Slovakia

The Escape from Invisibility

Karen Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134496471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Since Slovakia achieved independent statehood at the end of 1992 it has become one of the most prosperous post-communist states. This book provides a unique and thorough introduction to Slovakia and will enable the reader to understand its multi-faceted nature. The book includes chapters on Twentieth Century History, Politics, Economy and International Relations.

1
SLOVAKIA BEFORE INDEPENDENCE

In the twentieth century, Slovaks embodied the experience of much of Central and Eastern Europe: they witnessed frequent and radical changes not only of their system of government but also of their state. Imperial rule by the Hungarians ended in 1918, to be replaced by representative government from Prague upon the foundation of the Czechoslovak Republic. This endured until the eve of the Second World War, which saw the creation of the ‘Slovak state’, and authoritarian one-party rule under German tutelage. The restoration of Czechoslovakia in 1945 brought the brief return of a democratic form of government, before the communist takeover in Prague in 1948 plunged Slovakia into forty years of communist one-party rule. 1989 saw another short interlude of Czechoslovak democracy, until in January 1993 the people of Slovakia at last found themselves in a position to build a democracy of their own. As a result of all these changes, the proverbial villager who had never moved from their place of birth had watched the capital city move from Budapest to Prague to Bratislava, then to Prague again and finally back to Bratislava.

The Slovak capital of Bratislava itself exemplifies Slovakia’s position at the crossroads of Europe, and how closely it is interlinked with its neighbours. At the time Czechoslovakia was founded, its population was predominantly Hungarian or German-speaking rather than Slovak.¹ The city only received the name Bratislava in 1921, previously being known in Slovak as Prešporok, and it is still referred to with familiar ease as Pressburg by the Austrians and Pozsony by the Hungarians. Geographically, it is also extremely close to its neighbours: Hungary begins a few minutes’ drive down the road, and the Austrian border post is easily visible from the tower blocks of Bratislava’s suburbs. The tram that had run from Bratislava to Vienna in the period between the First and Second World Wars was remembered with an almost mystic reverence in the communist period, when the city was bordered by the Iron Curtain; and in modern times, Vienna’s Schwechat is the Slovaks’ favourite international airport. Although the twentieth century was the Slovaks’ Czech century, in which they were governed from Prague for a total of sixty-eight years, the crow on any Slovak rooftop can fly to Vienna and Budapest more quickly than to Prague.

Before Czechoslovakia

Consequently, although the historical background in this chapter will focus in the main on the Czechoslovak period, and relations between Czechs and Slovaks, it is important to remember that it was above all Hungary that dominated Slovak history, and that has left the deepest mark on Slovaks’ national consciousness. It is true that the preamble to the Slovak constitution passed in 1992 earnestly remembers Great Moravia, when Cyril (Constantine) and Methodius brought Christianity to the land, and this empire could, at a stretch of the imagination, be designated as the prototype common state of Czechs and Slovaks since it combined part of the current Slovak Republic in the east with Moravia – now in the Czech Republic – in the west. Yet this formation only lasted for about fifty years in the ninth century, and then collapsed. In 896, the Magyar tribes from whom present day Hungarians are descended had come through the mountains from Asia, eventually to settle, in the early tenth century, on the Danubian plain. There began the thousand years of Hungarian rule which form the refrain of many Slovak nationalist laments. The Slovak lands were in Hungarian Felvidék – the upper lands. Slovakia was Upper Hungary.

Contemporary Slovak historians therefore face a dilemma about what Slovak history actually is.² Since the predominantly Slav-speaking lands of Upper Hungary (that is, Slovakia) never formed a separate administrative unit within Hungary, creating Slovak history by examining the development of the territory that now comprises the Slovak Republic is complicated. The shape and form of the Hungarian empire over the last millennium changed many times. For example, parts of present day Slovakia were invaded by the Turks in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and in the same period, Bratislava was elevated to the status of the Hungarian capital while the Ottoman Empire controlled Budapest. Yet defining Slovak history as the story of the Slovak nation is no easier a task: although Slovak history has sometimes been portrayed as a thousand-year struggle for the survival of the Slovak nation,³ in some respects a Slovak national identity did not begin to ‚ crystallise until the end of the eighteenth century. Ludovít Štúr, who codified the Slovak language and is regarded as one of Slovakia’s great heroes in the struggle for nationhood, was only born in 1815.

This Slovak National Awakening in the first part of the nineteenth century was also a precursor of one of the most difficult periods of Hungarian rule for the Slovaks. The multinational Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire was badly shaken by the revolution of 1848, during which the Slovaks tended to side with the Austrians against the Hungarians, but when the Habsburg Empire became a dual monarchy with the Ausgleich of 1867, Hungarian rule over the Slovaks was strengthened. The Hungarians used their new-found power to launch a concerted campaign of ‘de-Germanisation’ in their part of the Empire, but their attempts to bolster the use of their own language led to the suppression of minority cultures and attempts totally to assimilate the Slovaks and other minorities. In the course of the 1870s and 1880s, the Slovak cultural association Matica slovenská was closed down, and secondary education in the Slovak language ceased. After 1907 the vast majority of primary education was conducted in Hungarian as well.⁴

What had changed over the course of the nineteenth century was the Hungarians’ attitude to the national and cultural identity of their empire. This is a development that is linguistically difficult to capture in the English language. The Slovak language differentiates between Uhorsko – the lands of the extensive Hungarian Empire – and Mad’arsko, the smaller, modern, ethnically Hungarian state, while both concepts tend to be rendered as ‘Hungary’ in English. Although the English word ‘Magyar’ is sometimes used to denote that which is culturally and linguistically Hungarian, there is no word that equates to the Slovak Uhorsko and pertains exclusively to the Hungarian Empire. This had traditionally been an area of many languages and cultures (and which had, for many centuries, used Latin as its official language for state communication). It was only in the nineteenth century – particularly the latter decades – that the Hungarians made a concerted attempt to impose the Magyar language and culture on those whom they ruled.

