Although it has got its superstructure (regional federations of cooperatives, the Cooperative Alliance of Serbia and the Cooperative Alliance of Yugoslavia ? the last one being a member of ICA), the cooperative movement in Serbia stays relatively weak, fragile and exposed to the will of much stronger actors on the agricultural scene.[1]

            If we turn now to Romania, we shall find out that the situation with agricultural cooperatives is much worse than in Serbia. The statistics of the ICA reveals that in Romania in 1997 there were no agricultural cooperatives at all (ICA, 1998, p. 72)! Unfortunately, this happens to be mainly true, since if we apply the definition of a cooperative adopted by the ICA,[2] peasants? cooperatives in Romania hardly exist.

            Romania dealt with her kolkhoz system in the most radical way, which cannot be found in any other country in Central and Eastern Europe. The socialist agricultural ?cooperatives? were totally dismantled by an agrarian reform that looked a lot like the agrarian reforms carried out in many countries of the region after the World Wars I and II and was achieved, without any doubt, mostly for political (and ideological) reasons. However, it is still possible to recognize two forms of organization in the Romanian agriculture that at least look like cooperatives, though they are not.

            Agricultural societies are a sort of descendants of the agricultural cooperatives that existed through the socialist period. Since a lot of people who got their (or their parents? or relatives?) land back were not able to till it (due to old age, absenteeism, lack of skill or capital, engagement in the other sectors of economy, unclear land ownership situation, etc.), the simplest solution was to ?give? the land to someone to till it for them. ?Someone? usually happened to be the management of the former socialist cooperatives, who just used the opportunity and became the managers of new-formed agricultural associations. In spite of the fact that these associations do have some characteristics of a cooperative, they do not satisfy, due to many reasons, all the requirements of the definition.

            The other phenomenon worth mentioning are the family associations, which surely represent a form of cooperation among the Romanian peasants. However, this form of cooperation is, actually, of a traditional kind. This means, above all, that there is no written and legal contract among the members of family associations, which allows us to classify them as a pre-modern form of cooperation among primary groups (families and neighbors). The cooperation we have been speaking about is a modern form of cooperation, which occurred for the first time in the middle of the 19^th century.