A view of Slovak history

by Ľubomír Lipták

One of the four state holidays of the Slovak Republic is 5th July, the feast of Sts. Cyril and Methodius. They are honoured as the "Apostles of the Slavs", who preached Christianity in the territory of modern Slovakia in the 9th century, but also because of their association with the state of Great Moravia, which included the northern part of the Carpathian Basin and adjoining territories in that period. These events and their commemoration more or less symbolize the long-term in the history of Slovakia and the Slovaks. Great Moravia was under constant pressure from the West. The Frankish Empire used military and religious weapons against it. Cyril and Methodius came from the East, from Byzantium, in 863, at the invitation of Prince Rastislav. Constantine-Cyril created a Slavonic alphabet, and translated liturgical books and part of the Bible into the Slavonic language. Cyril, Methodius and their pupils are regarded as the founders of education among the Slavs. However, the Latin, Western form of Christianity prevailed in Slovakia, and the Slovak language is written with Latin letters.

THE TRADITION OF GREAT MORAVIA

After three quarters of a century shaken by struggles with the Frankish Empire, Great Moravia succumbed to the Magyar tribes, who penetrated into Central Europe from the east. Slovakia became part of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1918. Therefore, the tradition of Great Moravia as "their own state" became an important part of Slovak national consciousness from the time of the national revival. Political documents appeal to it, operas have been composed, plays, novels and romantic epics have been written and television serials produced.
           The Magyar tribes succeeded, where the Huns and Avars, previous nomadic tribes from the east, had failed. They had also settled in the Danubian plains, but succumbed to struggles with Western Europe. Acceptance of Christianity and transition to a settled way of life enabled the Kingdom of Hungary to become part of the European civilization and culture of the 11th and 12th centuries. The frontier position of the Kingdom of Hungary between Eastern and Western Europe, the coexistence and cooperation of many ethnic groups, time delays in comparison with the countries from which the main cultural impulses came, combined with the appearance of many original phenomena, led to attempts to define "Central Europe", in the political discourse. The definitions vary, but Slovakia is included in all of them. However, from the outside point of view, Slovakia also has a background, marginal, sometimes completely forgotten position. This is not only because Slovakia is smaller than the surrounding countries.
           Until recently, historiography was mainly concerned with the history of states. Where forms of government are concerned, Slovakia has no great deficit compared to other European countries. It has experienced feudalism, various forms of monarchy, enlightened absolutism, parliamentary democracy, rightist and communist dictatorship, that is all the fruitful products and dead-ends of European history in the second millennium. However, Slovakia experienced them hidden within larger states, first in the Kingdom of Hungary, from the 16th century with Hungary included in the Habsburg Monarchy, which formed the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy from 1867. From 1918 to 1993, Slovakia was part of Czecho-Slovakia, apart from a six year interruption during the Second World War. This anonymous participation in the shaping of history is the cause of one of the most painful complexes of Slovak historical consciousness, which is only gradually acquiring a feeling for the long-term continuity of Slovak history through various states and regimes. This characteristic is also reflected in the fact that the cultural and spiritual components have great weight in Slovak history.
           It is problematic to evaluate and judge historical periods, and especially long periods. However, the history of Slovakia in the first half of the second millennium appears to be "most normal" from the point of view of the general development of Europe. Great catastrophes, such as the destructive Mongol raid of 1241 - 1242, were rapidly overcome. The settlement of the country became denser and more diverse. From the 12th century, the Slavonic population was joined by colonists from Western Europe, mostly Germany. They included peasants, but also many miners, craftsmen and traders. From the 14th century, Rumanian, Polish, Ukrainian and other peasants settled in the mountains and neighbouring areas. From the 16th century, Magyar or Hungarian settlement was pushed further north by the Ottoman Turks. The Jews formed a small, but economically important community. In spite of the continuing dominance of the Slavonic element in the population, the country already had a multi-ethnic character. It was a dynamic field of giving and receiving, meeting and limiting, assimilation and division.
