Damming The Danube

Gabcikovo/nagymaros And Post-communist Politics In Europe

John Fitzmaurice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367315344
• eBook ISBN: 9780429980756
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The conflict between Hungary and Slovakia over the Gab?ikovo-Nagymaros dam system on the Danube is a potentially explosive threat to regional stability along this key economic artery between the North Sea and the Black Sea. Emblematic of the difficulties in establishing a post-communist regional order, this bitter battle between material economic values and post-materialist environmental and cultural values threatens to resurrect nationalist resentments buried by forty years of communism. Based on a wealth of primary research, this balanced book considers the broad political, economic, social, legal, and environmental implications of the dam project—not just for Hungary and Slovakia, but for Europe as a whole. Viewing the controversy from the contending perspectives of all the key players, the author explores the role of outside mediation efforts and the resulting implications for regional security and cooperation.

1
The Danube: Setting the Scene

The Gabčikovo-Nagymaros dam issue is a complex question involving much more than a massive hydro-electric dam project. It is intimately linked with the River Danube, on which it is located, and with the history and mutual relations of the various peoples in its immediate vicinity. It raises different visions of the river, its future and man's relationship with the river. It involves sensitive issues of ethnic relations in this frontier region and delicate and highly controversial balances between economic and environmental claims.

The Danube flows 2,888 km from its source at Donaueschingen in the German Black Forest to its delta in the Ukranian Black Sea. It is Europe's next largest river, second only to the Volga. Unusually, it effectively flows west to east, not north to south, although in its course, it makes at least two 90° turns. The Danube is certainly Europe's most romantic and mystical river.¹ It is a truly European river, yet also an international river, not just in the legal sense that it is under the surveillance of the International Danube Commission but because it actually flows through no less than ten states. At several different points along its length, it forms an international border. Before 1918, it linked to the great international empires of Central Europe and more recently, flowed between east and west. It passes through areas of Germanic, Slavic and Magyar culture and through settlements of the main European religious faiths: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox. Despite navigational problems in several reaches, it remains a major trade and transport artery. There is already considerable traffic on the Danube, with a potential for growth into the next century. Some 6 million passengers are carried each year.² Its basin is home to 76 million people and it flows through ten cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, including three capitals (Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade). Even without the Gabčikovo-Nagymaros project, the Danube is already an important energy producer, as the Germans and Austrians have fully exploited their faster flow sections, with seven power stations. There are also two major dams at the Iron Gates.³

As it leaves Austria at Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia (" Pozony" in Hungarian, "Pressburg" in German), the Danube soon becomes part of a complex river system. A right-hand bend (the Moson Danube) leaves the main Danube, runs almost parallel to the Danube, meets the Raab at Györ and runs back into the main river 20 km north of Györ. To the north, the little Danube ("Maly Dunaj" in Slovak) traces a curve of about 100 km and the Váh at Kolarvo and then feeds into the main branch at Komarom. For 140 km, from just beyond Bratislava to just beyond Estergom, the Danube forms the border between Slovakia and Hungary, originally set in the Trianon Treaty of 1920. By its erratic course in this sector, with its many branches and an extensive gravel flood plain, the Danube has created both serious navigation problems in this section between Bratislava and Budapest and a unique natural landscape that would be threatened by works. It is also subject to serious floods, as indeed happened in 1954 and 1965. This section of the Danube, in which the dams are located, has always been problematic. It is a transitional sector in which the river slows down, slackening its gradient and losing its alpine character as it enters its middle section. This has aggravated problems for navigation which have been second only to those in the Iron Gates area. These problems have made intervention tempting though difficult.

