and winter as well as below-average grain harvests.¹ In parts of Eastern Europe in the 1890s, supply crises still occurred mainly due to crop failures.² Notwithstanding, these “old-style crises” were generally prevented in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Expanded areas under cultivation increased agricultural productivity, and the so-called “transport revolution”, especially the expansion of the railway, made it possible to compensate for regional undersupply.³

The hunger crises of the twentieth century, on the other hand, were no longer caused by natural factors or the lack of agricultural productivity but were the consequences of wars and sometimes radical political interventions in agricultural structures. The defining features of agricultural crises have also changed since the late 1870s in large parts of continental Europe. Crises did not arise from a lack of food but, on the contrary, from the consequences of an increased supply of agricultural products on rapidly integrating world markets. It was no longer the consumers who felt a crisis but the producers – Europe’s farmers – who were faced with growing competition from oversea as well as from Russia. The main symptom of the crisis was the fall in agricultural prices, especially grain prices. Consequently, this crisis has often been referred to as a grain crisis.⁴

The actual and supposed consequences of the grain crisis remained a determining element of political disputes from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, influencing both the agricultural and foreign trade policies of the countries while affecting sociopolitical debates in general. The focus of these policies (as well as debates) was on the effects of globalization on rural society and ways of avoiding or, at least, minimizing those outcomes perceived as negative.⁵ Following the turn of the century, grain prices stabilized somewhat, and food once again became a scarce commodity and, as a result, more expensive during the First World War and during the immediate post-war period. Such a change benefitted some farmers. However, the long-term trend from 1870 to 1939 of falling prices was only interrupted by exceptional events, such as war and crop failures.

From the mid-1920s onwards, farmers in all European countries, especially wheat producers, were again confronted with competition from oversea and with falling prices.⁶ The fall in agricultural prices accelerated during the Great Depression, beginning in 1929. Many farmers faced ruin as the difference grew ever larger between their expenses for paying back loans and buying industrial goods, such as equipment, artificial fertilizers, and textiles, and the income from the sale of their products.⁷ The agricultural crisis of the early 1930s was particularly dramatic from the perspective of economic history because various structural problems and cyclical developments overlapped, mutually reinforcing each other. Consequently, however, rural societies in Europe also fell into a severe social crisis, which became one of the most important causes of the strengthening of authoritarian and, in part, fascist forces.⁸

All this was particularly true in Eastern Europe because, firstly, the agricultural sector was much more important there than in other parts of the continent.⁹ Secondly, many Eastern European countries produced food surpluses both before the First World War and since the mid-1920s so that not only the incomes of many farmers but also the foreign trade balances of the countries depended on the possibility of selling these products abroad as well as on the prices that could be achieved. It is, therefore, no surprise that it was precisely the Eastern European rural population, with its market-oriented economy, that perceived interdependencies with the global economy critically and considered them primarily as triggers for crises. In most (economic) historical accounts made by both historians as well as contemporaries regarding East-Central and South-eastern Europe or individual countries in the region, such as Poland, Hungary, or Romania, the globally caused agricultural crisis has been a core element of master narratives, which all assume an unfavourable external environment for the development of one’s own national economy/economies.¹⁰

Question

This interpretation is critically questioned in the following analysis in several respects. First of all, the crisis narrative is examined for the case of the Eastern European wheat economy. It is noticeable that agricultural production in Eastern Europe grew between 1870 and 1913 at an above-average rate by international comparison (see Table 1). At the same time, wheat was the most important agricultural export commodity in Eastern Europe and thus an important basis for the development of the individual economies.¹¹ Before the First World War, both Russia and the Danube countries – comprising the Habsburg Monarchy, and Rumania – were consistently among the three largest wheat exporters in the world (see Table 2). From the perspective of an analysis of macro-economic data, there is much to suggest that it was only the world war and its consequences that plunged the Eastern European grain economy into crisis. It is obvious to connect this finding with a narrative that is widely used in global economic history: this narrative assumes that a “first globalization” beginning with the First World War and marked by increasing interdependence and integration ended and that a phase of “deglobalization” marked by disentanglement and disintegration began. The latter became fully manifest with the Great Depression.¹² However, considering the development of commodity chains has placed this finding into perspective.¹³ Here too, not only is the extent of trade reconstructed in the following analysis but also the degree of interdependence. The latter can be determined by examining the perceptions and actions of the actors involved in the wheat trade. This also raises the question for Eastern European historians of why agriculture developed better in the pre-war empires than in the post-war nation-states.

Table 1:Average Annual Growth Rate of Agricultural Production, 1870–1938 (percentage). Source: G. Federico, Feeding the World, An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800–2000, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 18.

The contradiction between measurable positive developments of production and trade flows and the simultaneous crisis frame of mind in contemporary discourses proves once again the fundamental fact that actors and their activities can never be explained solely by “real” developments but are based on individual perceptions that are shaped by discourses in “society” or in certain social groups, parties, associations, and so forth. The concern about an agricultural crisis dominated public debates, especially in the eastern provinces of Prussia and in large parts of the Habsburg Empire. The “agrarians” took advantage of this to call strongly for state aid. Historical research has long followed their rhetoric. Less present, however, has been the effect of the crisis as a “creative destroyer”, that is to say as an occasion for various initiatives to modernize agriculture.¹⁴

Table 2:Distribution of Average Annual World Wheat Exports, 1854–1913 (percentage). Source: R. M. Stern, “A Century of Food Exports”, Kyklos 13 (1960), pp. 44–64, at 58.

Therefore, the focus of the chapter is – entirely in the sense of a culturally informed study of economic crisis processes – the question of what effects the confrontation of a certain group of Eastern European actors with the world market had on their thinking and, above all, their actions. In our case, the actors are primarily wheat producers and traders, economic politicians, and representatives of interest groups. Thus, as in many other chapters in this volume, we start from the assumption that globalization is not a predetermined natural process of a constant increase in interdependencies but instead arises more from the interplay of a multitude of globalization projects of different actors or groups of actors.¹⁵

This is particularly true of economic globalization. Although the Eastern European protagonists of the grain trade were often able to draw on historical experience in exporting their products to Western Europe, they had to react to the new challenges of an escalating global competition by developing new strategies to position themselves. These strategies (described in more detail below) varied widely, ranging from defending Western European markets against new competitors to creating protected regional markets to switching to the production and the export of other agricultural goods that had better sales potential on world markets.

The analysis of this chapter is not primarily aimed at reconstructing the concepts that individual actors or interest groups developed in this situation. Such a procedure exceeds the scope of this text and is nearly impossible due to gaps in research. The aim is rather to identify the most important goals and measures for implementing these concepts and to assess the results of these actions. This structural historical approach allows statements to be made about the development from 1870 to 1939 in all parts of Eastern Europe. It will be shown that, as well as how, the political and economic elites in the period up to the First World War, within the framework of empires (the Habsburg Empire, the Russian Empire, and the German Empire) and of young nation-states (in particular, Romania), developed relatively successful strategies to adapt their wheat exports to new conditions. During and after the war, the internal conditions and external framework changed, which is why the old recipes for success proved unsuitable. New strategies based on the nation-state also failed for the most part.

In this situation, Eastern European actors, in particular, developed internationalist strategies to regulate the global wheat markets and minimize the negative consequences of the agricultural crisis for their domestic economies. These efforts to introduce global trade quotas and a system of European preferential tariffs were put on the agenda of the League of Nations and international conferences in the early 1930s. Initially, these efforts were only moderately successful, but they were taken up again at a global level after the Second World War and within the structure of the European Economic Community – an area to which Eastern European countries now had no access – and largely implemented.¹⁶ Moreover, the multiplication of activities at the international level proves that the thesis of a trend reversal from globalization to deglobalization (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) reflects the quantitative development of the flow of goods; however, a general “disentanglement” of national economies in the 1920s and 1930s cannot be supposed. On the contrary, in the case of the wheat trade, the interactions between national economic policies intensified, together with numerous efforts to regulate global markets and growing influence of international organizations on shaping economic policy.

The Object of Study: The Global Wheat Market

In the following section, the positioning of Eastern Europe in the globalization process in the field of wheat trade is examined. The selection of this case study is due to not only the great importance the discourses place on the wheat crisis as the core of the grain crisis, but also the relevance of wheat according to the conviction of economic historians that globally integrated commodity and factor markets are the very essence of globalization:¹⁷ “the commodity trade in wheat provides a particularly spectacular study of globalization”.¹⁸ This is partly due to the fact that the consumption of wheat increased significantly in various regions of the world during the period under review.¹⁹ The trade of grain made up more than 20 per cent of world trade in the time before the First World War, with more than 50 per cent of the grain being wheat. It had also become globalized since the 1870s much more rapidly and intensively than the trade in rye, barley, or even rice.²⁰ The volume of world wheat export per year increased from 130 million bushels in 1873/74 to 748 million bushels in 1924–1929.²¹

Coping with the sharp rise in demand for wheat was only possible through improvements in the transport sector and through the increase in wheat production. As mentioned before, the transport revolution was able to compensate for regional undersupply, on the one hand, and also intensify competition, on the other hand. The increase in production was based on the development of new cultivation areas oversea and in Eastern Europe. This extensive form of growth, however, also considerably increased the sector’s susceptibility to overproduction crises because, in the event of falling demand, producers were usually unwilling to stop using the previously laboriously developed arable land. Consequently, the wheat market developed into the most important scene of the agricultural crisis, or grain crisis, and it was not by chance that it became the object of the first attempts at global market regulation.²²

Strategy

In the following section, the development of the global wheat market up to the First World War and the role of Eastern Europe in this process is reconstructed. The focus is the actions of various Eastern European actors in this market and their reactions to the first signs of an overproduction crisis, which, in this study, are interpreted as elements of globalization projects. The section presents the difficult situation of Eastern European wheat exporters in the 1920s and during the Great Depression. An analysis of national crisis management strategies is then presented. The fourth section focuses on attempts to overcome the wheat crisis through international agreements. The chapter concludes with an outlook and a summary.

Concentrating on the analysis of structures has two consequences. Firstly, specific actors and groups of actors are rarely explicitly named; as a rule, the political and economic elites of a particular country appear as a single entity. Secondly, the analysis alternates several times between describing historical developments and explaining systematic connections, which should help one to understand the complex processes.

2 The Eastern European Wheat Economies in Global Competition until the Outbreak of the First World War

The Dependence of the Eastern European Wheat Economy on Foreign Trade

As has already been mentioned, from a global historical perspective, a distinction is often made between a phase of increasing economic interdependence before the First World War, the so-called “first (modern) globalization” – which was driven mainly by the integration of food markets (especially for cereals) and was only weakened, not prevented, by the protectionism of most Western European countries – and a phase of economic “deglobalization” – which began in the First World War and greatly intensified as a result of the Great Depression and in which protectionism reached previously unknown dimensions.²³ Global trade in agricultural goods grew at an annual rate of 3.7 per cent between 1850 and 1900 and of only 1.4 per cent between 1903 and 1938.²⁴

A comparison of the development of global agricultural production in these two periods shows that it grew more than twice as fast (by 1.6 per cent annually) during the period of the first globalization as it did between 1913 and 1938 (by 0.7 per cent annually; see Table 1, p. 40). This is why the increasing interdependence of the world economy tended to promote the production of agricultural goods, whereas the pace of growth slowed down considerably in a phase of deglobalization. This finding could be put into perspective by considering the inaccuracies of the data available, the negative effects of the world war, and with the argument that the low growth in the second phase could already have been a rational reaction of farmers to the commenced overproduction and its negative effects on the profitability of farms. It is precisely for this reason that it is important not only to consider the crisis as a phenomenon that can be described with the help of statistics but also to look at the perception of the crisis and at the reactions to the crisis by the affected actors.

Regarding Eastern Europe,²⁵ it is noteworthy that agricultural production between 1870 and 1913 increased more than in any other part of Europe, and the annual growth rate of 2.1 per cent was also well above the global average (see Table 1, p. 40). During the period marked by the First World War and the Great Depression, however, agricultural production in Eastern Europe grew less than in all other parts of the world. Per capita production even declined.²⁶ This is clear evidence that the development of Eastern European agriculture has been strongly influenced by global economic interdependence. This influence could apparently be both positive and extremely negative despite the almost permanent talk of crisis.

