page_title: International Agrarian Bureau
section_title: Creation
hierarchical_section_title: International Agrarian Bureau / IAB / Creation
caption_attribution_description: Български: Албум "Александър Стамболийски. Снимки из едни живот. От неговия син", посветен на Александър Стамболийски. English: Album "Alexander Stamboliiski. Photos of a Lifetime. By his son", dedicated to Aleksandar Stambolijski.
context_page_description: The International Agrarian Bureau, commonly known as the Green International, was founded in 1921 by the agrarian parties of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. The creation of a continental association of peasants was championed by Aleksandar Stamboliyski of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, but originated with earlier attempts by Georg Heim. Following Stamboliyski's downfall in 1923, the IAB came to be dominated by the Republican Party of Farmers and Peasants in Czechoslovakia, whose member Karel Mečíř served as its first leader. Mečíř was able to extend the IAB beyond its core in Slavic Europe, obtaining support from the National Peasants' Party in Greater Romania; as an ideologue, Milan Hodža introduced the Green International to European federalism.
  Hodža also redefined international agrarianism as a "Third Way" movement. The Bureau was thus a key competitor with the Krestintern, or "Red Peasant International", which existed as a proxy of the Communist International.
context_section_description: Other early efforts to organize peasant representatives into an international lobby were carried by the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS), whose leader, Aleksandar Stamboliyski, was the then-Prime Minister of Bulgaria. In May 1920, he declared his intention to establish a form of "agrarian representation" alongside the Republican Party of Farmers and Peasants (RSZML) in Czechoslovakia. He believed that RSZML would also ensure reconciliation between Bulgarians and Yugoslavs, after the nations had been separated by World War I. These attempts achieved public notoriety in February 1921. In that context, Stamboliyski openly described his project as resistance to the red peril, a "peasant dictatorship to oppose the dictatorship of the proletariat". French journalist P. de Docelles also noted that Stamboliyski had "transposed all of Lenin's formulas": "he will oppose the Green International to the Red International; and private property to communism".
  While visiting Czechoslovakia earlier that year, Stamboliyski had approached the RSZML directly, announcing that they would form an "International Peasant Union" as a League of Nations subsidiary. Antonín Švehla of the RSZML was to serve as its leader, with Stamboliyski expressing new hopes that this mediation would bring Yugoslav agrarianists into his movement. The original International Bureau, set up in Prague in November 1921, was still limited to three countries in Slavic Europe (including Yugoslavia). It was also briefly joined by White émigrés representing the by-then-defunct Russian Republic. However, in January 1921 Stamboliyski also visited non-Slavic Romania, meeting with the PȚ's Ion Mihalache and Virgil Madgearu, and discussing prospects for regional cooperation.
  The new peasant caucus is described by scholar Saturnino M. Borras Jr and colleagues as a continuation of Heim's movement. However, it found itself criticized by Austrian conservative Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who described the Green International as a front for agrarian socialism, the "peasant-boot dictatorship". On such grounds, Stamboliyski's initiative was well-received by Europe's anti-communist left. Anarchist Augustin Hamon saw it as the peasant's coming of age, noting that agrarian countries had all gone through a land reform. This meant that "capitalists" controlled the "agrarian revolution", but only for a brief moment; Hamon identified an ideological incompatibility between BVP conservatives and Stamboliyski's radicals. According to Hamon, industrial and agricultural workers were natural allies, since "one cannot be strong without the other", meaning that the Green International would find itself "pushed" into an alliance with the Comintern. Similarities between the two bodies were noted by journalist Albert Londres, who called attention to Stamboliyski's "little terror" in Bulgaria, including his institution of compulsory labor. Hamon's sympathetic vision was criticized by Adolphe Hodee, an agricultural trade unionist, who suggested that the "Green International" was fundamentally reactionary, a corollary of Luigi Sturzo's "White International". As Hodee put it: "Stronger and more dangerous than ever, peasant individualism opposes social progress under the communist banner, under the white banner, under the green banner."
  Both assessments are dismissed by more modern scholars, who note that Stamboliyski wished to found "an international agricultural league that would serve as protection against both the reactionary 'White International' of the royalists and landlords and the 'Red International' of the Bolsheviks". As argued by the writing duo known as Marius-Ary Leblond, European socialists, their prestige greatly damaged by the Russian Revolution, were no longer able to exercise any influence over the peasant movement and "coalesce [it] against Capital." Leblond proposed that "the Greens in Danubian countries, who are some of the most conscious and determined, alongside those of France and Russia, will form a powerful anti-Red coalition." Historian Bianca Valota Cavallotti believes that 
caption: Allegory of Aleksandar Stamboliyski's leadership of the peasants. From a 1935 album by his son
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