           The position of the towns as a new phenomenon in an agricultural country, was strengthened from the 13th century with extensive privileges. Many Slovak towns have charters of privileges from the 13th century. The basic wealth of most towns lay in crafts, organized in guilds, and trade in craft products, wine, cattle and metals. Until the occupation of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, important long-distance trade routes ran from the south-east to the Baltic Sea. Bratislava and other western Slovak towns profited from trade along the Danube. The mining towns formed an important and rich group. Gold was mined in Kremnica and other towns, silver at Banská Štiavnica and elsewhere, while Banská Bystrica grew rich from extraction of copper, which was exported to the whole known world. The Kremnica Mint began to strike gold ducats in 1355, and they are still produced there today. Numerous iron foundries and forges were scattered throughout the mountainous districts of central Slovakia until the beginning of the 20th century. Together with extraction of timber, floated down the rivers to the plains, mining and metal production formed important parts of the economy of the country. Grain and wine from the plains and areas below the mountains, wool and timber from the mountains, metals from the bowels of the earth and craft products from the towns, formed the basis of the prosperity of the country and its cultural flourishing. In the towns and at the numerous castles, the slender towers and elegant arches of Gothic were added to Romanesque buildings. Gothic wood carvings and winged altars still have a place among the most precious part of the cultural heritage of Slovakia.
           Apart from the educational institutions of the Church, the first town schools already appeared in the Middle Ages. In 1467, the Academia Istropolitana, the first university in the territory of Slovakia, was established in Bratislava. Students from Slovakia attended - university in Padua and Bologna, and especially in nearby Prague, Vienna and Krakow. The penetration of the Ottoman Empire into the Kingdom of Hungary at the beginning of the 16th century hindered this promising economic and cultural development.

ON THE FRONTIER OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

The native House of Arpád died out in 1300. Kings from the houses of Anjou and Luxembourg, and from the Polish - Czech - Hungarian House of Jagiello alternated on the throne of Hungary. The death of Louis II in the lost battle with the Turks at Mohács in 1526 is an important historical turning point. This is not because the Habsburgs finally gained the throne of Hungary, after a long period of effort, and kept it, with short interruptions until 1918, but because the occupation and annexation of most of the territory of Hungary by the Ottoman Empire made Slovakia a frontier region for more than 150 years. This was a period of cold war, tension, raids and robbery alternating with actual war, with capturing of castles and towns, devastation of whole districts, and deportation of the population into slavery. Life did not stop, but the Ottoman frontier certainly influenced a long period.
           The occupation of the centre of the country and the capital city of Buda moved the centre of gravity of the Kingdom of Hungary into the territory of present-day Slovakia. Bratislava gradually became the seat of the highest offices of the kingdom. Parliament met here until the mid 19th century, the kings of Hungary were crowned here from 1563 to 1830. Trnava in western Slovakia became the seat of the highest church offices, and in 1635 a Jesuit university was established there. Another was established at Košice in eastern Slovakia in 1657. Wars and the frontier position limited economic development and the associated social changes.
           The occupation of the Balkans and the centre of the Danube Basin by the Ottomans interrupted old trade routes from the south-east to the Baltic Sea, which especially affected the towns in eastern Slovakia. The most interesting monuments of the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods and whole historic town centres in Levoča, Bardejov and elsewhere, still survive in this region. However, this is also evidence of their shift to a more peripheral position. Mining and production of metals continued in central Slovakia, but it began to be overshadowed by other European centres. Thanks to the discovery of new sea routes, the Turkish occupation coincided with the shift of the centre of gravity of the economic development of Europe from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Slovakia, as a country in the centre of south - north routes, permanently lost geo-political importance.
           However, the greatest burden was the wars, with losses in fighting, huge costs for the construction and maintenance of fortresses, and payment of permanent garrisons. Both the Habsburg and Turkish sides collected supplies from the peasants in frontier areas. The situation was significantly complicated by the continual rebellions of the Hungarian nobility against the Habsburgs. The 17th century rebellions of Bocskay, Bethlen, Francis I Rákóczi and Thököly, centred in Transylvania and Slovakia, occurred in agreement with the Turks and with their help. The final rebellion, that of Francis II Rákóczi from 1703 to 1711, was supported by France. The political struggles of the period usually had ideological connections - the Reformation and its opponent, the Counter Reformation.
