168 Participatory Processes
Of course, there is tradition in the rich and complex agricultural history of The
Netherlands. However, there is no absolute traditionalism, in the sense of con-
servatism and stagnation. This has been demonstrated in the diligent work of agri-
cultural sociologists and historians. The seeds of progress slumbered in the bowels
of tradition.
Certainly in the 19th and 20th centuries, a comprehensive process of mod-
ernization took place, spurred on and driven by the peasants of the time. Tradition
and progress, conservatism and progressiveness do not constitute opposites. As I
will stress, each needs the other. The balance between the two is essential (Terron,
1984).
The great modernization project became defined at the end of the 1950s.
However, the principal issue is that, again, the word was wrong from the begin-
ning. It is not true that agriculture only started to modernize from that moment
onward. It had been modernizing for a long time. Looking back, one cannot but
say that this so-called modernization project was definitely not what was expected
and suggested at the time (nor later): to finish once and for all with tradition, to
finish once and for all with the rural as consistently backward.
The agricultural modernization project of 1950–1990 was one of the first
great megaprojects realized in The Netherlands.^41 It was not an adjustment of a
past that was moving too slowly, it was a universal operation in which the future
was made to dominate the past and the present. All in all, the so-called moderniza-
tion project in agriculture was (and is) an ‘undercover megaproject’. It was not the
beginning of modernization in agriculture, it was about the forced implementa-
tion of another modernization path than the path or trajectory followed up to
then. However, the particularities of this modernization path remained undis-
cussed, for it seemed to be about modernization tout court.
The gradually manifesting chaos of the undercover megaproject should be
thought through and included in the planning and assessment of the megaprojects
that are now (40 years later) being defined in society at large. There is a case for the
thesis that expert systems and macroprojects are almost inevitable in contemporary
society – at least with regard to certain issues.^42 What is fascinating about agricul-
tural modernization as a macroproject, however, is that it was unnecessary, cer-
tainly from a comparative perspective. We would have had a different kind of
agriculture – probably of a better kind, maybe of a worse kind. However, it is
impossible to maintain that agriculture and the countryside would have vanished
without the great modernization project. This knowledge prompts a critical exam-
ination of the ways in which expert systems operate and intervene in the organiza-
tion of time, space and social practices.
So much for the relationship between the words and the things, the social
constellations and terms with which we interpret and understand them. As I stated
previously, the social sciences try to understand every constellation using the
vocabulary and the regularities of the previous constellation. This applies a fortiori
to agriculture. As if by natural law, the things and the essentials of the periods in
question are invariably interpreted and understood wrongly.