The 'Egalitarianism' of the Right: The Agrarian League in Southwest Germany, 1893-1914

Abstract

The commercial crisis of 1873, the ensuing industrial recession of the next decade, the depression in agricultural prices for the next two decades proved to be critical turning points in the political history of Europe and North America. The crisis triggered cartelization, the return to protectionism, and fundamental shifts in voter alignment. In broader terms the crisis meant a retreat from liberalism, at least in its classical nineteenth-century form, on the part of governments and voters.1 Within Germany the crisis resulted in a solidarity bloc of Junkers and peasants on the basis of restoration through pseudo-democratic2 radicalism; in historical hindsight we can see the alliance as a major step on the road toward Fascism. The instrument which forged the bloc was the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte). Aroused by the agricultural crisis and by Chancellor Leo von Caprivi's commercial policy, which moderately reduced grain tariffs in order to encourage industrial exports, German landowners organized a radical agrarian movement. Launched at an assembly in Berlin in February 1893, the Agrarian League was a combination of economic pressure group and political party, but with a self-conception as a 'movement' (Bewegung) over and above all parties or divisive interests. Programmatic statements of the League contained almost exclusively economic demands except for a few perfunctory references to the monarchical and Christian social order, but it assumed the features of a political party with its mass organization, massive public agitation, active and independent role in elections, and insistence on strict parliamentary discipline from its members. The League's organizational structure was apparently democratic,