Property Redistribution and Democracy in Poland and the Baltics

The states emerging from the western periphery of the Russian Empire – Poland and the Baltic States – conducted sweeping programs of property redistribution on the basis of liquidation, agrarian reform, expropriation and monopolisation, thus putting central demands of pre-war nationalist agendas into practice. Abroad, these politics were often criticised as undemocratic and as products of an elite that lacked “maturity” and respect of the principle of the inviolability of property. Minorities, who were for the main part victims of these politics, used the connection between private property and democracy to mobilise international public opinion, while the new states launched campaigns to argue that their politics were rather “ultra-democratic” as they empowered the mass of people that had before been barred from political participation. The proposed article investigates how politics of property redistribution were contextualised in debates of democracy and its applicability in East Central Europe and how the relationship between state and property was conceived by looking at internal debates in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as well as at discussions and complaints made to the League of Nations.