Land reforms in Europe and Latin America: social change´s driver or pending subject? A comparative overview since the short XXth century

Abstract

The question of land reform has been central throughout the 20th century. Although it is now relatively outdated, the question of what the relationship between rural and urban environments should look like is a revival of the role of reform in contemporary state-building. This text takes a long-term view of the century of conflict. The two great reformist moments occurred in the post-war years of 1918 and 1945. In the first, marked by the Russian and Mexican revolutions, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were the main protagonists. In the second, Latin America, some African and Asian countries undertook these processes with mixed results. In both waves, the counter-cyclical status of the Spanish case in the 1930s and that of Portugal after the Carnation Revolution are discussed. In general terms, an excessively critical view of the reforms as rather radical processes has been offered.