           The Reformation penetrated into Slovakia very quickly, especially by means of the German inhabitants of the towns. In 1549, five eastern Slovak towns already issued the Confessio Pentapolitana. Calvinism spread among the Hungarian or Magyar population, but by the end of the 15th century, the moderate Augsburg Confession had become dominant in Slovakia. In the second half of the 16th century, Protestants were in the majority, partly also thanks to the support of the nobility, to which the opportunity to secularize church property was welcome.
           The Catholic counter-offensive, led mainly by the Habsburg court and helped by the Jesuits, was successful mainly by winning over the nobility, but also thanks to pressure and persecution of Protestants. The power situation in the towns frequently changed, especially during the Estates uprisings, with mutual persecution, physical and spiritual terror. A positive result of this quarrel was competition in the struggle for hearts and minds: many new Protestant schools were established, for example, the high quality Collegium in Prešov, as competition with the two Jesuit universities and the new Catholic secondary schools. Music, literature, architecture, the splendour of Baroque Catholic churches and the austere elegance of Protestant churches, limited both by world-view and Counter Reformation laws, were also reflections of this ferment. In the dramatic form of social conflict, the confessional quarrel continued for almost two and a half centuries, until the Toleration Patent of Joseph II ended civil and religious discrimination against Protestant and Orthodox Christians in 1781. However, the Catholic - Protestant phenomenon continued to play an important cultural and political role in Slovak society, in the following centuries, and it is still observable today.

THE FRUITS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE MULTI-NATIONAL STATE

The final offensive of the Ottoman Empire in the Danube region, the attempt to capture Vienna in 1683, was also the beginning of its enforced retreat to the Balkans. The country, freed from military pressure, was rapidly regenerated. The number of inhabitants, decimated by wars and epidemics, increased, and people migrated from Slovakia to depopulated areas in the south. This created numerous still surviving enclaves of Slovak population in the territories of Jugoslavia, Hungary and Rumania. Craft and trade revived, the first manufactories appeared. The Enlightened absolutist monarchs, especially Maria Theresa (1740 - 1780) and Joseph II (1780 - 1790) enabled the first steps of modernization. Serfdom, which bound the majority of villagers to the soil and placed them at the mercy of their landlords, was abolished. The foundations of a land register were laid. The administration and judiciary were improved and professionalized. The Toleration Patent was a step towards a more open society. The foundations of state education and universal school attendance were laid. The Mining Academy at Banská Štiavnica, first technical college in the world, was established in 1763. The orientation of the country towards modernization was clear and promising. However, it struck against several large obstacles, which later proved to be fatal.
           Fear of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars put a brake on the Enlightenment reforms. In the Kingdom of Hungary, the policy of the monarchs in Vienna struck against further obstacles, especially against the fear of members of the nobility, that they would lose their traditional economic and political privileges, and fear of the centralizing royal court. Therefore, the Hungarian Estates sabotaged many of the reforms. The struggle with the Habsburgs, which had led to a series of armed uprisings in the 17th and early 18th centuries, again began to crystallize less radical, but decisive resistance "against Vienna". This struggle originally had a religious and Estates character, but it now began to acquire an ever more significant national veneer.
           Maria Theresa and Joseph II promoted German as a unifying factor in the multi-national monarchy. The effort to extend education to the widest groups and growth of the bureaucracy limited the traditional, but nationally neutral Latin. However, in the Enlightenment, it was not a matter of Germanization. National languages were not suppressed, but had limited practical and cultural space. It was probably the only and last possible way to successfully take the Monarchy across the threshold of modernization and emerging nationalism. It was unsuccessful. The power elites of the Kingdom of Hungary placed the idea of a sovereign Kingdom of Hungary against the idea of a centralized state, against "Vienna". Apart from historical arguments, the modern national idea was increasingly used. >From the end of the 18th century, the idea of the traditional Hungarian Estates nation, that is essentially of the Hungarian nobility, was ever more transformed into the idea of a Hungarian political nation of all classes, and from this to the idea of ethnic unity of the country.
