The articles in this special issue of Rural History address aspects of the multifaceted and often very intense relationship between rurality, modernity and national identity in the 1920s and 1930s. They derive from a conference organised in January 2007 by the Interwar Rural History Research Group. The conference, ‘Rethinking the Rural: Land and Nation in the 1920s and 1930s’ brought together forty-nine papers on fifteen different countries and concluded with a plenary session in which it became clear that there were some striking commonalities to the interwar experiences of the countries in question. In particular, the three-way relationship between the countryside, modernisation and national identity seemed to be prominent almost everywhere. Bound up with these was the rise of international trade and its close corollary, the agricultural depression, which affected rural areas on a literally global scale. While there were also some intriguing and unexpected differences between countries, the broad context seemed to be similar enough that it would be fruitful to collect those papers that related most closely to these core themes and publish them together. In this editorial, I will briefly outline the articles that follow, pick out what seem to me the most interesting connections, and then consider some of the wider questions this raises.

The 1930s saw new research and extended debates over the nature of the countryside in China and its socio-economic and historical role. Those on different sides of these debates, many drawing on historical materialism, tended to recreate modernist assumptions. These included assumptions that history was unilinear, and that what was Western was also modern, universal, urban, and objective, while what was not Western was traditional, local, rural, and subjective. The modern nation state, made up of modern citizens, was the outcome of, and the active subject in, a progressive history.

Yet other approaches, focusing on the role of the countryside in China's development, challenged not only aspects of modernity but the assumptions in which the debates were couched. The philosopher and social activist Liang Shuming (1893–1988) focused on the countryside as the creative field in China. He envisioned a new form of community that, instead of the state, would be the active locus for change. Liang's new, village communities would draw on but not reproduce cultural traditions across a ruptured history and form the basis of a non-capitalist industrialisation. Rather than appropriate the dominant image of modernity, Liang revisited its basic assumptions. In so doing, he generated fresh visions, opening up a different set of possibilities and recasting the relation of the country to the city, the nation and the future.

Interwar France saw itself as a rural nation. The First World War, won in the muddy earth of the trenches, elevated the image of the ‘peasant soldier’ to a symbolic height. But paradoxically, it was during this period that the urban population overtook the rural. Against this backdrop, references to the noxious consequences of rural migration increased in frequency and virulence. The condemnation of rural migration was part of the celebration of a French national identity rooted in the past, the earth and other key agrarian values, such as thrift, hard work and property ownership. French peasants are perceived to be the last bearers of this value set. In other European countries too, the same ideological debate was at play. In Italy and Germany, in particular, the regimes were faced with a similar dilemma, championing a racially pure, rural, identity rooted in the past, whilst embracing a modernising revolution. Their parallel attempts at aligning these two ideas are richly suggestive.

This article explores how the land and the agricultural community were made out to be central to the assertion of Welsh national identity between the world wars. Political Nationalism came out of a disillusion with Liberal national sentiment. Liberal nationalists had recognised the significance of the land in Wales and made secure a devolved administrative regime for agriculture, the Welsh Council of Agriculture, originally established before 1914. For the political Nationalists, however, this was far too little. They perceived a cultural and economic crisis which might be overcome only through complete self-government. That crisis originated historically in the annexation of Wales to England which had intruded an alien land system and destroyed a natural, patriarchal rural order; which had foisted an alien commercial, industrial system and had led to the Anglicisation of Welsh society. In its depressed state, inter-war Wales was subjected to a new and reactive form of politics, often influenced by European right wing ideas, which was anti-urban, anti-capitalist, anti-English and anti-modern, all of which had wider repercussions for the future of Welsh identity.

In interwar debates about Hungarian modernity, the countryside played a prominent symbolic role. For conservative nationalists, the Hungarian countryside became a symbol and source of authentic, ‘traditional’ Hungarian national culture, unchanging, hierarchical, ordered society and stable community, and national uniqueness. Entertainment films of the 1930s provided alternative representations of the countryside that upheld the possibility of modernising traditional Hungary. According to the films, modern Hungary would be created at the intersection and out of the cooperation between rural and urban, modern and traditional. The films questioned and challenged the idea that the rural was ‘pure’, authentic, untainted, but they also rejected the idea that it was shameful, hopelessly backward, or unable to change. Showing the countryside as both traditional and part of modern mass culture, as both nostalgically stable and an exotic vacationland, the films offered an integrative vision of Hungary which destabilised assumptions of both liberals and conservatives. Popular films used the countryside to provide a unique and alternative vision of modern Hungary that was integrative and reconciliatory; they provided an outlet for a liberal, democratic, capitalist perspective unavailable elsewhere in the public sphere.

On basis of the argument ‘Better milk – increased consumption’ the Swedish association, ‘The Milk Propaganda’, managed to frame a milk marketing project in which economic interests were intertwined with references to public health and the survival of the Swedish countryside. The very idea of marketing milk, building on its quality and health, was presented as mutually beneficial for producers and consumers, and for the entire Swedish society. In the 1920s and 30s the project was visible through posters, a journal, milk restaurants and school campaigns. The story includes fascinating encounters between rurality and urbanity, materialised through milk. During the economic crisis around 1930 milk marketing became aggressive and consumers were urged to consume as much dairy produce as possible in order to fulfil their national duty to help save farmers and the countryside.

The representation of the car in the countryside was central to selling the benefits of motoring and owning a car in the interwar period. Motor traffic was a key part of the debate and legislation on the countryside, in the context of land for building and food production, and scenery for pleasure and reassurance of what it meant to be English. This essay focuses on the impact of the motor car as it generated a new economy for rural Britain with new services, buildings and roads that changed the landscape and made the countryside more accessible. It shows how the motoring press and advertising campaigns exploited an imagined ‘Beautiful Britain’ and brought about a modernisation that set in place aspects of the use, values and culture of the British countryside that have remained to the present.