The Eastern European Wheat Economy in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century

Trade relations on the European grain market intensified considerably in the middle of the nineteenth century. The most important structural cause of this was the increased demand for food in England and, a little later, in other parts of North-western Europe due to population growth, progressive urbanization, and industrialization.²⁷ The main institutional precondition for the reconstitution of the European cereal market was the strengthening of free trade through the abolition of the British Corn Laws (1846) and the establishment of a system of most-favoured-nation trade agreements between the main European states.²⁸

European wheat-exporting regions were all located in the eastern part of the continent. Due to differences in development and because of the data situation, it is useful to distinguish between the following regions of origin, which can be roughly identified as “East-Central Europe” (Poland), “South-eastern Europe” (Hungary and the Balkans), and “Russia”:

1. The Polish lands had already exported large shares of their wheat production in the sixteenth century to Western Europe via Gdańsk and Amsterdam. After the partition of Poland and the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), the Polish agriculture from Masovia and the upper reaches of the Vistula was separated from the ports and its traditional foreign markets: “Ultimately Polish lands ceased to be the European granary.”²⁹ The non-existence of a Polish state in the nineteenth century complicates the statistical reconstruction of the declining but still existing wheat export from the Polish lands. The Prussian partition area of Greater Poland and Pomerania had the most productive agriculture and direct access to the Baltic Sea ports – partly due to the capitalist agricultural reforms that were initiated relatively early on. Of the total wheat and rye production, exports accounted for the highest share.³⁰ The Kingdom of Poland, which belonged to the Russian Empire, still exported grain to Western Europe, amounting to 20 million roubles in 1874.³¹ Since being connected to the railway network in the 1860s, Galicia had changed the main destination of its grain exports from Western Europe (via Gdańsk) to the territory of the German Customs Union or the German Empire and, finally, mainly to the Bohemian lands and Austria.³² Similar to the Polish provinces of Prussia, the large estates in Galicia, which were heavily based on the cultivation of grain, delivered their products to the industrializing centres of the Habsburg Empire. The Galician agricultural producers, however, faced stiff competition from Hungary.

2. Hungary had also been supplying surpluses of its agricultural production to the West, mainly to Austria and other parts of Central Europe, with varying intensity for several centuries. After a decline in trade relations, a result of the Napoleonic Wars and falling prices for agricultural goods from 1815 onwards, Hungary’s trade relations with neighbouring regions to the west grew again in the 1830s as they increasingly demanded Hungarian grain and wool.³³ At the same time, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Russian Empire and the freedom of navigation through the Black Sea and the Dardanelles Strait, laid down in the subsequent Treaty of Adrianople (1829), enabled grain exports from the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (both later joined to become Romania) to Western Europe.³⁴ Between 1855 and 1873, both Hungary and Romania again increased their exports of cereals (especially wheat), which went mainly to Central and North-western Europe. The corresponding increases in production were based mainly on a significant expansion of arable land, while labour and soil productivity increased only slightly. Since the 1860s, Serbia had also exported grain, but more importantly, it traded in other agricultural goods such as pigs and plums.³⁵

3. Russia had been active on the European wheat market since the early nineteenth century and had mainly ousted Polish competitors. Around 1850, the export of wheat came almost exclusively from the European Black Earth provinces: over 90 per cent was shipped via ports on the Black Sea (especially Odessa) and the Sea of Azov, and over 50 per cent was sold in Great Britain.³⁶ The abolition of serfdom in Russia initially led to numerous instabilities and reduced Russian wheat exports in the early 1860s, especially because wheat traders from the northern states of the USA during the American Civil War (1861–1865) were also selling their grain to Europe. After just under a decade, the situation improved, and Russian wheat exports increased again. Decisive factors in this were a new agrarian structure, the development of arable land on the lower river Volga, and, above all, the ongoing construction of railways. The new routes reduced the cost of transporting grain to ports on the Black Sea and made it possible to deliver it to those on the Baltic Sea as well. The disproportionately high expansion of wheat cultivation in Russia, compared with other cereals, was mainly caused by external demand.³⁷

This new aspect of the influence of external markets on the decision-making processes of agricultural producers in a country that is usually characterized not only as backward but also as peripheral is an important indication of an often overlooked fact: as early as the 1870s, processes began that led to the fact that the Russian economy before the First World War was interwoven with other regions of the world economy with above-average intensity and diversity.³⁸

The Emergence of the Global Condition in the Wheat Trade and the Role of Eastern Europe

The increase in Russian wheat production for export is also an indication of a radical change that took place in the 1870s: within a few years, a literally global market for cereals, especially wheat, had emerged.³⁹ The expansion of the reach of the market mainly affected the side of the suppliers. In addition to the USA, Canada and Argentina, and later Australia and India, also entered the market as new “oversea” participants. They competed with the Eastern European exporting countries as well as with the respective local farmers for the sale of grain on the markets in Western and Central Europe and increasingly in the Mediterranean region.

The most important structural causes for the creation of the global condition in the wheat trade, which is exemplary for other commodity markets, were revolutionary changes in transport and communication. The former led to a significant reduction in transport costs in both ocean shipping and rail shipping. The railways made it possible to develop large fertile areas in temperate climates that were well suited for growing grain and, through the settlement of immigrants, were often preceded by the displacement or extermination of the indigenous population. In the case of oversea production, it was then possible to transport the cereals to ports by the new land routes and from there across the Atlantic to Europe.

Within a few decades, the share of transport costs in the price of grain fell from 75 to 30 per cent.⁴⁰ Initially, this benefited farmers in the USA, who were able to farm extensively due to low land prices as well as who had high labour productivity thanks to advanced mechanization. This made them superior to their European competitors and increased their market shares, especially in Great Britain.⁴¹ In Great Britain, the “industrial revolution” had already led, since the late eighteenth century, to massive urbanization and expansion of the secondary sector with a simultaneous strong population growth so that the demand for the import of agricultural goods was very high.

The reduction of transport costs was a necessary but not a sufficient enough condition for the globalization of the wheat market. Equally important was a general reduction in transaction costs, being the technical prerequisite for the establishment of a global telegraph network. Information on prices, grain transports on the world’s oceans, and stocks and harvest prospects elsewhere in the world was available within minutes at any location in the world connected to the network. The standardized determination of wheat quality characteristics made the global wheat market more transparent. Corresponding institutions were established primarily in Chicago and Liverpool, which were the main transhipment points for wheat exporters and importers;⁴² the grain exchanges with the highest turnover were there and in Winnipeg. Since 1880, future business dealings and trade were also carried out in these centres, which, 100 years later, were to become the hallmark of a process of globalization that could barely be regulated and were also the subject of a criticism of globalization as early as in the late nineteenth century.⁴³

The situation of local spaces of interaction in the international wheat trade has probably contributed to the fact that global and economic historians have mostly described the problem of “grain invasion” and the subsequent protectionist reaction of continental European countries, especially France and Germany, as a North Atlantic entanglement; meanwhile, actors from Argentina, Australia, and Eastern Europe have, so far, hardly been considered.⁴⁴ However, if we look at the shares of the individual world regions and countries in the international wheat trade, a different picture emerges – despite certain uncertainties regarding the accuracy of the data (see Table 2, p. 41).

Even before 1870, the USA was the largest wheat exporter in a market that was much smaller but had more participants. In the course of the transport and communication revolutions in the 1870s (described above), US farmers not only multiplied the volume of exports to Europe but also increased their market share. Argentina and Canada almost caught up with the USA in the course of the two decades before the First World War. At the same time, Russia and the Danube countries⁴⁵ developed into the largest wheat-exporting regions in the world. Their market shares, 22 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively, were actually larger than before the globalization surge of the 1870s.

These data show that both Russia and the Danube countries have achieved considerable success in the fight against non-European competitors. They developed and implemented successful strategies to overcome the crisis. Therefore, it was not their positions on foreign markets that were considered problematic but rather the consequences of their dependence on foreign trade. This finding invites us to take a closer look at the Eastern European discourse on the wheat crisis and the different reactions to the intensified competition on the world market.

Positioning Strategies of the Politics and Economy of Eastern Europe in the Process of Globalization of the Wheat Market

Russia’s success on the European grain market, similar to its oversea competitors, was initially based on falling transport costs and expanded cultivation areas – not only in the south-eastern part of European Russia (the so-called New Russia) but also now in the North Caucasus and West Siberia. The Russian state pursued an export-oriented globalization project with its railway construction policy and the expansion of ports on the Black Sea and Baltic Sea as well as the promotion of internal colonization. Although labour productivity and incomes in agriculture also rose in Russia between 1870 and 1913, the successes on world markets were largely based on low labour costs by international standards.⁴⁶

The activities of wheat traders in Russia (e.g. the Greek traders in Odessa) have not yet been sufficiently investigated.⁴⁷ But without a doubt, information about the global wheat market also reached Russians province through the parallel expansion of railway and telegraph networks. An American traveller reported from Nikolaev that the “peasants on arrival at the market with their grain were asking ‘What is the price in America according to the latest telegram?’ And what is still more surprising: they know how to convert cents per bushel into kopecks per pood.”⁴⁸ Therefore, the world market price also influenced the price formation on the domestic market in Russia. At the same time, Russian cereal traders were trying to avoid the centralization of trade processing in Chicago and Liverpool. Thus, after the settlement in 1894 of the Russian-German customs war, direct trade between these two countries increased.⁴⁹ Russia became the most important supplier of wheat, animal feed, and many other agricultural products to the German Empire.⁵⁰

The export opportunities led to the fact that grain was still grown on 75 per cent to 90 per cent of the arable land – despite a certain diversification of production, for example by growing vegetables and oilseed near cities in central Russia and Ukraine. The share of wheat in the grain area increased to 32 per cent by 1913, exceeding that of rye (29 per cent), oats (19 per cent), and barley (12 per cent). The positive experience with wheat exports from 1880 onwards led to an increase in exports of other cereals, for whose cultivation the conditions in large parts of Russia were more favourable and the competition on foreign markets was much less intense. In 1913, 40 per cent of all Russian exports consisted of grain.⁵¹ Between 1909 and 1913, the Russian share of world wheat exports was 25 per cent. The shares for rye, oats, and barley were 37 per cent, 43 per cent, and even 71 per cent, respectively.⁵²

Romania’s political and economic elites pursued a similar globalization project to Russia’s and managed to make the country the fourth-largest wheat exporter in the world before the outbreak of the First World War.⁵³ The decision to increase export production, despite falling world market prices, was based on various motives and constraints. Due to the protectionist policies of the potential target countries, especially Austria-Hungary, it was only possible to a very limited extent to switch to livestock exports, which would have been more lucrative in terms of trade.⁵⁴ Income from the export of raw materials and grain was also considered indispensable for the development of their own industries in the medium term. In the opinion of the National Liberals and the “industrialists”, the problem of rural overpopulation could also be defused in the long term.⁵⁵ For the time being, however, the exploitation of the so-called sharecroppers had enabled grain production and exports to increase. These sharecroppers were formally independent farmers who had to work regularly on the estates. This was a consequence of the partial revision of the 1864 agrarian reform following a coup in 1866 against its initiator Alexandru I. Cuza. Although the farmers remained free from feudal fetters in the legal sense, they received only very small holdings, the yield of which was insufficient to support their families. In addition, they were obliged to pay compensation to the former landowners in the form of work due to the lack of money.⁵⁶

Similar to Russia, Romania’s possibilities of increasing productivity within this system were limited. The per capita production of wheat and corn in Romania had stagnated since about 1890. By tapping the last available land reserves, total production was increased until the world war. And thanks to relatively low labour and transport costs, Romanian wheat was competitive on the European markets. This led to an intensive economic integration of this Balkan state with other parts of the continent. Around 1910, Romania exported about one-quarter of its national income and thus had a very high foreign trade quota compared to other countries in Europe or even worldwide.⁵⁷ Almost 80 per cent of exports were grain deliveries. Romanian foreign trade proved to be very flexible in opening up sales markets. Until the early 1880s, the Habsburg monarchy was the most important export market. However, due to the protectionism that began there, the British market and, since the turn of the century, the Belgian market had gained in importance.⁵⁸

Romania was a particularly extreme example, but not the only country with a strong orientation towards exporting cereals, especially wheat. Immediately after Bulgaria became independent in 1878, the local farmers, most of whom were small- and medium-scale farmers, also began to significantly increase their exports of grain and wheat, which had previously been impeded by the Ottoman tax system. Around 1910, 20 per cent of the Bulgarian national income was exported, with only one-quarter of it to the Ottoman Empire.⁵⁹

Wheat producers in Hungary, almost all of whom had large estates, reacted to the increasing competition on the European wheat market with two strategies. The first and most important countermeasure was an agricultural protectionist foreign trade policy started in the late 1870s, which was maintained until the First World War.⁶⁰ It was in the common interest of the Austrian and Bohemian industrialists and the Hungarian landowners to maintain the monarchy’s trade and customs union and the policy of protective tariffs. Although the protectionist turnaround made their wheat exports more difficult, it largely shielded the Habsburg monarchy’s sales market from grain imports. The consequence of this strategy was that the share of “genuine” Hungarian exports of grain and flour that crossed the borders of the Habsburg monarchy, which had still amounted to two-thirds in the 1880s, fell to one-fifth in the 1890s, and was only one-tenth after 1900.⁶¹ It is no coincidence that this was almost exclusively flour.

