Green Barons, Force-of-circumstance Entrepreneurs, Impotent Mayors

Book excerpt: This comparative history investigates rural communities in six east-Central Europe countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Most of them experienced in the 1990s the fourth radical restructuring of agricultural relations of the twentieth century, and, more challengingly, an historically unprecedented trajectory from socialism to capitalism. The author considers similarity and difference in the linked processes of breathing real democratic life into the structures of local democracy and recreating farming structures and non-agricultural businesses based on private ownership and private enterprise.