           However, like the whole Monarchy, the Kingdom of Hungary was a multi-national state, in which the ethnic Hungarians or Magyars were a minority. The majority was formed by Rumanians, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Germans and Rusyns. The process of national emancipation or "national renewal" among them occurred at different times and speeds, so that the temporary winners in this competition were the ethnic Hungarians or Magyars. If we speak only about Hungarian - Slovak relations, the central position of the Hungarian or Magyar ethnic group in the Carpathian Basin was important, but especially the role of the nobility in the process of national emancipation had great significance. Although the nobility was partly Slovak in ethnic origin, it accepted the Hungarian state idea in the form promoted by the Hungarian or Magyar political elite - the idea of a Magyar nation state. An ethnically unified Magyar state became the aim of the ruling Hungarian or Magyar elites until the 20th century. In the environment of the development of the non-Magyar ethnic groups into modern nations, this became a permanent trauma or deforming element. The process of Magyarization, not by natural assimilation, but from above, by pressure, became a brake on the proclaimed aims of the ruling elites . to create a developed country, equal to those of Western Europe.
           The Hungarian Parliament passed the first Magyarizing laws in 1790 and 1792. In the following decades, the languages of the other nations, including Slovak, were excluded from offices, local administration and schools. This process was gradual and struck against resistance from the beginning. Slovak national consciousness also received an important instrument at this time - that of a written language.
           Apart from Latin, German and a Slovakized form of Czech were used in the territory of Slovakia from the Middle Ages. Slovakized Czech became the liturgical language of the Slovak Protestants. In the environment of the Catholic seminary in Bratislava, which had the aim of educating priests as educators of the people in their own language, in accordance with Enlightenment ideas, Anton Bernolák laid the foundations of a Slovak written language, based on the western Slovak dialect, in the 1780s. This phase of national renewal produced numerous factual and literary works, especially poetry, translations from ancient literature and a translation of the Bible. The Slovenské učené tovarišstvo (Slovak Learned Society), founded in 1792, was an intellectual and literary society, typical of the Enlightenment period. However, apart from Bernolák's linguistic current, the Protestant part of the national movement continued to use Czech. In the 1830s, a new core of the national movement crystallized in the environment of the Evangelical Lyceum in Bratislava, under the leadership of Ľudovít Štúr. The need for national education in comprehensible language and the Catholic - Protestant linguistic dualism led to the idea of codifying a new integrating form of the written language for all Slovaks. The central Slovak dialect became its basis, and in 1846 Ľ. Štúr published its grammar. The literary almanac Nitra was already published in the new literary language in 1844, and the Slovenské národné noviny appeared in it from 1845. The Catholics also accepted it.

THE EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS AND OUR NATIONAL EMANCIPATION

Štúr's codified Slovak language, which became the basis of written Slovak, after some later adaptations, had much greater importance in further development than language did for nations with their own states, precisely defined frontiers and capital cities. The Slovak language had an integrating character, it often represented the national and state idea, it was a sort of defensive wall. The bearer of the language - the writer or poet - was perceived as the embodiment, not only of aesthetic, but also of moral elements. The language - nation link often approached identification.
           The European revolutionary crisis of 1848 - 1849 has an important place in Slovak national emancipation. In the whirlwind of events, marked by revolutions and storms in France, Germany, Italy and the whole Habsburg Monarchy, the Slovaks first appear on the scene as a separate political entity. At the Hungarian Parliament of 1848, they demanded consistent democratic constitutional changes, emancipation of the serfs and civil equality. At first, the Slovak national movement was united with the Hungarian, but when it demanded territorial autonomy, they came into sharp conflict. While the Hungarian national movement progressed to dethroning the Habsburgs and declaring the independence of the Kingdom of Hungary, the Slovaks demanded that the monarch separate them from the Kingdom of Hungary and create a separate Slovak province in the framework of the Empire. Armed conflict between Slovak volunteer units and the Hungarian Army deepened the abyss of distrust and rejection for decades.