Indeed, the second crisis management strategy of the Hungarian large-scale farmers was to develop the milling industry and export flour instead of unprocessed wheat. The terms of trade here were much more advantageous. Austro-Hungarian foreign trade policy supported this strategy by allowing mills to import duty-free wheat if a certain quota of flour was later exported.⁶² This was used to import wheat varieties that were not sufficiently available in Hungary from the Balkan states and then to process them into high-quality flour and sell it at some profit in Austria and further abroad.

Similar to the Habsburg monarchy, the German Empire also initially introduced grain protection tariffs, thereby curbing the import of foreign grain and the fall in prices. At the same time, the grain economy also had an interest in certain foreign wheat varieties. After Germany had ended the customs conflict with Russia by concluding a trade agreement in 1894 in the interest of its export industry, grain duties were temporarily reduced. The politically influential East Elbian large landowners were compensated by removing the proof of identity (Identitätsnachweis) and introducing export subsidies in the form of a grain import certificate system (Getreideeinfuhrschein). This meant that it was now possible to mix Russian grain and domestic grain, especially rye and wheat (imported as duty-free), and profitably export product to Scandinavia.⁶³

The large landowners in the Polish provinces of Prussia also benefited from this mix of protection and subsidies. The Galician wheat exporters, however, had a hard time asserting themselves against Hungarian competition. The grain exports of the Kingdom of Poland neither were in a favourable market position under the Russian Empire nor were they promoted by politics. Since the 1890s, the kingdom had become a net importer of grain, mainly from Russia as well as from the Prussian eastern provinces.⁶⁴ The development in the Kingdom of Poland was linked to strong population growth, rising per capita consumption, and the rapid industrialization of some regions. For industry, in contrast to agriculture, membership of the Russian Empire was a positive, sometimes even decisive, factor in development, particularly in the areas around Warsaw and Łódź and along the Silesian border.⁶⁵

Development Economics and Historical Evaluation of the Globalization Projects of Eastern European Wheat Producers

From the perspective of developmental economics, the expansion of industry in response to the declining competitiveness of domestic agricultural products on domestic and foreign markets is the most promising strategy in the medium and long term, but it is often difficult to implement. An alternative or complementary strategy is the substitution of cereal cultivation through the production of other agricultural products for which the competitive conditions are more favourable and whose processing allows entry into industrialization supported by the development of a food processing industry. Such a diversification strategy is more sustainable from an agro-economic point of view and reduces dependence on individual markets and customers.

For example, the Hungarian milling industry mentioned above and the sugar beet industry, which also expanded rapidly between 1870 and 1914 in the Bohemian lands and the Prussian eastern provinces, prove that regional industrialization, supported by the food processing industry, took place not only in the Netherlands and Denmark but also in East-Central Europe.⁶⁶ This path can initially be interpreted as an evasive reaction to the escalating competition on the grain markets in the first phase of globalization. However, unlike the protectionist reaction by implementing a protective tariff, mill and sugar manufacturers soon successfully penetrated the external markets and developed alternative globalization projects.⁶⁷ Farmers who, as a result of the grain crisis, switched their production to livestock and dairy farming or vegetable growing remained more locally or regionally oriented. Credit cooperatives provided the necessary investments. Global competition triggered impulses for modernization and led to an institutional innovation that enabled a “combination of agrarian individualism with the expanded facilities of large-scale operation”.⁶⁸

The German Empire and the Habsburg monarchy offered better conditions for the development of favourable strategies than those of Russia and the Balkans. The practice in Russia and the Balkans of concentrating on the export of a few primary goods is not regarded as an optimal strategy by development economics. The main argument of this critical assessment is the dependence of a large part of the economy on often highly volatile markets.⁶⁹ In Russia and Romania, unlike in Hungary and the Polish lands, not only the landowners and farm workers but also large parts of the peasantry were connected with the grain industry. It is no coincidence that revolutionary unrest and uprisings occurred in Russia and Romania between 1905 and 1907, especially in rural areas.⁷⁰ At the same time, there were greater risks in the cultivation of export-oriented monocultures, which meant that the domestic markets could no longer be supplied if harvests failed and stock was insufficient.⁷¹

Economic theories are useful for evaluating the positioning of contemporary actors in the globalization processes, but their importance should not be overestimated. Firstly, many of the world’s richest countries were net exporters of food around 1900. This was the case in Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and the USA.⁷² The fact that the Eastern European agricultural exporting countries were not amongst them was, therefore, not due to their position on the world market. Secondly, economic and political decisions depended, most importantly, on traditional patterns of action, the scope for decision-making, and the existence of alternatives as well as general interests and power structures. The export of grain to Western Europe was traditionally of great importance to the large landowners in Eastern Europe and was now also becoming more relevant for farmers in Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia. The expansion of the export of primary goods, especially in backward economies, was often the only, or the most obvious, strategy to turn foreign trade into an “engine of growth”.⁷³

The export revenues generated in this way flowed, to a considerable extent, into state and private investment in industry and infrastructure, albeit often as a detour and not in an optimal way, consolidating the economic and political power of large landowners. The concentration on wheat cultivation resulted primarily from external demand, and interestingly, this was criticized primarily by contemporaries in Hungary, where the diversity of production and exported agricultural goods was relatively high.⁷⁴

From an Eastern European history perspective, the balance of the social, economic, and political consequences of the constitution of the global wheat market is certainly ambivalent. From a global historical perspective (and this has hardly been noticed by researchers so far), the economic and political elites of Eastern Europe played a decisive role in shaping the global wheat market.⁷⁵ Around 1910, none of the globalization strategies developed in Eastern Europe had failed. Almost half of the world’s wheat exports still came from Europe.⁷⁶ Accordingly, there could be no talk of a crisis in the corresponding foreign trade relations. The outbreak of First World War fundamentally changed the situation and endangered the previously successful Eastern European globalization projects.

3 Eastern Europe in the Global Wheat Trade between 1914 and 1939

The First World War and its Consequences

The outbreak of the First World War divided the globalized markets for agricultural products along the borders of the military blocs. The first bottlenecks in the food supply became particularly evident for the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary as early as the end of 1914. There was a shortage of labour in the course of mobilization. Fertilizers from Latin America and animal feed, which had been sourced mainly from Russia, were no longer available, and there were complications in agricultural and food policies.⁷⁷ After the Triple Entente’s blockade measures worked better from 1916 onwards, also preventing deliveries via neutral countries, the food supply of the population and of the army of the Central Powers deteriorated to such an extent that hunger riots broke out, which contributed to capitulation in 1918.

In Russia, hostile sea blockades in the Black Sea and in the Baltic Sea prevented the export of grain. Notwithstanding, Russian agriculture suffered less than Central Europe from labour shortages during the war, and the decline in production was also less severe. However, the now “surplus” grain was mainly used for consumption by farmers, and only a small proportion found its way to urban consumers and the army. Since no income could be generated through exports, grain production declined significantly until 1917 and more sharply than agricultural production as a whole.⁷⁸

Romanian wheat exports almost came to a complete standstill after the outbreak of the war mainly due to the massive disruption of shipping traffic on the Black Sea. It was only at the beginning of 1916 that the then still neutral state succeeded in selling parts of the good wheat harvest from the previous year to the Central Powers and Great Britain. Romania’s entry into the war on the side of the Entente, the rapidly following military defeats, and the subsequent German occupation caused considerable damage to agricultural production and, above all, to grain cultivation. In the end, the German Empire was not able to efficiently exploit the conquered granaries, either in Romania or later in Ukraine. As a result, the Central Powers lost the war because they could no longer feed their own population adequately.⁷⁹ The production and export of agricultural goods declined in occupied territories such as Romania because no seeds were sown, the rural population passively resisted, and the country’s infrastructure was destroyed.⁸⁰ Several years after the end of the war, agricultural production was still lower than it was before the war.

On the Entente side, however, the war also led to a sharp decline in domestic agricultural production – particularly grain production – especially in France and Italy.⁸¹ However, in diametric contrast to the Central Powers that were actually “in the middle” – Germany, and Austria-Hungary – the Western European states had unlimited access to the world markets. Large parts of North and South America and Australia increased their agricultural production year after year during the war, in some cases by double-digit rates, in order to supply France, Great Britain, and Italy in particular.⁸² This growth in production was primarily based on an expansion of the area under cultivation, which increased by 50 per cent in Canada and even doubled in Australia.⁸³

Extensive Growth Strategies in Wheat-exporting Countries as Factors Exacerbating Crises

The war was a catalyst for, not the cause of, the dominance of extensive growth strategies in wheat production. Throughout the period under review, there was a close link between the development of wheat acreage and wheat production, both at the global level and for each major exporting country. This observation is only trivial at first glance. Although other ways of increasing production, such as breeding new varieties or improving soil quality through amelioration and fertilization, were also used, they were almost everywhere of secondary importance compared to the expansion of acreage. The only exception was the wheat-importing countries of Western and Central Europe, where it was nearly impossible to convert fallow or pastureland into arable land. However, these countries had modern agricultural sciences and applied their findings to increase yields per hectare.⁸⁴

In Eastern Europe, in contrast, the amount of arable land increased, especially for the cultivation of wheat: “Wheat acreage expanded from less than 14 million [acres], 1885–89, to more than 25 million, 1935–1939. In general, this represented a movement to poorer wheat lands.”⁸⁵ Consequently, the per hectare yields of European exporters – which, in the period between 1885 and 1895, were still at the same level as in the European importing countries and significantly higher than those of oversea exporters – fell in relation to their competitors.⁸⁶

The dominance of the extensive growth strategy rose significantly from 1914 onwards. This had important effects on the grain and wheat markets. Contrary to a central assumption in the market model of the classical economy, changes in demand, which are usually expressed in prices that reflect shortages, had almost no effect on the volume of production. The development of land for cereal cultivation was usually not motivated by economic considerations in the narrower sense but was part of politically or geostrategically motivated projects of territorial expansion. It partly served national political objectives and was often the result of more or less controlled migration and colonization processes.⁸⁷ For this reason, developments in wheat production and demand were only loosely linked. Moreover, it was extremely difficult to reduce production when demand fell, because this would have meant no longer using the land that had just been developed. Only a few Western European countries in the 1920s and the USA managed to do so in response to the 1929 crisis, and in both cases, there were attractive alternatives.⁸⁸ According to calculations by Wilfred Malenbaum, the difference between the area required for wheat cultivation and the area actually cultivated rose to over 10 per cent in the late 1920s. This led to increasing production for industrial processing and rising wheat stocks but not to restrictions on production.⁸⁹

Neither the demand for cereals and especially wheat nor the consumption of products that derived from cereals and especially wheat follow the theoretical models of the free market. In global terms, wheat consumption continued to increase after 1918 because the population grew. However, per capita consumption stagnated and even declined under certain circumstances. In Western and Central Europe – in the regions with the highest wheat imports – population growth was also relatively modest, unlike the substantial rise during the nineteenth century. Here, neither rising incomes nor falling wheat prices led to an increase in wheat consumption. In good times, more vegetables and meat were consumed, and in times of crisis, rye, potatoes, or rice were the main sources of income. Accordingly, wheat lacks a correlation between price development and supply and the “demand [for wheat] is exceptionally inelastic”.⁹⁰

The Wheat Market in the 1920s

The special (in some respects) market for wheat still held an important position in world trade in the 1920s. The volume of the wheat trade was increasingly and precisely recorded in world statistics, the only difference being the extent of Soviet foreign trade: “The trade in wheat grew from an annual average of 686 million bushels for the 1909–1913 crop years to an annual average of 777 million bushels for the 1922–1926 crop years.”⁹¹ Most contemporary studies on the global wheat trade distinguish between five groups of countries. On the exporters’ side, firstly, the so-called “Big Four” from oversea – Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the USA – together accounted for more than 80 per cent of net exports; secondly, the six European exporting countries – Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia (Soviet Union), and Yugoslavia – had a share of 10 to 15 per cent; and thirdly, a number of non-European countries – such as India as well as North African and South American countries – together accounted for about 5 per cent of wheat exports (see Table 3). On the net importers’ side, a distinction was made between European countries from the west, north, south, and centre of the continent and non-European countries; the former accounted for about 25 per cent of world production but could only cover about 75 per cent of their own needs and were therefore the most important group of importers.⁹²

Table 3:Distribution of Average Annual World Wheat Exports, 1909–1938 (percentage). Source: R. M. Stern, “A Century of Food Exports”, Kyklos 13 (1960), pp. 44–64, at 58.