A hotly debated issue in relation to the dam project has been the amount of permissible human intervention on the river. Yet, as the above cursory survey of the Danube's significance to the peoples who live along it shows, these have always been competing claims on its resources. This is not a new issue, but the sheer size of the dam project brought these conflicts sharply to the forefront.⁴

The Danube is an internationalised river and has been so since the first Danube Convention in 1856, adopted following the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War. At that time, a European Danube Commission, including non-riparian Great Powers, was established both as a symbol of the river's international status and to ensure free navigation. Following the First World War, the Versailles peace settlement established a new Danube Convention in 1921. An eleven-member international Danube Commission, responsible for navigation from Ulm to Braila (Romania), was set up. It comprised Germany (2 members), Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania for the riparian states, and Britain, France and Italy as representatives of the earlier non-riparian European Danube Commission, deriving from the 1856 Convention. The USSR was excluded.

In the 1930s, as the influence of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany grew in the region, the international regime was gradually replaced and its organs lost their significance. The powers of the international bodies were re-nationalised. Romania acquired the rights of the commission under the Treaty of Sinaia (1938), to which Germany and Italy acceded. After World War Two, a new Danube regime was needed and a convention was concluded at Belgrade in 1948, to which the by-now communist states alone acceded. The western powers-the United States and the old 1921 signatories-either voted against the convention, abstained or, as in the case of Belgium, Italy and Greece, were not represented. Austria joined the new Danube Commission in 1960. It now has seven members, though clearly the membership will evolve as the situation in relation to the successor states of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR settles down.⁵

The Gabčikovo-Nagymaros project⁶ has generated widespread attention and controversy because of its vast size and because of its implications for the Danube- one of Europe's most majestic and mythic rivers and a deep and significant part of the European consciousness. It is important to underline the sheer scale of the original project, because human intervention to tame and alter the Danube is by no means new and has certainly not been universally negative. This project is, though, an altogether larger scale. Measures to improve navigability, prevent flooding and harness the river's energy have been undertaken both above and below the sections of the river in which the Gabčikovo-Nagymaros works are situated. Some would argue that there is no longer today any "natural Danube" and so regard the Gabčikovo-Nagymaros plan as a normal and logical continuation of these previous developments." Critics see the Gabčikovo-Nagymaros project as a gigantic and unnecessary intervention. All would agree on the massive scale of the project.

Long discussed in both Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the project⁸ was finally agreed upon in a treaty of 1977. With the joint and ancillary national works, it was to represent a massive building programme, extending some 200 km from just below Bratislava to Nagymaros, below the Danube bend and above the Cspel Island, which stretches almost to Budapest. The original project comprised a series of levees on both banks below Bratislava; a large reservoir, 16 km in length, between Hrusov-Dunakiliti; the Dunakiliti weir itself; the diversion/power canal; the hydro-electric station at Gabickovo with 8 x 90 mW vertical kaplan turbines and two 34 x 275m navigation locks; the outlet canal meeting the Danube at Palkovicovo; and the Nagymaros power plant, navigation locks and weir. Following the collapse of the communist regime in Hungary, the new government sought to reach a negotiated cancellation of the project with the new democratic authorities in Czechoslovakia. When these negotiations failed, Hungary escalated the dispute by unilaterally terminating the Treaty. Nearly independent Slovakia riposted with Variant C. This temporary solution was put into operation in October 1992. Entirely in Slovak territory, it involves a weir at Cunovo that diverts the water into a now-extended navigation channel down to Gabčikovo and lets a small flow of water into the old river-bed that constitutes the frontier. The Dunakiliti weir (in Hungarian territory) and the Nagymaros works have been discontinued.

Notes

1. For a literary view of the romance and mystery of this great river, see C. Magris The Danube; Biography of a River.

2. Pierre Bernard, Le Roman du Danube, Paris: Pion, 1991 describes the river from source to mouth. Pp. 115-180 cover the section from Bratislava to Budapest.

3. See the Equipe Cousteau study for the EBRD, entitled The Danube: For Whom and For What?, Final Report, March 1993, pp. 69-100.

4. Ibid. p. 104 and pp. 171-172.

5. See S. Gorove, The Law and Politics of the Danube, The Hague: 1964, on the international regime of the Danube and its evolution over time.