           The defeat of the Hungarian revolution in 1849 brought Franz Joseph to the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary. Absolutism was formally renewed, but the emancipation of the peasant masses from serfdom, equality before the law and other achievements of the revolution could not be reversed. In an effort to prevent a further explosion, the neo-absolutist power itself opened the doors to economic reforms, modern legislation and capitalist enterprise. Although the Vienna court and the aristocracy were basically centralist, after the experience of revolution, they could not ignore the real movements in society. After the military defeats in Italy and in the war of 1866 with Prussia, they also had to yield to defeated, but unbroken Hungary. In 1867, the Monarchy was reshaped into a dual state, Austro-Hungary with a common monarch, foreign policy, customs and currency.
           Hungarian policy up to 1918 shows two clear directions: an attempt to use the advantages and space of the dualist Monarchy, and an effort to achieve the complete independence of the Kingdom of Hungary. However, both more or less strongly supported the idea of a state, which would be not only politically but also ethnically homogeneous. The actual ruling power, modernization of the country and the associated mobility, secularization, urbanization and industrialization moved the country forward, but also gave the state unprecedented power to strengthen the assimilation processes and generate new ones. In its efforts to accelerate Magyarization, the state attempted to use the Church and the schools, and to prevent defence by the affected, by suppressing Rumanian, Serb, Slovak and Ruthene societies, schools and publishing. This pressure increased over time. In 1870, there was teaching in Slovak in 1,882 elementary schools, in 1914 only in 365.
           The Slovak national movement also used the ferment which led to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The national cultural and academic organization Matica Slovenská was established in 1863, three gymnasia with teaching in Slovak were established as a result of public collections, but, above all, a political programme was formulated. The Memorandum of the Slovak Nation was adopted at an assembly in Turčiansky Svätý Martin in 1861. It formulated demands to recognize the separate identity of the Slovak nation and its autonomy in the form of a Slovak "Okolie". In this autonomous territory, Slovak would be the official and educational language, in which laws would be published. The aim was a stronger Kingdom of Hungary, "a united, free, constitutional country, with liberty, equality and fraternity of nations".
           The Memorandum programme, gradually supplemented with socio-economic demands, remained topical until the break-up of the Kingdom of Hungary. However, the Slovak political elite did not have enough strength to achieve its implementation. It often had to concentrate on mere survival. In the 1870s, the Budapest government even dissolved Matica Slovenská and closed the Slovak gymnasia.
           The Hungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy in the period 1867 - 1918 presents a special and contradictory image. On the one hand, development, represented by the rapid construction of railways and roads, urbanization and industrialization. Budapest grew into a modern European metropolis with ambitions to equal Vienna. On the other hand, the modernization process was deformed and unsatisfactory in many ways. The Kingdom of Hungary and Slovakia as part of it, remained a mainly agrarian country, with an economic and cultural level half way between Western Europe and the eastern and south.eastern parts of the continent. This had various causes. Some could be overcome only by long-term development, for example, the results of the fact that the two revolutions, which shaped Europe in the 19th century - political and industrial - came late. The first steam engine came to Slovakia in 1832, the first bank in Bratislava was established in 1842, the first railway was built in 1846, but in 1910 only 100,361 inhabitants of Slovakia worked in industry, and Slovakia was one of the most industrialized parts of the Kingdom of Hungary.
           The slow democratization of the state was a great handicap to modernization. The electoral system allowed only about 5% of the inhabitants of Slovakia to vote in 1910. Fear of the large number of members of the non-Magyar nations delayed many necessary political reforms until the Kingdom of Hungary would be a nationally homogeneous state. The only means by which this could be achieved in the foreseeable future - forcible Magyarization - brought results, but it provoked counter-actions and nourished foci for future changes.