The most important change in the order of exporting countries compared to that from the pre-war period was the increasing importance of the “Big Four”, especially Canada, and the decreasing importance of the Eastern European exporting countries. After the end of the First World War, all the countries of Eastern Europe were confronted with diverse and serious challenges, often very different in detail.⁹³ However, the aim everywhere was to rebuild agricultural production and politically stabilize the “new states” by making social concessions to the newly dominant ethnic groups.

Land reforms – the division of large estates and the handing over of plots of land to former farm workers, being landless or land-poor farmers – were based on social and nationality policy motives. The extent to which interventions in ownership and farm size structures inhibited or promoted agricultural production was as controversial amongst contemporaries as it was in agricultural history research.⁹⁴ It is clear that smaller farms tended to grow less wheat than large farms before the war and that the share of wheat consumed on a farm was much higher; therefore, less grain was available for export. Moreover, improvements in the productivity of wheat production were mostly driven by large estates.⁹⁵ For this reason, land reforms are often cited as the reason why Eastern European countries were unable to regain their strong positions on world wheat markets.⁹⁶ This view is contradicted by the fact that land reforms have been implemented with very different degrees of consistency. In Hungary, for example, the large land holdings traditionally producing mostly wheat remained almost untouched. Nevertheless, neither Hungary nor the Soviet Union, whose agriculture was organized in large operating units after collectivization in the 1930s, were able to redevelop their grain exports in a sustainable manner.

In principle, all Eastern European states, including the Soviet Union, tried to tie in with the development strategies of the pre-war period and to generate investment funds for the implementation of national industrialization plans through income from agricultural exports. The fact that this not quite succeeded until the outbreak of the world economic crisis was due less to changes in the size of farms than to the long duration of the reconstruction process in agriculture, which, after 1918, suffered from continuing armed conflicts, the disintegration of the Eastern European economic area, and the practices of economic nationalism that shaped foreign trade relations and large parts of everyday economic life.⁹⁷

The situation was made more difficult by the fact that oversea competitors wanted and were able to maintain the positions on the Western European markets they had acquired during the war. Experts from the Food Research Institute, founded at Stanford University in 1921, noted: “The decline in Russian, Danubian, and Indian exports being much more than offset by increases from Canada, Argentina, and Australia.”⁹⁸ The war had also changed the attitudes of many Western European politicians towards their agricultural sectors. Countries such as Germany, Italy, and France were striving for a higher share of self-sufficiency or even complete self-sufficiency, especially in the field of wheat production. The ultimate goal was now to increase wheat production, even if this required considerable investment in breeding new varieties and in improving the soil through fertilization or amelioration. Many grain-importing countries began to subsidize their farmers, increase customs duties, and erect other trade barriers even before the outbreak of the global economic crisis.⁹⁹ However, the Eastern European countries that exported agricultural goods reinforced the trend towards protectionism by also pursuing a policy of protective tariffs, mostly in the interest of their young industries.

The Wheat Market in the Global Economic Crisis

As a result of the structural features of the wheat market mentioned above and the growing supply from oversea producers, wheat prices fell below pre-war levels as early as 1920–1922, although the reconstruction of agricultural production at that time was not yet complete in many parts of Europe, and food was still lacking in some regions. From 1923 to 1925, agricultural prices rose, and between 1925 and 1929, they fell again, while almost all industrial prices rose, which worsened the terms of trade at the expense of agricultural goods exporters.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless, the size of the “world wheat area” increased by 13 per cent between 1924 and 1929. The “Big Four” even increased the area producing wheat by 20 per cent.¹⁰¹ This led to a significant drop in wheat prices, whereas, at the same time, stock increased, especially after the good global harvest of 1928.¹⁰²

This analysis of wheat prices shows that the world economic crisis from 1929 to 1933 further reinforced the already existing downward trend. In East-Central and South-eastern Europe, the relationship between industrial and agricultural commodity prices also changed to the disadvantage of the rural population.¹⁰³ From 1930 to 1934, the index of all agricultural prices declined by 45 per cent in Poland and by 35 per cent in Romania. Domestic wheat prices fell by about 50 per cent in all Eastern Europe. The corresponding declines in the indexes of prices paid by the peasants were 29 per cent in Poland and 16 per cent in Romania.¹⁰⁴

The reason for this development was that the grain sector, which was already in a structural crisis, was additionally confronted with a general recession in which consumption stagnated or even declined. Moreover, virtually all countries continued to hamper foreign trade through protectionist measures. Countries such as Germany, France, and Italy increased tariffs on agricultural imports many times between 1929 and 1933, with wheat tariffs particularly being raised to a great extent. Countries such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium, which had previously practised mostly free trade, introduced import duties on agricultural products. At the peak of the crisis in 1933, even countries that had been advocates of economic liberalism since the middle of the nineteenth century controlled their foreign trade through central government institutions. The grain trade was in the hands of state monopolies, and domestic agriculture received state subsidies.¹⁰⁵ However, European importers were not initially able to significantly increase their degree of self-sufficiency, which was around 70 per cent, despite the significant rise in economic nationalism and protectionism. As a result, they remained the most important market for wheat exporters even in the crisis years, as they had amassed 73 per cent of all (global) wheat exports.¹⁰⁶

In addition to falling demand for wheat on the most important markets, wheat exports from the countries of Central and South-eastern Europe suffered from the fact that the Soviet Union during the global economic crisis made more concerted attempts to tie in with the export traditions of the tsarist empire. In its early years, the Soviet Union had been neither willing nor able to export wheat in the face of wars against external enemies and against civil war at home as well as under the conditions of war communism and the famine of 1920/21. This was first achieved in 1923, with the Soviet leadership accepting supply shortages on the domestic market – which was similar to tsarist Russia.¹⁰⁷ The volume of Soviet wheat exports remained relatively low in the 1920s, as harvests fluctuated widely and production was mostly below pre-war levels, while domestic consumption increased. In addition, even in the period of the New Economic Policy, farmers had little interest in export production because the state-fixed prices were not lucrative.¹⁰⁸ It was not until the good harvests of 1930 and 1931 that Soviet wheat exports of 2.3 million and 5.2 million metric tonnes, respectively, were made possible; however, due to the low world market prices, these brought in considerably less foreign exchange for the state treasury than the leadership around Joseph Stalin had hoped for.¹⁰⁹ In the following two years, wheat exports fell as production plummeted due to poor natural conditions and the consequences of forced collectivization. There was a great famine during this period, which claimed several million lives in the Soviet wheat-growing regions, particularly in Ukraine.¹¹⁰

European Crisis Management Strategies of the “Big Four” and the Countries of Eastern Europe

All in all, the world economic crisis reinforced the global imbalance between rising production and stagnating consumption of wheat, which had already existed before 1929, and thus accelerated the fall in prices. As a result, the wheat crisis was mostly interpreted as an overproduction crisis and is regarded as one of the causes of the extraordinary severity of the Great Depression.¹¹¹ The wheat-importing countries reacted to this by strengthening their respective national protectionism, creating incentives to raise domestic prices and, consequently, to increase their own agricultural production. They adopted a policy of economic nationalism as a means of keeping people on the land or of making the nation more self-sufficient in food in the event of war. For example, in the five years from 1927 to 1931, Germany produced 137.2 million bushels and Austria 11.9 million. In 1938, Germany, including Austria, produced 221.2 million. In corresponding periods, Great Britain increased its production from 47.1 to 73.3 million.¹¹²

It was much more difficult for wheat-exporting countries to find a strategy to protect their farmers from ruin. Farmers in the “Big Four” states had been able to serve a growing market for decades, only being forced to compete since the First World War. They were now faced with a shrinking market. While the wheat trade averaged 808 million bushels per year between 1927 and 1931, which was a slight increase, the amount fell to 572 million bushels between 1932 and 1936.¹¹³ The bad harvest of 1930 also made it clear how important wheat exports were for foreign trade, and in the case of Argentina, Australia, and Canada, also for the entire national economy.¹¹⁴ It gradually became evident that a further increase in production would only exacerbate the problem. At the same time, only the state seemed to be able to break the vicious circle of procyclical action.

Even if the measures taken by the individual states differed considerably in detail, some common features can be identified in retrospect. Firstly, it now became blatantly clear that the cereal crisis could not be tackled by national measures alone, instead requiring global solutions; moreover, the creation of regional alliances was also seen as possibly helpful.¹¹⁵ Secondly, attempts were made everywhere to regulate the market or even to shut it down completely. Both objectives were related. For example, an international agreement on production quotas or the sharing of markets necessarily presupposed control over production or, at least, trade in each individual state. This could not be achieved in the agricultural sector of the economy, which was characterized by a large number of producers by cartel agreements of large private companies; but only through institutions that were either state-owned or were acting on behalf of the state. Thirdly, the “Big Four” states tried to support farmers affected by falling prices or production restrictions by means of subsidies. These state interventions not only burdened national budgets, which were already strained during the global economic crisis, but also often did not meet the expectations placed on them.¹¹⁶

Unfortunately, there is no comparative study of crisis management measures. However, there are indications that subsidies for farmers affected by the wheat crisis in the USA and Canada often served as an incentive to increase production as well as tended to exacerbate the crisis.¹¹⁷ In Australia, wheat acreage continued to grow, and the Australian Wheat Board bought wheat at a guaranteed price, which forced the government to depreciate the currency, making wheat more competitive on external markets but worsening the balance of payments.¹¹⁸ The Argentinean government took a similar course, buying up three-quarters of the grain harvest in 1933/34. Canada succeeded in reducing the supply, with the government buying up and storing wheat. However, this caused the country to lose its leading position in the wheat market, as it was overtaken by Argentina and Australia. After the crisis seemed to have bottomed out and prices had risen slightly in 1933, the Canadian Wheat Board returned to export promotion.¹¹⁹

Despite declining demand, significantly lower prices, and correspondingly low profitability, all the players associated with wheat exports in Eastern Europe also attempted to continue, or even increase, exporting wheat during the Great Depression. The farmers were concerned with making enough income to ensure the subsistence of their families and to be able to meet financial obligations to creditors and the state. Converting production to other crop cultivation or to livestock farming did not seem possible in the short or medium term. The Eastern European states had a great interest in the continuation of agricultural exports, as they had taken out relatively high loans and increased imports of industrial products in the years 1924–1929 and, consequently, mostly had a negative balance of payments. Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia were already the most heavily indebted countries in Europe at the beginning of the crisis. The interest and dividend payments of these four countries rose from USD 71 million in 1926 to USD 134 million in 1929 and finally to USD 163 million in 1932.¹²⁰ While the value of imports from these countries rose from USD 754 million to USD 922 million between 1925 and 1928, export earnings stagnated, falling to USD 700 million.¹²¹

