Dietmar Müller's intriguing new book proposes an intervention in the literature on nation-building in interwar east central and southeastern Europe by centering agrarian policy—specifically land reform—as a key element of the attempt to transform multiethnic, post-imperial borderlands into homogeneous parts of self-proclaimed nation-states. Land policy and nationality policy were intertwined, as land reform became a means of undercutting the economic and political power of minorities closely associated with defunct empires (Hungarians, Germans, Turks). In this comparative study of agrarian policy in Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, Müller also posits land reform in the immediate post-1945 period, before the communist takeover and the onset of collectivization, as “continuation and completion” (“Fortsetzung und Vollendung,” 8) rather than a break from agrarian policies of the interwar era. At the same time, policy after 1945 became more radical. If in the 1920s and 1930s Polish, Romanian, and Yugoslav authorities discriminated against great landowners who belonged to “foreign” groups, after World War II ethnic Germans especially were forcibly expropriated and often expelled (from Poland and Yugoslavia, though not Romania) in order to ensure ethnic homogeneity and lasting security in the borderlands.

Müller argues that already the states created at the end of World War I abandoned liberal agrarian policy in favor of intrusive state control of who could and could not own agricultural land, as well as how the owners’ might deal with it in terms of inheritance, selling land, and using it as collateral. In states with majority peasant populations, where landownership carried multifaceted political, economic, social, and cultural implications, both interwar and postwar elites saw land reform as the means to accelerate state and economic modernization and ethnic homogenization. Interwar elites hoped and assumed that the beneficiaries of land reform would reward them at the ballot box, while the communists saw land reform as a prelude to collectivization, itself a necessary element of social transformation and regime endurance. In both eras, Müller argues, policy regarding agricultural land was a pivotal element of state-building and nation-building.

The book adopts mostly a top-down perspective and offers a deep analysis of pertinent laws (including constitutions, which often included sections on agricultural land), practices of governance, and elite attitudes toward peasants as producers and citizens. While one wishes for a matching bottom-up perspective that would say more about themes Müller touches on—such as peasant agency and strategies of evading official regulations—this is a reasonable framework for such an ambitious work to adopt. Especially interesting is Müller's analysis of interwar elites’ fundamental distrust of peasants, which translated into paternalistic policies that limited landowners’ individual control over their own property and, in turn, limited peasants’ investment in nation-building. Despite their desire to control practices of landownership, interwar states failed to invest in the development of regulatory and administrative professions (surveyors, notaries, and administrators who kept land cadasters), which then undercut accurate taxation and prevented the development of a strong middle class and a prosperous peasantry. Political manipulation of diverse historical traditions of recordkeeping and landownership in different regions of the newly-created states hobbled efforts at imposing uniform norms. Ultimately, this book revolves around the conundrum of all elite, top-down reform projects: if they empower the poor and the “lower orders,” they undercut elite power and privilege, yet without such empowerment, reforms remain piecemeal and incomplete.

Dietmar Müller has written an interesting and useful comparative study, which is, however, somewhat uneven, as the book devotes more space and in-depth analysis to the interwar era than to the postwar people's democracies. This unevenness stretches to the source base as well: printed primary sources are in Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, German, French, and English; Polish sources appear in translation, and only Romanian archives were consulted. Müller's narrative and argument also bypass World War II almost entirely, despite the long shadow cast by that era's experiences of land expropriation and reapportionment, violent persecution of some groups and elevation of others on ethno-ideological grounds, and the fraught connection between national belonging and working the land. Instead of skipping over World War II in order to focus on continuities between the interwar and the postwar periods, a closer examination of continuities and caesuras across the war's start and end would have both bolstered and complicated the book's central argument.