Dieter Gessner

Marktregulierende Agrarpolitik in Deutschland 1924/25 bis 1967: Entwicklung, Ziele, Alternativen und Handlungsspielräume

Market regulating agricultural policy is a special form of agrarian protectionism. In Germany it was established as a high protection customs policy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the Weimar Republic in 1925/26 on the occasion of the “Kleine Zolltarifnovelle” this policy was continued on a new complicated political basis. The Social Democracy, searching for new voters, attached the consumer-protection to its banner and in this way gave the agrarian protectionism a flexible ideological and parliamentary basis. NS-policy took over this policy during the world-wide economic crisis, radicalised protectionism and established the agrarian cartel by forcing producers, trade and consumers into the so-called Reichsnährstand.

After 1949 the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, renewed the essentials of the market regulating agricultural policy step by step and pressed these ideas into the European Agricultural Common Market. The agrarian protectionism in its different phases from 1925/26 to 1967 was legitimated independently of the respective form of German government by a number of conceptions of orderly policy. Its hard core are anti-liberalistic and anti-capitalistic ideas of different graduation (“organisierter Kapitalismus”, “Neuer Plan” and “Soziale Marktwirtschaft”).

During a period of 60 years alternatives have been visible but they have not been transfered into action due to the absence of political intentions.

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