In 1930, the wheat harvest in Eastern Europe – unlike oversea – was exceptionally good and offered an opportunity to generate much-needed export revenue by increasing volume despite falling prices.¹²² In fact, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia tripled the volume of their grain exports from 1928 to 1933. At the same time, the respective export quotas fell; consequently, the share of agricultural products in exports rose to 80 per cent in Bulgaria, 60 per cent in Hungary, and 50 per cent each in Poland and Romania.¹²³ This development was based on a large number of government measures designed to promote the export of agricultural goods in general and often of wheat in particular. Producers received subsidies that were intended to enable them to offer wheat on external markets at dumping prices. At the same time, interventions in domestic markets ensured that prices were higher there than on world markets.¹²⁴

These measures could only be implemented through the forced cartelization of agricultural trade, the establishment of state monopolistic trade organizations, and the management of foreign exchange.¹²⁵ In Hungary, for example, the export of flour was subsidized by the state, and all agricultural trade was controlled by semi-governmental agencies in the form of cooperatives or joint stock companies.¹²⁶ In addition to the state buying up products and subsidizing exports, Romania and Bulgaria, and later Poland and Yugoslavia, enacted laws in 1934 that cancelled part of the debts of many farmers.¹²⁷

All these measures taken by the countries of Central and South-eastern Europe could only dampen the consequences of a structural agricultural crisis exacerbated by the economic slump for their farmers and farm workers. These measures were also connected with serious side effects and inefficiencies, creating an enormous burden on already strained national budgets as well as operating at the expense of domestic consumers. As national measures in each case, they caused ruinous competition between the Eastern European states. In this situation, it became increasingly clear that only internationally coordinated measures could overcome the procyclical vicious circle of Western European protectionism and Eastern European export promotion.¹²⁸ The depth of the crisis and the obvious unsuitability of nation-state policy instruments meant that national elites were prepared to hand over competences in the field of economic policy, especially agricultural policy, to Europe.¹²⁹ If the Eastern European states wanted to achieve a result favourable to them at an international or European level, they had to recognize their common interests and act together despite all other political differences.

4 Internationalization as a Crisis Management Strategy

Before the First World War

The globalization of the wheat markets was linked to diverse processes of the internationalization of politics and science. The most important institutions in this respect in the period before the First World War were the International Congresses of Agriculture (ten congresses between 1889 and 1914) and the International Institute of Agriculture, which was created in 1905 and based in Rome.¹³⁰ The problems of Western and Central European agriculture, which resulted from the competition between America and Russia, were on the agenda at the first agricultural congress, initiated by the French agricultural politician Jules Méline and organized in Paris. Amongst other things, the pros and cons of protectionism and state agricultural subsidies were discussed. The congresses in The Hague (1891) and Brussels (1895) focused on “internal” counterstrategies, such as improvements in agricultural credit and the establishment of cooperatives. The congresses in Budapest (1896), Lausanne (1898), Paris (1900), and Rome (1903) focused on demands for restrictions on futures trading by regulating stock exchanges and for a bimetallic currency system as an alternative to the gold standard. German representatives put forward these demands, often supported by representatives from the Habsburg monarchy and Switzerland.

The congresses were therefore not only places for professional dialogue between agricultural experts from different countries but also arenas for the representation of economic interests and forums – where the shaping of globalization, according to its own rules, was promoted. At the Budapest agricultural congress, criticism was directed primarily at the conditions on the wheat market. For example, the chairman of the German Association of Farmers (Bund der Landwirte), Berthold von Ploetz spoke of a “stock market Moloch” dominated by “international big business”.¹³¹ In order to protect agriculture on the European continent, the creation of a European customs union consisting of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary and the establishment of an international organization to regulate the grain trade were discussed, which was advocated in particular by the Swiss Ernst Laur. Neither initiative was implemented partly because Germany lost interest in the agricultural congresses from 1903 onwards, as they were considered to be dominated by France. The congresses now concentrated more on technical and agricultural topics again.¹³²

The creation of an international organization to deal with the global grain trade was also discussed elsewhere. In 1903, the agricultural societies of Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Serbia founded an international commission to coordinate the wheat and flour trades. The aim was to encourage European producers to cooperate in marketing their own products in order to strengthen their position in global competition. However, the commission was ineffective because farmers only cooperated cautiously. The regulation of the sugar market by the International Sugar Convention (1902), which was signed in Brussels by all major European countries except Russia, was more successful. It provided for the abolition of import restrictions and export subsidies and for the equal treatment of cane and beet sugar. The International Sugar Council would monitor its implementation. In fact, this international agreement ended the subsidy race between the main producers of beet sugar: Germany, the Habsburg monarchy, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.¹³³

The hope for an international order of the grain market played a decisive role in the founding history of the International Institute of Agriculture. David Lubin – who was born in the Russian part of Poland in 1849, came to the USA as a child, later searched for gold in California, then successfully built up a mail-order business, and, from 1885, grew cereals and fruit – had already presented his idea of an international chamber of agriculture at the Budapest agricultural congress. Lubin, unlike many European representatives of agricultural interest groups, especially from Germany, was less concerned with state intervention. In agreement with the American anti-trust movement, he considered an international association of farmers to be urgently needed, which, on the one hand, was to form a counterweight to industry and trade organized in large companies and international cartels and syndicates. On the other hand, he hoped that this would balance the interests of American and European producers of agricultural goods, especially wheat, and of all producers and consumers who suffered from price fluctuations caused largely by speculators. He promoted his ideas on a trip to Europe until he finally received support in Italy.

In 1905, a conference attended by governments and agricultural organizations from 41 countries decided to establish the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome (the predecessor of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). Contrary to what Lubin and the Italian government had sought, the institute was not given instruments to effectively protect farmers from cartels and speculation. Accordingly, even if the institute was not able to intervene directly in the agricultural market, its collection of data from all over the world on agricultural production, prices, farm workers’ wages, credit opportunities, and so on had improved the functionality of the market through greater transparency.¹³⁴

Both the history of the agricultural congresses and of the International Institute of Agriculture are told in the historiography as part of a Western intertwining process. The Habsburg monarchy – particularly Hungary, which was the leader in agricultural and agrarian policy issues – played a constitutive and important role everywhere. However, there is some evidence that other actors from Eastern Europe also sought solutions to the agricultural, or wheat, crisis in an international context at an early stage. The Hungarian landowner and politician Sándor Károlyi, for example, organized an international agricultural congress in Budapest as early as 1885, which was not (as had been customary) limited to descriptions of the situation in various areas of agriculture but resolutely sought ways out of the “international agricultural crisis”. Only a few years after the introduction of protective tariffs by some states, experts argued that long-term stable trade agreements or even a customs union including Germany, France, and Austria-Hungary would be a more effective instrument in the competition against North America.¹³⁵ Jenő Gaál, an economist at the Technical University of Budapest, proposed a different solution at the same congress. He warned of the agronomic and economic consequences of a cereal monoculture – taking little account of crop rotation, being detrimental to livestock farming, and making the crop too dependent on export markets – and pleaded for the reduction of wheat production.¹³⁶

Russia, as an emerging wheat exporter before 1914, was interested in international regulatory measures of a very different kind. In 1896, Ernst von Kotzebue, the Russian envoy to the USA, proposed a bilateral agreement to Richard Olney, the US secretary of state, to “withhold from the market the wheat not needed for domestic consumption in their countries, thereby raising the price to a level corresponding to the standard rate”. He reported a positive Russian experience with intervention in the wheat market and expressed the conviction that these measures would be in the interest of the two largest exporters of grain. Citing their liberal principles of trade, the USA rejected these measures.¹³⁷

The examples above confirm the thesis that internationalist initiatives often came from business circles.¹³⁸ In the case of agriculture, its protagonists were often supported by governments, although actors from Eastern Europe were also involved. The motives and goals for the development of international solution strategies were manifold. They ranged from sealing off global market interdependencies to attempts to create cartel-like alliances for joint market dominance and the establishment of regulatory mechanisms to order the market.

Internationalist Strategies to Fight the Wheat Crisis in the Interwar Period

The First World War naturally represented a massive setback for all international institutions and projects aimed at economic cooperation and integration. At the same time, a more intensive cooperation within the Entente and between the Entente and its oversea food suppliers was established. Numerous networks established during this period continued to operate in the post-war period and influenced various bodies of the League of Nations (LoN). After 1918, both the victorious powers and the LoN, dominated by the winners of the war, pursued an apparently plausible goal in terms of the world economy: a return to free trade and the gold standard.¹³⁹ Only the confrontation with the Great Depression and the growing economic nationalism everywhere made it clear to the experts of the Economic and Financial Organization in the LoN that these goals did not meet the complex requirements of the post-war situation.

In the course of preparations for the World Financial and Economic Conference, held in London in 1933, advisors of the LoN, who had previously been strict free traders, developed flexible responses to the protectionism of nation-states. They now advocated a combination of international solutions, regional agreements, and bilateral negotiations that would at least reduce customs duties and other trade barriers, as their complete abolition was considered completely illusory. Agreements to regulate global commodity markets by setting quotas for production and trade, for example for coal, meat, and especially wheat, now also seemed desirable or, at least, the lesser evil.¹⁴⁰

If now “the invention of international market intervention […] was the central element of internationalism in the world agricultural crisis” of the interwar period,¹⁴¹ this was not primarily due to a departure of liberal economists from the ideology of free trade. The fact that the representatives of national agricultural protectionism also took up international cooperation from the pre-war period as early as the mid-1920s was just as important. The International Commission of Agriculture (Commission Internationale d’Agriculture, CIA), founded in 1889 on the fringes of the first International Congress of Agriculture (mentioned previously), played a central role in promoting international cooperation.¹⁴² Even then, an alliance of Europe’s agricultural stakeholders against competition from oversea was being sought, as the Polish social scientist Sigismund Gargas emphasized in retrospect.¹⁴³ The division of Europe by war, which the victorious French power continued to pursue after 1918, and the general shortage of food temporarily put the advocates of European protectionism on the defensive.

However, developments in the cereal markets encouraged a return to common agricultural interests in Germany and France. In 1925, the CIA was re-established at a conference in Bern. It involved representatives of 68 agricultural associations, coming from not only large Western states, such as Germany, France, Italy, and the USA, but also Eastern European states, namely Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. At the first official meeting of the CIA in Paris in March 1927, the 6 countries from Eastern Europe were represented amongst the 21 states attending.¹⁴⁴ The CIA was soon called the Green International, that is to say an institutionalized alliance of agricultural interest groups that opposed the liberal orientation of the first World Economic Conference, organized by the LoN in Geneva in 1927.

This orientation was not only based on “politics of interests” but also the expression of a sociopolitical model of “agrarianism”, which emphasized the special features of life in the countryside and work in agriculture. The aim was to create a society of small owners in which the rules of rural family economy determined the values of an inwardly rather weak state that had to protect the rural population from the dangers of globalization.¹⁴⁵ The interest groups from Eastern Europe, that is to say farmers’ and agrarian parties, played a much greater role than in Western Europe, especially in the 1920s, and they undoubtedly had a strong influence on the CIA’s agrarianist model. They also formed an essential basis for the strength of the Green International due to their membership numbers.¹⁴⁶ To what extent Eastern European representatives at the CIA, such as the Pole Stanisław Humnicki and the Czech Vladislav Brdlík, determined political action alongside well-known agrarians, such as Ernst Laur, Jules Gautier, and Andreas Hermes, has not yet been investigated.

In terms of trade policy, the CIA aimed at the creation of European agricultural protectionism – a shielding of national markets through coordinated measures, such as the levying of import duties and the introduction of non-tariff trade barriers – and a global organization of agricultural markets through production and foreign trade planning by means of international commodity agreements.¹⁴⁷ The cartels established in some industrial sectors, which also combined protection and intergovernmental cooperation, served as a model. The Eastern European member associations linked these two objectives with their demand for an intra-European system of tariff preferences.¹⁴⁸ Their support for the protection of Western European markets against cheap cereals from oversea was made conditional on the creation of privileged access for their exports to these markets. The willingness of the Western European associations to respond to this demand depended on how they assessed the attitude of domestic farmers and the chances of being able to enforce their own demands against oversea grain exporters.