6. See Equipe Cousteau, The Danube, pp. 172-177, for a description of its environmental implications.

7. See J. Liptak, ed., The Danube: Its Problems and Prospects, Bratislava: NVK International, 1993, especially pp. 77-96 for a Slovak view.

8. Ministry of Transport, Communications and Public Works of the Slovak Republic, Commissioning of the Temporary Solution of the Gablikovo Waterworks, Bratislava, October 1992, contains a detailed history and specifications of the project.

2
Shaping the Region: 1848-1945

The key to the dam question lies in the difficult relationship between Slovak nationalism and the Czechs and Hungarians. Gabčikovo has become a symbol of Slovak national independence and pride, to be defended equally against Prague and Budapest. One might argue that if the relationships between Bratislava and Budapest and between Bratislava and Prague had been better, then the dam project could have been cancelled in 1990 as both Prague and Budapest actually wanted. In that context, Gabčikovo became an almost unique Slovak victory over both the Czechs and Hungarians.

The Danube region has a complex and conflictual history, and it is only against this background that the present suspicions and conflicts can be understood. The Czechs and Slovaks had separate histories until 1918 when they came together in a common state. They did not know each other, but they needed each other for essentially negative reasons. The Czechs needed the Slovaks as additional Slav "ballast" to balance the German minority. The Slovaks needed a partner to enable them to escape from the domination of Hungary. It proved an unequal and difficult relationship that eventually, after several restarts, led to the (final?) divorce of 1993. The Slovaks therefore always saw two enemies: the Hungarians and the Czechs, neither of whom had accorded them an equal status during their periods of control over Slovakia. Both Czechs and Hungarians were, after 1989, opposed to the Gabčikovo-Nagymaros project, regarding it as a white elephant, a relic of Stalinism. Both would, if it had been left to them, have abandoned the project. For both, the attitude of the Slovaks was the stumbling block. Not surprisingly, the dam issue became part of more generalised mutual misunderstandings, resentments and recriminations. Let us look at this fraught history.

Slovaks were part of Hungary since the early Middle Ages, but the Czech lands, Slovakia and Hungary never were under a single political authority until 1526. Even then, apart from a short period in the mid-nineteenth century, the Habsburg Empire was never centralised. Indeed, after the Ausgleich in 1867, the Czechs and Slovaks were in different "halves" of the dual monarchy established by that Ausgleich.

The Slovaks first appeared in the present area of Slovakia and eastern Moravia in about 500 AD. The first Slovak state identified as such by many Slovak nationalist historians was the Greater Moravian Kingdom that came into being in 840 through the union of the principalities of Nitra and Moravia under Prince Pribina. It lasted until 907, when it succumbed to Hungarian attacks that had been intermittently pressed since 895.¹ This kingdom was important as a national reference point, confirming the Christianisation of the Slovaks and their western orientation towards Rome rather than Byzantium. In due course, the Slovaks were incorporated into the Kingdom of St. Stephan--which was to last until 1918—though as part of the Habsburg possessions after 1526, following the defeat of the Hungarians by the Turks at the Battle of Mohács. Most of Hungary, but only the eastern part of Slovakia, was occupied by the Turks until the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.²

For much of the eighteenth century, Upper Hungary, as Slovakia was called, became the centre of political life in Hungary with the capital in Bratislava and the seat of the Hungarian primate in Estergom. Earlier, in 1635, a Jesuit university had been founded at Trnava, becoming the centre of the early Slovak national renaissance. Following the first real codification of the Slovak language by Daniel Krman (1740) and Pavol Dolezal (1746), the university sponsored a translation of the Bible in 1756-59 and the work of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• A Short Chronology of the Dam
• 1 The Danube: Setting the Scene
• 2 Shaping the Region: 1848-1945
• 3 The Communist Intermezzo
• 4 Towards Democracy
• 5 The Dam or the Rise Before the Fall?
• 6 The Impact of the Fall of Communism on the Dam
• 7 The Legal Issues and International Mediation
• About the Book and Author
• Index