Magyarisation meant that it was instrumental for young Slovak-speakers seeking upward mobility via education to abandon their Slovak roots and assimilate into Hungarian culture, which to an extent represented modernity and progress in contrast to more rural, Slovak life. The only other escape for a Slovak at the end of the nineteenth century – and, indeed, well into the early Czechoslovak period – was emigration. With the exception of the Irish, few other peoples in Europe experienced such an exodus as Slovakia. Approaching 20 per cent of the population emigrated to the USA in the last half century of Hungarian rule, a majority never to return.⁵ Other Slovaks moved to the non-Slovak parts of Uhorsko, and Budapest in particular, but also Vienna contained larger urban concentrations of Slovaks than any town in what is today Slovakia.⁶ But from there, at least, it was easier for them to return to their roots, particularly after the formation of the Czechoslovak state in 1918.

In these circumstances, it was hard for Slovaks to organise politically, since they lacked a strong educated elite. Many of the literate urban-dwellers in Slovakia – Hungarian bureaucrats and aristocrats and German traders – could not speak Slovak at all. In the villages, the leading figure of authority was the priest, but since the Catholic church was organised territorially as part of Hungary, and the bishops were Hungarian, priests were subject to the normal Magyarisation pressures. Even if they retained a nationalist persuasion, their celibacy meant that their views could not be handed down to their children.⁷ Consequently, although Slovakia was a largely Catholic country, Slovak Protestants were pivotal to nineteenth century nationalist movements. Their vernacular Bibles were written in the Czech biblical language, and this created a natural affinity with their Slav neighbours in the west.

The political organisation of Slovaks in Upper Hungary was concentrated around the Slovak National Party, founded in 1871.⁸ Since the adverse circumstances in which Slovak politicians had to function required a united approach, the party contained different strands within it, ranging from liberals with close links to Prague and the Czech Professor Tomáš Masaryk to Catholic populists. However, in electoral terms, the Slovak National Party could achieve very little in a country where a limited franchise, no secret ballots and widespread bribery and corruption rendered standing for election virtually pointless.⁹ The largest number of Slovaks ever to enter the Hungarian parliament, in 1906, was seven, and the figure decreased to three in 1910.

The Hungarian attempts totally to assimilate the Slovaks might have been successful had it not been for the First World War and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire.¹⁰ When the war started in August 1914, the Slovaks found themselves in a weak position, forced to fight against the Slav Serbs and Russians for a Hungarian state to which they felt little loyalty, but vulnerable to the harsh oppression characteristic of wartime if they displayed open opposition. A consequence of this was that Slovak national aspirations were articulated most vocally by Slovaks abroad, particularly in the United States.¹¹ The possibility that the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) would be defeated opened the way to more ambitious goals than mere Slovak autonomy within a Hungarian state, and by 1915 the favoured project was the formation of a Czecho-Slovak state. This notion was promoted in London by the Czech Masaryk, and in Paris by the Slovak Milan Rastislav štefánik, who had lived there since 1904 and become a French general. Together with Eduard Beneš, they created the Czechoslovak National Council in February 1916, which set about furthering Czecho- Slovak plans not only on the diplomatic front, but also by the creation of a Czechoslovak Legion to further the Entente’s war efforts. In the summer of 1918, the French, British and Italians finally recognised the Czechoslovak National Council as the Czecho-Slovak government.

Czechoslovakia between the wars

In the light of the overwhelming Hungarian threat to Slovak identity, joining with the Czechs to form Czechoslovakia in 1918 was an attractive option. On 18 October 1918, the Slovak General štefánik, together with the Czechs Masaryk and Beneš (both later Czechoslovak presidents), signed ‘The Declaration of Independence of the Czechoslovak Nation by its provisional government’, which stated:

We claim the right of Bohemia to be reunited with her Slovak brethren of Slovakia, once part of our national State, later torn from our national body, and fifty years ago incorporated in the Hungarian State of the Magyars, who by their unspeakable violence and ruthless oppression of their subject races have lost all moral and human right to rule anybody but themselves.¹²

The Czechoslovak Republic was founded in Prague on 28 October 1918. In the course of 1918 the idea of a Czechoslovak state had also increasingly been supported by declarations within Slovakia itself, where politicians and people alike were still subject to repression by the Hungarian authorities. These culminated in the formation of a Slovak National Council in the Slovak town of Martin in September 1918, followed by the ‘Declaration of the Slovak Nation’ on 30 October 1918.¹³

The actual relationship of Czechs and Slovaks in this new state was a source of contention that lasted until 1992. The formation of a Czecho- Slovak state was presented as the demand for self-determination by a Czechoslovak nation – a concept that was to cause lasting problems. Particular confusion was caused by the Pittsburgh Declaration of May 1918, in which Czechs and Slovaks in the USA agreed to form a state in which the Slovaks would have autonomy.¹⁴ A difficulty of wartime declarations and agreements reached in communities not organised as democracies is that the decision-making rights of individuals can later be disputed, and the status of the Pittsburgh Declaration was never clear.

Slovak politicians immediately embraced the new Czechoslovak state, and although, unlike the small Slovak elite, ordinary people in Slovakia were not really f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Chronology
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Map of Slovakia
• 1. Slovakia Before Independence
• 2. Slovak Politics In an Independent State
• 3. Slovakia and the World
• 4. The Economy In Slovakia
• Select Bibliography