The stability of the alliance between national agricultural lobbyists in the CIA also depended on substantive and institutional competition – between the Economic and Financial Organization of the LoN, together with its previously dominant anti-protectionist experts, and the International Institute of Agriculture. The International Institute of Agriculture had intensified its activities since the mid-1920s particularly because the leadership of fascist Italy had recognized that the institute, with its global orientation, could be a valuable instrument for foreign policy and foreign trade interests and therefore the government significantly increased its influence in the organization. With the foundation of the Permanent International Commission of Agricultural Associations (Commission Internationale Permanente des Associations Agricoles, CIPA), an organization under the control of the International Institute of Agriculture was created, which was in direct competition with the CIA. The main focus of the commission was exerting influence on the LoN as well as representation of the agricultural interest groups at the international congresses organized by the LoN.¹⁴⁹ Although the CIA was able to assert itself against the CIPA, the CIA came under National Socialist influence from 1933 onwards. Parts of the agrarianist ideology and the idea of international commodity agreements were attractive to National Socialist Germany. Conversely, organizations represented in the CIA were interested in German concepts for the organization of the agricultural market and the preservation of the peasantry, such as the Reichsnährstand as a statutory corporation of farmers and the Reichserbhofgesetz, which was a law linking farm succession to the principle of racial origin.

The competition between international agricultural organizations is not just an interesting part of the history of internationalism. Its results had a great significance for the conditions of the international agricultural markets and also for the Eastern European wheat exporters. Between 1930 and 1933, 20 international conferences on the agricultural crisis took place, at which appropriate multilateral solutions were sought and compromises were reached in the face of conflicting interests. If one asks about the role of the Eastern European countries in this process, it must first be pointed out that the Soviet Union was initially excluded. Nevertheless, the other Eastern European countries, which, in contemporary sources, were mostly summarized as the Danube countries, played an important role from the beginning. Amongst the 20 conferences, 7 alone were used by representatives of the Eastern European countries for internal communication. The core was formed by the four wheat-exporting countries, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria, as well as Poland, which exported very little wheat, instead trading rye and barley as well as various other agricultural products. Polish agricultural policy-makers had recognized that the problems of the wheat trade were particularly serious and that regional alliances and international solutions in this area could serve as a model for other commodities.

Since the World Economic Conference in Geneva, the LoN had attempted at various conferences to reach agreements to reduce or at least freeze customs duties. However, France did not want to accept any restrictions on its customs policy sovereignty regarding agriculture in the country. The Eastern European states also rejected any of these measures.¹⁵⁰ First, they represented the interests of a large part of the Eastern European industries, which lacked international competitiveness. Second, they rejected these on principle because customs policy was a political instrument that could be used as a means of exerting pressure in foreign relations. Third, and perhaps ultimately the most decisive reason for rejecting the LoN’s trade policy initiatives, was that they envisaged no, or only minimal, opening of the Western European agricultural markets.¹⁵¹

In March 1930, after numerous failed attempts, the LoN asked its member states by means of questionnaires for proposals for measures to improve relations between industrial and agricultural states. The Romanian minister of trade and industry, Virgil Madgearu, endeavoured to find a common position amongst the Eastern European agricultural-exporting countries and invited his colleagues from Yugoslavia and Hungary to a meeting in Bucharest. Madgearu had studied economics at Leipzig University, was the leading head of a left-wing agrarianism in Romania, and sat on the cabinet as a representative of the Peasants’ Party.¹⁵² Madgearu wanted to achieve the taking out of the most-favoured nation clause contained in most of the trade contracts for the grain trade. He argued that deleting this clause would not harm Western European farmers and would only minimally reduce the sales of the oversea cereal exporters who dominate the market while greatly helping Eastern European cereal producers. Madgearu’s demand was rejected by an overwhelming majority at the Geneva Conference for a Tariff Truce in February 1930 because many saw it as an attack on a fundamental principle of free trade policy. In Bucharest, however, he managed to persuade his colleagues from Hungary and Yugoslavia to agree to his aim and to return the questionnaires with uniform demands to Geneva. However, he did not succeed in eliminating the competition between the Eastern European wheat exporters, which was also his aim.

At the end of August 1930, Poland organized in Warsaw an international conference of agricultural countries, in which almost all Eastern European states took part.¹⁵³ The regionalist character of the conference is reflected in the participation of Czechoslovakia, which was the only industrialized country in Eastern Europe, and in the observer status of Finland. Once again, it was a question, firstly, of cooperation between the states themselves and, secondly, of joint action at an international level. The states agreed to facilitate mutual trade by amending or abolishing veterinary regulations in particular, which had mainly served as non-tariff barriers to trade. An agreement to abolish export subsidies mainly affected the wheat trade and was a first measure against ruinous competition in the form of mutually outbidding subsidies. In addition, in Warsaw and at the now regular meetings of the Eastern European agricultural states, measures were agreed on for mutual information and coordinated action on export markets, which helped to ensure a certain regulation of the market and, above all, a stabilization of prices. Nevertheless, these objectives were only achieved to a limited extent due to conflicting interests and technical reasons, such as the lack of storage capacity.

The demand originally made by Romania and then again by Yugoslavia and Hungary for a general deletion of the most-favoured nation clause was modified in Warsaw, with supporters seeking only a temporary preference to be granted to European agricultural products, especially cereals, on all European markets. In this form, preferential tariffs were also accepted by conference subjects who, like Czechoslovakia, had no direct interest in this point. This increased the assertiveness of the Eastern Europeans in the international arena because the members of the “agricultural bloc” formed in Warsaw jointly stood up for the demands decided on in the conference.¹⁵⁴

Subsequently, the CIA leadership took up the idea of preferential tariffs for grain. Through their growing influence in the Agricultural Expert Commission, founded in 1929, the preferential tariffs became an important element of the strategies discussed at the LoN to overcome the agricultural crisis and the world economic crisis. Therefore, in 1931, the LoN, which until then had been a major proponent of the principles of free trade and thus also of most-favoured nation status, founded a Committee to Study the Problem of the Export of Future Harvest Surpluses of Cereals, which promoted the development of a European preference system.

The concept received further impetus after the British Empire Economic Conference, held in Ottawa in 1932, introduced a system of “imperial preference” in trade policy, which privileged the exchange of goods between Great Britain, the autonomous dominion, and colonies over trade with third countries. This step, which was exceptional for the traditionally free-trading Great Britain, would not have come about without the predicament of the Great Depression, but it was made easier by the historical heritage of the empire. Similarly, Eastern European farmers justified their aspired privilege on Western European markets by referring to the centuries-old intra-European trade relations.¹⁵⁵

There are also references in some European plans of the late 1920s to the idea of a common and protected market for Western European industry and Eastern European agriculture.¹⁵⁶ Amongst the many reasons for their failure and for the triumph of nationalism in the 1930s is the fact that major Western actors always sought pan-European customs alliances when it seemed certain to them that either their own state or, at least, no other state would be given a hegemonic position in these alliances.¹⁵⁷

The climax and turning point in the movement initiated by the Eastern European states for a European grain market protected from the outside world was the Stresa Agricultural Conference in September 1932, where delegates from all the major European states, except the Scandinavian countries, Spain, and the Soviet Union, were to agree on proposals with which the Study Commission for the European Union, founded in 1930 by the LoN, was to represent a common European position at the World Financial and Economic Conference in 1933. The crisis in the Eastern European agricultural states was at the centre of these proposals. In retrospect, the Stresa conference represents an extremely ambivalent event. On the one hand, proposals were made to combat the wheat crisis at an international level, which had a considerable impact. In addition to a large number of foreign trade agreements, which were to constitute an intra-European preference system, there were various credit programmes that were to benefit both indebted agricultural states and their farms as well as the establishment of a fund for the improvement of economic structures in agricultural Eastern Europe, which was to be financed by all participating states. On the other hand, Stresa’s internationalism was not global but exclusively European, in other words, regionally oriented. In addition to economic and European policy approaches, power policy objectives played a central role. France particularly tried to attract the Eastern European states through generous offers, thereby reducing the influence of Germany and Italy. After this succeeded only to a limited extent, because states like Romania did not want to give up important sales markets, the French lost interest in the European project.¹⁵⁸

Before regional solutions of a different kind, such as the Großwirtschaftsraum (greater German economic area), prevailed, attempts to solve the wheat crisis through a global approach reached their peak. The International Wheat Conference in London in 1933 is considered “the first global effort by major wheat producers to manage the world trade in wheat by setting export quotas and reducing the volume of land seeded to wheat”.¹⁵⁹ In fact, all major wheat-exporting and -importing countries participated in this conference. The Soviet Union was also present, although it was not yet a member of the LoN and had not yet been recognized by other important participating states under international law.

The wheat-exporting countries agreed at the conference on two measures to stabilize wheat prices and to avoid overproduction in the future. Firstly, the volume of wheat trade was to be reduced to 560 million bushels in 1933/34 and to only a slightly larger quantity in 1934/35.¹⁶⁰ To this end, appropriate quotas were set for the individual exporting countries. Canada was allowed to export 200 million bushels, Argentina 110 million, Australia 105 million, the Danube countries 50 million, the USA 47 million, and other states, including the Soviet Union, 48 million. Secondly, the acreage used for wheat cultivation should be reduced by 15 per cent in a few years. However, only the “Big Four” committed themselves to this. The Danube countries again justified their strict refusal to reduce their own wheat cultivation area by even a single acre by referring to their historical rights to Western European markets. In doing so, they referred to the loss of their once very good position in the world market caused by the world war. In their view, “[a]creage movements in the Danube countries were not of international concern so long as their exports were below the prewar level”. Consequently, “acreage reductions should be made by countries where the greatest expansion over prewar acreage had taken place”.¹⁶¹

Other criteria discussed in London for determining shares in the global wheat trade and for the obligation to reduce cultivated areas were the respective production costs, the importance of the wheat economy in the respective economies, and the existence of alternatives to wheat production. Taking these criteria into account, the aim was to force US farmers in particular to reduce their production and export of wheat. This was also done in the 1930s, flanked by the economic policy of the New Deal (1933–1939). However, all other wheat-exporting countries, after a short time, had only partially or not at all fulfilled the commitments they had made in London. This also applied to the wheat-importing states, which had promised not to expand their own production, to gradually reduce customs duties, and to promote wheat consumption. The Wheat Advisory Commission, also founded in London in 1933, was unable to prevent the violations of the agreement, but it did document them.¹⁶²

5 Summary

We found that Eastern European wheat exporters were able to hold their own very well until the First World War in one of the first truly global markets. This was based on extensive production growth, especially observable in Russia and Romania. The Eastern European cereal monoculture naturally represented a structural disadvantage for modern Eastern European agriculture in the medium and long term. On the other hand, it formed an irreplaceable basis for the intensive integration of Eastern Europe with the world economy. In Hungary in particular, there were also attempts to counter the increasing international competition on the wheat market with a mix of protectionism, increasing the degree of processing of export goods, and the diversification of agricultural production and exports. In the Kingdom of Poland, on the other hand, a constellation occurred that was rather rare in Eastern Europe, in which the declining international competitiveness of agriculture promoted the industrialization of some subregions.

In the 1920s, the tendency towards overproduction on the global wheat market increased significantly. One reason for this was that exporters from oversea had taken over a large part of the wheat supply of Western European countries under the conditions of the First World War and tried to maintain this position after the war. In this constellation, the structurally induced inability of wheat producers to react to changes in market conditions unfolded. During the Great Depression, the Eastern European states intervened in the grain trade with previously unimaginable intensity, despite their high level of debt, and tried to prevent a decline in agricultural exports through subsidies. They also took up approaches to internationalist strategies from the pre-war period and developed the concept of a European system of tariff preferences. This was transferred to the LoN by the International Commission of Agriculture, where it replaced older market liberal concepts. A decisive prerequisite for this development was the establishment of an Eastern European agricultural bloc, which had a great deal of influence in the CIA, a fact that has, so far, been given little attention by the historiography on European integration.

Considering the failure of European and global attempts at market regulation and the limited effectiveness of national measures to cope with the wheat crisis, it is not surprising that Eastern European wheat exporters were quite willing to assume the role assigned to them within the framework of the Großwirtschaftsraum that was formed from 1933 onwards.¹⁶³ In the following years, they increased their share of world trade and, due to the barter trade system, were less affected by the renewed fall in prices on the global wheat market in 1939 than the oversea producers were.¹⁶⁴ In the same year, however, the Second World War began, again with catastrophic consequences for Eastern European farmers.