           Slow economic growth provoked mass emigration. Between 1880 and 1914, 500,000 people emigrated from Slovakia only to the USA. The emigrants created a network of societies, periodicals and magazines in America, and they became familiar with the ideas of democracy and federalism, for which they did not have conditions at home. In the years of the First World War, this emigrants' movement played an important role. Among the domestic Slovak political elite, the idea of a "national" representation, deriving from the traditions of 1848 and the Memorandum of 1861, already acquired a more modern form. Before the First World War, all the main European political currents were already active. The conservatives were represented mainly by the mainly Protestant Slovak National Party and the Catholic Slovak People's Party. On the left were the social democrats, and in the centre the agrarian movement. Finally, there were the small but active reformist groups with liberal elements, especially the group around the revue Hlas. All of them were opposed to the Budapest government. In spite of all their differences of programme, they had some common demands - language rights, since Slovak was gradually pushed back to the household, universal suffrage, which would give the vote to the mass of Slovak peasants. However, the real state of political forces in the state was such that no solution could be seen in the foreseeable future. Only the First World War radically changed this.
           The war sharpened decades of growing tensions in the Habsburg Monarchy, the social and national conflicts. The traditional authorities of the monarch and the Church were weakened. The world conflict brought previously unimaginable geo-political combinations. Since the Partition of Poland in 1777, Slovakia had been a territory entirely within the Monarchy, with no frontier towards another state. In the course of the war, an entirely new possibility for achieving the national aims of the Slovaks appeared: that of cooperation with the Czechs.
           Czech society was a generation ahead of Slovakia in the formation of civil society and its own economic and cultural institutions. It could base itself on the traditions of the old Czech state. During the war it began to incline to the idea of complete emancipation in its own state. After going abroad in 1915, Professor T. G. Masaryk, the leading supporter of independence, began to agitate in Paris, London and Washington, for the liquidation of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a Czech state. However, the Czech Lands, surrounded by ethnically German regions on three sides, needed "a gate to the east", and Slovakia provided it. A political bond was built on the old cultural links between the Czechs and Slovaks. The Czecho-Slovak project found a response and support in the influential Czech and Slovak immigrant communities in the USA, as well as at home. Milan Rastislav Štefánik, a Slovak astronomer living in France, became Masaryk's closest colleague abroad. The main argument in favour of the new state was the organization of Czechoslovak armies or "legions" in Russia, France and Italy. At the moment of defeat of the Monarchy, the Czecho-Slovak Republic was declared in Prague on 28th October 1918. Two days later, the Slovak National Council at Turčiansky Svätý Martin declared its support for the new state.

SLOVAKIA IN THE CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC

Slovakia entered the Czecho-Slovak Republic with several handicaps. The Budapest government was determined not to give up Slovakia, the Slovak National Council did not have enough strength, and Slovakia became part of the new state only thanks to military assistance from the Czechs. In the situation with a serious imbalance of strength, Prague was able to apply the centralist model of state organization. The republic was very ethnically varied. The Czechs were in a minority compared to the total number of Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rusyns and Jews. A solution was sought in the construction of a "Czechoslovak nation", but this found little support in Slovakia. The linguistic and cultural closeness of the Slovaks and Czechs was obvious, but so was the feeling and fact of difference. Slovak national self-consciousness, strengthened by the changes of 1918, opposed this artificial construction. In contrast to the Kingdom of Hungary, the democratic political system provided more possibilities and instruments for defence. The attempts at "ethnic Czechoslovakism" - the claim that the Czechs and Slovaks are one nation, only "temporarily" divided - were gradually replaced by various conceptions of one political nation with two languages. Centralism was also gradually eroded. The idea of autonomy for Slovakia, promoted mainly by Hlinka's Slovak People's Party, was accepted as a natural result of the separate identity of the country.
