Europe's Zimbabwe.

You would never guess that a revolution is brewing, reading the glossy sales brochure for Amhuinnsuidhe Castle in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. There's the turreted Victorian castle on the isle of Harris, all stag heads, tapestries and family portraits of Scottish aristocrats. There are shots of the 55,000-acre estate--green-gold hills, sparkling rivers stuffed with salmon, tweed-clad gamekeepers obligingly holding up the spoils of a good day's shooting. But there's no mention of an awkward fact: any new laird of the castle, who has the right to collect rent from farmers and villagers living on the estate, might not get to enjoy his lordship for long.

The reason is a radical new land-reform law, expected to pass the Scottish Parliament later this month, that will give commoners a chance to own the hills they work on. Anticipating the legislation, a group of 750 tenants led by a local petrol-station manager, David Cameron, have put in a bid to buy the 4.5 million [euro] property. If the sale goes through, "people here will have a say in what happens on the land on which they live and work," says Cameron, his eyes teary. The emotion springs from history: in still-feudal Scotland, where just 1,200 people own more than two thirds of all land, the very notion of commoners as lairds would until just recently have been laughable.

Set up four years ago, after devolution from rule by Westminster, the Scottish legislature has made land reform its flagship issue. A classic tactic for new nationalistic regimes, the plan has evoked especially strong feelings in Scotland, where for centuries English lords--and more recently Arab sheikhs and other foreigners--have bought up huge estates that are often used for no more than a few weeks of hunting and shooting a year. On Jan. 23, the government will debate a bill giving communities the right to buy out their landlords--whether or not they want to sell. Prices would be established by independent valuation (regardless of other, possibly higher offers). Crofters, as Highland tenant farmers are called, would go from being latter-day serfs to the de facto monarchs of their realm.

Landowners have denounced the bill as "communist" and "Mugabe-style," a reference to the Zimbabwean president who's given his black countrymen free license to appropriate the farms of its whites. Proponents see it as a win for democracy--and a demonstration of Scotland's independence from both Westminster and the hereditary land-owning interests symbolized by Britain's House of Lords.

There's little disagreement that change is overdue. After all, it's hard to ignore the fact that 80 percent of the nation's land is in the hands of .08 percent of its people--a concentration of ownership roughly a hundred times that of the rest of ...