In conclusion, it should be emphasized once again that the Eastern European grain economy was extraordinarily closely intertwined with the world economy between 1870 and 1939. It is true that, as a result of war, revolution, and political transformation in the years after the war, Eastern Europe’s share of the global wheat market declined dramatically. In the world economic crisis, foreign trade in general and the wheat trade in particular collapsed. However, this does not mean that one could speak of a general deglobalization. Both the Soviet Union and the Danube countries made different efforts to revitalize and to restructure the wheat trade and increasingly made use of international organizations.

Notes

1

C. O’Grada, R. Paping, and E. Vanhaute (eds.), When the Potato Failed: Causes and Effects of the ‘Last’ European Subsistence Crisis, 1845–1850, Turnhout: Brepols Publisher, 2007.

2

T. Altpeter et al., “Hungersnöte in Russland und in der Sowjetunion 1891–1947”, in: A. Eisfeld, G. Hausmann, and D. Neutatz (eds.), Hungersnöte in Russland und in der Sowjetunion 1891–1947: Regionale, ethnische und konfessionelle Aspekte, Essen: Klartext, 2017, pp. 9–24, at 13–15.

3

This process is one of the most important economic contributions to the development of the global condition.

4

K. H. O’Rourke, “The European Grain Invasion, 1870–1913”, Journal of Economic History 57 (1997), pp. 775–801; P. Gunst, “Agrarian Developments in East Central Europe at the Turn of the Century”, in: P. Gunst (ed.), Hungarian Agrarian Society from the Emancipation of Serfs (1848) to the Re-privatization of Land, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 23–49, at 43 f.

5

G. Mai, “Die Agrarische Transition. Agrarische Gesellschaften in Europa und die Herausforderungen der industriellen Moderne im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 33 (2007), pp. 471–514; U. Müller, E. Kubů, T. Lorenz, and J. Šouša, “Agrarismus und Agrareliten im östlichen Mitteleuropa. Forschungsstand, Kontextualisierung, Thesen”, in: E. Kubů, T. Lorenz, U. Müller, and J. Šouša (eds.), Agrarismus und Agrareliten in Ostmitteleuropa, Berlin and Prague: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag – Dokořán, 2013, pp. 15–116, at 41–49; K. D. Barkin, The Controversy over German Industrialization 1890–1902, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

6

W. Malenbaum, The World Wheat Economy 1885–1939, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, pp. 176–180.

7

R. Bideleux and I. Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe. Crisis and Change, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 437–440.

8

M. Mann, Fascists, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 48–64; A. C. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World. The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism, Standford: Stanford University Press, 2000, pp. 166–201.

9

W. Fischer, “Wirtschaft, Staat und Gesellschaft in Europa 1914–1980”, in: W. Fischer (ed.), Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1987, p. 93.

10

Bideleux and Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe, p. 436; C. H. Feinstein, P. Temin, and G. Toniolo, The European Economy between the Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 76–83; I. T. Berend and G. Ránki, The Hungarian Economy in the Twentieth Century, London: Croom Helm, 1985, pp. 101–103.

11

I. T. Berend and G. Ránki, Economic Development in East-Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, New York: Columbia University Press, 1974, p. 150.

12

See, for example, R. Findlay and K. H. O’Rourke, “Commodity Market Integration, 1500–2000”, in: M. D. Bordo, A. M. Taylor, and J. G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 13–64, at 37–49.

13

S. C. Topik and A. Wells, “Warenketten in einer globalen Wirtschaft”, in: E. S. Rosenberg (ed.), 1870–1945. Weltmärkte und Weltkriege, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012, pp. 589–814, at 809.

14

J. A. Schumpeter, Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie, Stuttgart: UTB, 2005; regarding the Prussian Eastern Provinces: O. Grant, “‘Few Better Farmers in Europe’? Productivity, Change, and Modernization in East-Elbian Agriculture 1870–1913”, in: G. Eley and J. Retallack (eds.), Wilhelminism and Its Legacies. German Modernities and the Meaning of Reform, 1890–1930, New York: Berghahn Books, 2003, pp. 51–59.

15

See the introduction to this volume.

16

G. Thiemeyer, Vom “Pool Vert” zur Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft: Europäische Integration, Kalter Krieg und die Anfänge der Gemeinsamen Europäischen Agrarpolitik 1950–1957, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017.

17

M. D. Bordo, A. M. Taylor, and J. G. Williamsom, “Introduction”, in: Bordo, Taylor, Williamsom (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective, pp. 1–2.

18

G. P. Marchildon, “War, Revolution and the Great Depression in the Global Wheat Trade 1917–1939”, in: L. Coppolaro and F. McKenzie (eds.), A Global History of Trade and Conflict since 1500, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 143. See also G. Federico and K. G. Persson, “Market Integration and Convergence in the World Wheat Market, 1800–2000”, Discussion Papers. Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, 2007, pp. 6–10; Topik and Wells, “Warenketten”, pp. 684–690.

19

Malenbaum, The World Wheat Economy, pp. 23, 65–88.

20

G. Aparicio and V. Pinilla, “International Trade in Wheat and Other Cereals and the Collapse of the First Wave of Globalization, 1900–38,” Journal of Global History 14 (2019) 1, pp. 44–67, at 50–52.

21

Topik and Wells, “Warenketten”, p. 694.

22

“If wheat is the product that historians use to show the progress of the process of international economic integration in the nineteenth century, in the 1930s it also exemplifies the collapse of the first wave of globalization” (Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, p. 46).

23

P. E. Fäßler, Globalisierung. Ein historisches Kompendium, Köln et al.: UTB, 2007, pp. 74–119.

24

Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, p. 45.

25

In these statistics (Federico), Russia and the Habsburg monarchy form “Eastern Europe”. The South-Eastern European states and the Ottoman Empire were apparently not taken into account.

26

Berend and Ránki, Economic Development, p. 289; J. R. Lampe and M. R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, pp. 337–340.

27

The volume of wheat trade increased tenfold between 1846 and 1880. The most important importers in the 1870s were Great Britain, with six million tons; Germany, with three million tons; and France, with two million tons annually. Cf. Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, pp. 46 f.

28

I. T. Berend, An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Europe. Diversity and Industrialization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 288–292.

29

P. Koryś, Poland from Partitions to EU Accession. A Modern Economic History, 1772–2004, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 96–109, at 102.

30

M. Kopsidis and N. Wolf, “Agricultural Productivity across Prussia during the Industrial Revolution: A Thünen Perspective”, Journal of Economic History 72 (2012) 3, p. 639.

31

N. Wolf, “Local Comparative Advantage. Agricultural and Economic Development in Poland, 1870–1973”, in: P. Lains and V. Pinilla (eds.), Agriculture and Economic Development in Europe since 1870, New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 255–285, at 268.

32

K. Kaps, Ungleiche Entwicklung in Zentraleuropa. Galizien zwischen überregionaler Verflechtung und imperialer Politik 1772–1914, Vienna: Böhlau, 2015, pp. 137–165, 342–349, 413–415.

33

Z. Kaposi, Die Entwicklung der Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in Ungarn 1700–2000, Passau: Schenk Verlag, 2007, pp. 36–38, 46–48.

34

C. Ardeleanu, International Trade and Diplomacy at the lower Danube. The Sulina Question and the Economic Premises of the Crimean War (1829–1853), Braila: Editura Istros, 2014, pp. 100–103, 265–267.

35

M. Palairet, The Balkan Economies c. 1800–1914. Evolution without Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 103–108.

36

Topik and Wells, “Warenketten”, p. 688; C. H. Harley, “Transportation, the World Wheat Trade and the Kuznets Cycle, 1850–1913”, Explorations in Economic History 17 (1980), p. 218.

37

M. E. Falkus, “Russia and the International Wheat Trade, 1861–1914”, Economica 33 (1966) 132, pp. 416–429; B. K. Goodwin and T. J. Grennes, “Tsarist Russia and the World Wheat Market”, Explorations in Economic History 35 (1998) 4, pp. 405–430.

38

P. R. Gregory, Before Command. An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 77–80.

39

Cf. for linkages with the intensification of foreign trade in rice between Asian regions, see A. J. H. Latham and L. Neal, “The International Market in Rice and Wheat, 1868–1914”, Economic History Review 36 (1983) 2, pp. 260–280.

40

Transport costs on a global scale fell more than ever before between 1870 and 1910 and not even later. For example, see Findlay and O’Rourke, “Commodity Market Integration”, pp. 35–37; R. Aldenhoff-Hübinger, “Agrarhandel zwischen Integration, Desintegration und transnationaler Kooperation, 1850–1914”, in: C. Henrich-Franke, C. Neutsch, and G. Thiemeyer (eds.), Internationalismus und Europäische Integration im Vergleich. Fallstudien zu Währungen, Landwirtschaft, Verkehrs- und Nachrichtenwesen, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007, pp. 193–202, at 194; Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, p. 155; Marchildon, “War”, p. 4.

41

J. Foreman-Peck, A History of the World Economy. International Economic Relations since 1850, Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1983, pp. 102–106; Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 127–153; Marchildon, “War”, p. 144.

42

M. Bühler, Von Netzwerken zu Märkten. Die Entstehung eines globalen Getreidemarktes, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2019, pp. 103–153.

43

Topik and Wells, “Warenketten”, pp. 692, 712–715.

44

O’Rourke, “The European Grain Invasion”; Findlay and O’Rourke, “Commodity Market Integration”, pp. 40–43.

45

This category included the nation-states of South-Eastern Europe, especially Romania, as well as the Habsburg monarchy.

46

Gregory, Before Command, pp. 27–49, rejects Gerschenkron’s thesis, predominant in older literature, of a Russian agricultural crisis existing in the late nineteenth century and argues, amongst other things, by calling attention to export successes. Similarly, see V. P. Timoshenko, Agricultural Russia and the Wheat Problem, Stanford: Food Research Institute, Stanford University, 1932, pp. 140–150.

47

Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, p. 48.

48

Cited in Goodwin and Grennes, “Tsarist Russia”, p. 408.

49

Bühler, Von Netzwerken zu Märkten, p. 104. On the German-Russian trade conflict, see R. Weitowitz, Deutsche Politik und Handelspolitik unter Reichskanzler Leo von Caprivi 1890–1894, Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978, pp. 228–299.

50

R. Jasper, “Die regionalen Strukturwandlungen des deutschen Außenhandels von 1880 bis 1938”, PhD thesis, FU Berlin, 1996, pp. 240–245.

51

P. Gatrell, “Poor Russia, Poor Show: Mobilising a Backward Economy for War, 1914–1917”, in: S. Broadberry and M. Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 235–275, at 248.

52

Goodwin and Grennes, “Tsarist Russia”, p. 406; Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, p. 51. See also Timoshenko, Russia, pp. 139–150.

53

Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 170.

54

In 1882, Austria-Hungary introduced prohibitive duties against Romanian livestock imports. See R. Preshlenova, “Austro-Hungarian Trade and the Economic Development of Southeastern Europe Before World War I”, in: D. Good (ed.), Economic Transformations in East and Central Europe. Legacies from the Past and Policies for the Future, London: Taylor and Francis, 1994, pp. 231–260, at 237.

55

A. Harre, Wege in die Moderne. Entwicklungsstrategien rumänischer Ökonomen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009, pp. 70 f.

56

Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 159 f.; Gunst, “Agrarian Developments”, pp. 29–34; D. Turnock, Aspects of Independent Romania’s Economic History with Particular Reference to Transition for EU Accession, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 7–15; D. H. Aldcroft, Europe’s Third World. The European Periphery in the Interwar Years, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, p. 29.

57

Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 164; A. Nützenadel, “A Green International? Food Markets and Transnational Politics, c. 1850–1914”, in: A. Nützenadel and F. Trentmann (eds.), Food and Globalization. Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008, p. 154.

58

Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 161–174. It should be noted that London’s importance as a hub for the European wheat trade declined, while Antwerp’s importance increased. Exports to Belgium were often transported on to Great Britain and neighbouring countries, especially Germany. Cf. Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, p. 104.

59

Palairet, The Balkan Economies, pp. 188 f.; Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 174.