           The disputes about the position of Slovakia in the state are an important part of the inter-war period, but they are not the whole story. The republic was a parliamentary democracy. When dictatorships became established in the surrounding countries, it remained an island of democracy in Central Europe. This enabled an explosion of social and cultural changes, which can be described as new wave of national renewal. Slovak, officially "the Slovak form of the Czechoslovak language", became the official language. In schools, teaching was in Slovak and in the languages of the minorities. Only 23 Slovak periodicals or magazines were published in 1918, but by 1937 there were already 250 daily papers, regular magazines and periodicals, concerned with politics, entertainment, the arts and sciences.
           After 1918, Slovakia had precisely defined frontiers, a capital city - Bratislava and national administrative institutions, for the first time in history. National economic institutions - for industry, craft, farming - societies for writers and artists and a Slovak National Theatre were established. Matica slovenská was revived. There were dozens of political parties, trade unions, thousands of societies and associations, that is the whole fabric of a modern civil society. The same dynamic was seen in culture - literature, the fine arts and architecture, where the older orientation to Vienna and Budapest was replaced by an orientation to Paris and Prague. Real political elites were formed for the first time. Only a few Slovaks had struggled into the old Hungarian parliament, but in the new Prague parliament they were represented in proportion to population. Slovaks became ministers and ambassadors. In 1935, Milan Hodža became the first Slovak to serve as prime minister.
           Filling of the space opened by democracy, by evolutionary development was brutally interrupted at the end of the thirties. Nazi Germany used the movement of Sudeten Germans led by Konrad Henlein as an internal weapon against Czecho-Slovakia. At Munich in September 1938, Hitler got British and French agreement to the occupation of the frontier regions of the republic. On 2nd November 1938, Germany and Italy gave Hungary the southern districts of Slovakia by the Vienna Arbitration. Munich meant the end of the defensiblity of the republic and of democracy. In the post-Munich shock and marasmus, the Prague government moved towards authoritarianism. On 6th October 1938, Hlinka's Slovak People's Party declared the autonomy of Slovakia, and gradually liquidated the democratic regime and opposition. However, post-Munich Czecho-Slovakia was only a short episode in Hitler's aggressive policy. On 14th March 1939, the autonomous Slovak parliament declared the independence of Slovakia after Hitler threatened partition of the country between the neighbours. On 15th March, Hitler forced President Hácha to accept a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia.
           Slovakia experienced the tragedy of the Second World War divided. A quarter of Slovakia's territory was occupied by Hungary, and Germany took a small but important territory in the West, so that it directly bordered on the territory of the capital city Bratislava. The "Treaty of Protection" of March 1939 subordinated the foreign policy, economy and army of the Slovak Republic to German control. In the Nazi sphere of power, Slovakia had an intermediate position between the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and vassal states such as Hungary and Rumania to the south-east. Its army participated in the military campaign against Poland, and from 1941 against the Soviet Union. Germany gave Hlinka's Slovak People's Party some space for its own version of dictatorship in internal policy. The regime was a mixture of traditionalist conservatism, Catholic social doctrines, corporate organization of an Austro-Fascist type, with some radical innovations. Democratic, socialist and liberal currents, organizations and conceptions were outlawed.
           The regime had quite wide support at first. The national rhetoric was successfully nourished by disputes with Hungary about the southern territories, and with the external attributes of independence, such as a president, parliament, government, currency, army, national anthem, flag, international recognition and diplomatic relations. The war-time boom helped the regime to overcome the economic problems of independence. However, the dismantling of democracy and the clear inclusion of the state in the Nazi sphere also created centres of opposition from the beginning. In conditions of dictatorship, the opposition quickly changed to illegal struggle. It was politically very varied, ranging from groups, which did not agree with the break-up of Czecho-Slovakia and endeavoured to restore it, to communists, who wanted a Soviet Slovakia in the framework of the Soviet Union. The domestic armed groups were connected with exile organizations in the West, especially the Czechoslovak government in exile of Edvard Beneš in London, and in the East, the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in Moscow. As during the First World War, Czechoslovak units were formed abroad in France, the Near East, Britain and the Soviet Union. They fought in France, North Africa, the Battle of Britain and the Liberation of France. In the Soviet Union, Czecho-Slovak military units, enlarged by deserters from the Army of the Slovak Republic, gradually grew into an army corps.
