Politics of Land. The Politicization of Rurality in Europe since the late 20th Century
In recent years, political developments in Europe in general and the crisis of liberal democracy in particular appear to be marked in many ways by one conflict: the opposition between the urban and the rural. Notwithstanding national and regional differences, observers perceive the urban-rural conflict as one of the main reasons for the declining recognition of parliamentary representation in Spain, France, Poland, Germany and elsewhere.
Suggestions to explain this development are discussed in various disciplines. The workshop at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research will bring perspectives from different fields of research together and embed the topic in a broader conceptual framework. The aim is to raise new questions about the connection between the politicization of rural areas, the current loss of legitimacy of parliamentary representation and changes in land use. On the one hand, it is necessary to clarify what sustained the fabric of political relationships, the disruption of which is said to have provided the urban-rural divide with new significance. On the other hand, it needs to be discussed which material developments have shaped the current portrayal of economic and social conflicts in political categories of the rural.
Previous studies have emphasized the relational nature of the concepts of city and countryside and placed their changing meanings in recent decades in the context of globalization and Europeanization. The discussions of the workshop will build on these findings and link them to the question of the conditions under which “the countryside” could become a resource for political mobilization. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, the aim is to go beyond short-term analyses of the present and examine how changes since the last third of the 20th century have made possible new representative claims that draw on a juxtaposition of city and countryside. The workshop is intended to establish a basis for an innovative engagement with the topic.