Land Grabbing in Southeastern Europe in Historical Context

Recent studies on land grabbing in Southeast Europe suggest that parts of the region are re-experiencing in the post-socialist era what happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries due to the decline of the Ottoman land tenure system, under identical conditions involving fundamental sociopolitical transformations and integration with global capitalism. During these historical phases, the processes of enclosure developed in varying degrees in accord with the topographical and societal conditions of the societies as well as geographical proximity to the European capitalist centres. Today, despite growing connections with the European Union, the whole region has remained on the periphery of the capitalist Western European core, which is specialized in technology and knowledge, while retaining the position as agrarian societies and neat providers of raw materials and food to industrialized Western centres. This chapter suggests that although the regime types governing those nations change throughout historical phases, primitive accumulation practices that harm the small peasantry have been sustained so far under different banners. Land grab in those countries also invokes a public passivity, which symptomizes the prevalence of a historic bloc—as coined by Gramsci—regarding the unquestionability of the liberalization on the land system and intra-EU market dynamics and consequently the current practices of enclosure that turns land into a fictive financial asset favouring beneficiaries other than the local peasantry.