60

H. Matis, “Leitlinien der österreichischen Wirtschaftspolitik 1848–1918”, in: A. Brusatti (ed.), Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, Vol. 1: Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 1973, pp. 29–67, at 51f.; I. T. Berend and G. Ránki, “Ungarns wirtschaftliche Entwicklung 1849–1918”, in: ibid., pp. 462–527, at 492–499.

61

M. Szuhay, “The Capitalization of Agriculture”, in: P. Gunst (ed.), Hungarian Agrarian Society: From the Emancipation of Serfs (1848) to the Re-Privatization of Land, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 99–124, at 120.

62

Ibid., pp. 118–120.

63

M. Steinkühler, Agrar- oder Industriestaat. Die Auseinandersetzungen um die Getreidehandels- und Zollpolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1879–1914, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 164–184; R. Aldenhoff, “Agriculture”, in: R. Chickering (ed.), Imperial Germany. A Historiographical Companion, Westport: Greenwood, 1996, p. 49.

64

Wolf, “Local Comparative Advantage”, pp. 256, 280.

65

U. Müller, “East Central Europe in the First Globalization (1850–1914)”, Studia Historiae Oeconomicae 36 (2018), pp. 71–90, at 82 f.; Koryś, Poland, pp. 181–185.

66

U. Müller, “The Concept of Regional Industrialization from the Perspective of the Economic History of East Central Europe”, in: J. Czierpka, K. Oerters, and N. Thorade (eds.), Regions, Industries and Heritage. Perspectives on Economy, Society, and Culture in Modern Western Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 90–115.

67

U. Müller, “Transnationale Verflechtungen der Wirtschaft in Ostmitteleuropa”, in: F. Hadler and M. Middell (eds.), Handbuch einer transnationalen Geschichte Ostmitteleuropas, Vol. 1. Von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Göttingen: V&R Academic, 2017, pp. 308–314.

68

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, p. 156.

69

The situation of Serbia was similarly precarious. Although it was less dependent on grain exports, as it exported various agricultural products, about 90 per cent of these were delivered to Austria-Hungary until the Customs War (1906). Cf. Preshlenova, “Austro-Hungarian Trade”, pp. 241–243; M.-J. Calic, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens 1815–1941. Der aufhaltsame Fortschritt während der Industrialisierung, Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 1994, p. 127.

70

Gunst, “Agrarian Developments”, pp. 43–45.

71

Indeed, in 1891, after several years of an export boom in Russia, a famine occurred due to a bad harvest. Unlike in the 1840s, this did not have any pan-European effects because the other regions of Europe and the USA had average to good harvests, allowing supply and price levels there to remain stable. At the same time, Russia was not in a position to compensate for regional deficits. Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 176–180; G. B. Robbins, The Famine in Russia 1891–1892. The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis, New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

72

Topik and Wells, “Warenketten”, p. 686.

73

J. Riedel, “Trade as the Engine of Growth in Developing Countries, Revisited”, Economic Journal 94 (1984) 373, pp. 56–73.

74

Z. Kiss, “Gesellschaftshistorische Aspekte der Getreidekrise gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts”, in: M. Keller, G. Kövér, and C. Sasfi (eds.), Krisen/Geschichten in mitteleuropäischem Kontext. Sozial und wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Studien zum 19./20. Jahrhundert, Vienna: Institut für Ungarische Geschichtsforschung 2015, pp. 144–147. In 1910, the respective shares of grain and wheat in total exports were 78 and 53 per cent in Romania, 54 and 25 per cent in Bulgaria, 40 and 13 per cent in Serbia, 18 and 5 per cent in Hungary. Cf. Berend and Ránki, Economic Development, p. 150.

75

Cf. Topik and Wells, “Warenketten”, pp. 687–728; Bühler, Von Netzwerken zu Märkten; Foreman-Peck, History, pp. 102–106.

76

Cf. Table 2. See also Topik and Wells, “Warenketten”, p. 698; Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, p. 55.

77

U. Müller, “Landwirtschaft und Agrarpolitik”, in: M. Boldorf (ed.), Deutsche Wirtschaft im Ersten Weltkrieg, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020, pp. 343–369.

78

Gatrell, “Poor Russia”, pp. 241 f., 256–259.

79

H. Münkler, Der Große Krieg. Die Welt 1914–1918, Bonn: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 2014, p. 582.

80

Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 344–346.

81

A. Offer, The First World War. An Agrarian Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

82

Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, p. 52.

83

Marchildon, “War”, p. 145.

84

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, p. 101.

85

Ibid., p. 100.

86

Ibid., p. 97.

87

Ibid., pp. 23–29; 49–51, 91–100, 153; Topik and Wells, “Warenketten”, p. 695; Marchildon, “War”, pp. 145 f.

88

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 112–125, 187.

89

 Ibid., p. 173.

90

 Ibid., pp. 65–90, at 70. See also V. P. Timoshenko, World Agriculture and the Depression, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1933, pp. 562–565.

91

Marchildon, “War”, p. 145.

92

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 62–64; Marchildon, “War”, pp. 145 f.

93

Aldcroft, Europe’s Third World, pp. 39–56, 68–93, 106–126; A. Teichova, Kleinstaaten im Spannungsfeld der Großmächte. Wirtschaft und Politik in Mittel- und Südosteuropa in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Munich: Oldenbourg 1988, pp. 15–25; Feinstein et al., European Economy, pp. 20–32; Turnock, Aspects, pp. 181–190.

94

U. Müller, “The Impact of Land Reforms on the Constitution of ‘National Economies’ in East Central Europe during the Interwar Period”, in: C. Kreutzmüller, M. Wildt, and M. Zimmermann (eds.), National Economies. Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the Wars (1918–1939/45), Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 181–195.

95

Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, pp. 49–52.

96

D. Müller, Bodeneigentum und Nation. Rumänien, Jugoslawien und Polen im europäischen Vergleich. 1918–1948, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020, p. 97. See also I. T. Berend, “Agriculture”, in: M. C. Kaser and E. A. Radice, The Economic History of Eastern Europe 1919–1975, Vol. 1. Economic Structure and Performance between the two Wars, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, p. 162.

97

Bideleux and Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe, pp. 422–434; H. Schultz and E. Kubů (eds.), History and Culture of Economic Nationalism in East Central Europe, Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2006.

98

Stanford University, Wheat Studies of the Food Research Institute 1 (1924) 1, p. 26.

99

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 101, 157–161, 169 f.; Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, p. 53 f.

100

Berend, “Agriculture”, pp. 171–174; Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, p. 106.

101

Timoshenko, World Agriculture, p. 553.

102

Ibid., pp. 565–569; Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, pp. 56–58; Marchildon, “War”, pp. 147–149.

103

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 8–11. Cf. also J. W. F. Rowe, Primary Commodities in International Trade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965; Teichova: Kleinstaaten, pp. 177–179.

104

H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, between the Wars, 1918–1941, Cambridge: Westview Press, 1945, pp. 80–84.

105

Timoshenko, World Agriculture, pp. 627–629; Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 12 f.

106

Marchildon, “War”, p. 147.

107

Wheat Studies, Vol. I, p. 47.

108

Timoshenko, Russia, pp. 93, 98; Aparicio and Pinilla, “International Trade”, pp. 56 f.

109

Marchildon, “War”, pp. 144, 146 and 151; Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, p. 56.

110

R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

111

Marchildon, “War”, pp. 147–152; F. G. von Graevenitz, Argument Europa. Internationalismus in der globalen Agrarkrise der Zwischenkriegszeit (1927–1937), Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2017, pp. 67f.

112

P. Hevesy, World Wheat Planning and Economic Planning in General, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940. Cf. also Marchildon, “War”, p. 153.

113

Ibid., p. 145.

114

While the USA had a much larger domestic market for wheat and the highly diversified foreign trade structure of a leading industrialized country, Argentina’s exports consisted primarily of wheat and beef, in the case of Australia wheat and wool, and in the case of Canada exclusively of wheat. Cf. Marchildon, “War”, p. 146.

115

See under section 4.

116

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 16–20.

117

Foreman-Peck, History, p. 208.

118

Marchildon, “War”, p. 151.

119

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 14 f.

120

Timoshenko, World Agriculture, pp. 542 f., 583–591, 596 f.

121

Ibid., pp. 603 f.

122

Ibid., pp. 607 f.

123

Teichova, Kleinstaaten, pp. 177 f.

124

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, pp. 17–20.

125

Teichova, Kleinstaaten, pp. 178f.

126

Aldcroft, Europe’s Third World, p. 124.

127

Berend, “Agriculture”, pp. 176–182.

128

Graevenitz, Argument Europa, pp. 67–69.

129

A. S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, London: Routledge, 2000.

130

K. Naumann, “Verflechtung durch Internationalisierung. Die ostmitteleuropäische Partizipation an Internationalen Organisationen”, in: Hadler and Middell (eds.), Handbuch einer transnationalen Geschichte Ostmitteleuropas, pp. 327–329; Nützenadel, “A Green International”.

131

Cited in R Aldenhoff-Hübinger, Agrarpolitik und Protektionismus. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich 1879–1914, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 53.

132

Ibid., pp. 42–70. See also R. Aldenhoff-Hübinger, “Landwirtschaft im Spannungsfeld von Nationalisierung und Globalisierung. Getreidehandel und Agrarkrisen in Westeuropa, 1850–1914”, Themenportal Europäische Geschichte (2007), http://www.europa.clio-online.de/2007/Article=206.

133

Nützenadel, “A Green International”; Graevenitz, Argument Europa, pp. 56–59.

134

M. L’Eplattenier, Die Träger der internationalen Zusammenarbeit auf dem Gebiete der Landwirtschaft, Winterthur: Keller, 1961, pp. 47–55; W. Kaiser and J. Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe. Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 49–58.

135

A. Vári, Herren und Landwirte. Ungarische Aristokraten und Agrarier auf dem Weg in die Moderne (1821–1910), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2008, pp. 145–150.

136

Kiss, “Gesellschaftshistorische Aspekte”, pp. 145 f.

137

Monatliche Nachrichten zur Regulierung der Getreidepreise, ed. by G. Ruhland, 1. Jg. (1900/1901), pp. 46f.

138

Nützenadel, “A Green International”.

139

A. Tooze, Sintflut. Die Neuordnung der Welt 1916–1931, Munic: Siedler, 2015, pp. 17–27.

140

P. Clavin, Securing the World Economy. The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, p. 104 and passim; Graevenitz, Argument Europa, p. 81–86.

141

Ibid., p. 12.

142

Ibid., pp. 107–130.

143

S. Gargas, Die Grüne Internationale, Halberstadt: H. Meyer’s Buchdruckerei, 1927, pp. 14–20.

144

Thus, the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, and Lithuania were missing.

145

Müller et al., “Agrarismus”, pp. 16–22, 94–100; Graevenitz, Argument Europa, pp. 130–134.

146

Ibid., pp. 137f.

147

Ibid., pp. 143–145.

148

Ibid., pp. 149f.

149

Ibid., pp. 161–165.

150

Ibid., p. 86.

151

W. Szulc, “Die Warschauer Agrarkonferenz (August 1930) und die Formierung des Agrarblocks in Ostmitteleuropa”, Studia Historiae Oeconomicea 20 (1993), pp. 169–170.

152

R. Daskalov, “Agrarian ideologies and peasant movements in the Balkans”, in: R. Daskalov and D. Mishkoca (eds.), Entangled History of the Balkan, Vol. 2. Transfers of Political Ideologies and Institutions, Leiden: Brill 2014, pp. 314–321.

153

Apart from the Soviet Union, only Lithuania was missing, whose relations with Poland were very tense.

154

Szulc, “Die Warschauer Agrarkonferenz”, pp. 169–177.

155

Marchildon, “War”, pp. 155–157.

156

Graevenitz, Argument Europa, pp. 247–263.

157

This applies more or less to the trade policy aspects of the European policy concepts of Aristide Briand and André Tardieux, but also to the plan for a German-Austrian customs union.

158

Graevenitz, Argument Europa, pp. 274–296.

159

Marchildon, “War”, p. 152.

160

One bushel corresponds to 27.2 kilogrammes. In 1931 and 1932, the global wheat trade was still more than 800 bushels. Cf. Marchildon, “War”, pp. 157 f.

161

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, p. 188.

162

Marchildon, “War”, pp. 157 f.

163

Cf. from the rich literature S. G. Gross, Export Empire. German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015.

164

Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy, p. 212.