           The position of the Bratislava government weakened as the war went on. In the shadow of Nazi "protection", it adopted a series of measures, which firmly linked it with Nazi Germany. The People's Party was traditionally anti-Semitic, and from its first moments in power, it adopted a whole series of anti-Jewish laws, which culminated in 1942 with agreement to the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps in Poland. The policy of adapting the country to the Nazi "New Order in Europe" definitively closed the Slovak Republic's door to post-war Europe. The Allies - Great Britain, France, the USA and the Soviet Union - already recognized the Czechoslovak government in exile of Edvard Beneš in 1941.

THE SLOVAK NATIONAL UPRISING AS THE SOURCE OF A NEW HISTORICAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

The sovereignty of the Czecho-Slovak Republic was renewed first in the territory of Slovakia. In 1943, resistance groups already created an illegal Slovak National Council. With the help of anti-fascist officers in the army, it prepared for an uprising, which would enable the rapid advance of the Soviet forces through Slovakia from the Eastern Carpathians to Vienna. At the end of August 1944, before preparations were complete, the German army began to occupy Slovakia, but it met with resistance from the army and partisans of the uprising. The armed struggle lasted two months. In the centre of the uprising at Banská Bystrica, the Slovak National Council declared the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak Republic, and its army was declared to be the First Czechoslovak Army in Slovakia. The Slovak National Council banned Hlinka's Slovak People´s Party, repealed anti-democratic legislation and ruled the territory controlled by the uprising for two months as a sovereign government.
           The Slovak National Uprising was also a large military undertaking in the context of the Second World War. Sixty thousand soldiers and twenty thousand partisans tied up significant German forces for two months. However, the uprising remained more or less in the shadow of other events of the time - the Warsaw Uprising, the revolution in Rumania and the rapid advance of the Allies in France. However, it had key importance for 20th century Slovak history. It demonstrated the ability and maturity of the Slovaks to take independent action. It was a rare example in Europe of that time of a joint approach by leftist and rightist forces.
           The uprising gave the Slovak elites the self-confidence, political capital and experience required for them to demand entry into postwar Czechoslovakia as equals of the Czechs. However, the war did not only leave destroyed railways, bridges and houses, minefields and the tradition of anti-fascism. It also created political destruction and radicalism. In the period 1945 - 1948, there was a struggle in the renewed state over its future orientation - towards renewal of the pre-war parliamentary democracy, or leftwards towards a regime of Soviet type? However, democracy was limited and mutilated from the beginning. Nationalization of large factories, mines, financial institutions and estates created a break in private ownership. Members of the German and Hungarian minorities were deprived of citizenship and property. The Germans and some Hungarians were expelled from the state. This maintained an extraordinary state in large areas for a long time, and made nationalism the state ideology. The immense post-war difficulties radicalized the people, but the idea of communism was still only accepted by a minority. In the 1946 elections, the communists received 30% of the vote, while the Democratic Party, founded during the uprising got 62%. However, the victory of the left in the western, Czech part of the state enabled the reversal of the situation in Slovakia. In February 1948, the communists took control of the government in Prague, and the republic definitively became part of the Soviet Bloc.
           The communist dictatorship continued and completed the series of destructions of society, which started during the war. The dictatorships not only affected individuals, but whole groups. During the war, the majority of Czechs had to leave Slovakia, and the numerous Jewish community, with its strong position in the economy and the liberal professions, was practically liquidated. After the war, expulsion and limitation of civil rights affected the Germans and Hungarians. After February 1948, large social groups in the population were affected. Collectivization undermined the traditional values of the peasantry and the village. The basic groups in urban culture - the craftsmen, tradesmen and members of the liberal professions - were deprived of their property and proletarianized. Rapid and forcible changes brought permanent elements of radicalization and intolerance into society. They threatened and liquidated a basic peculiarity of Central European cultures - the creative tension of multi-ethnic environments, the confrontation of traditionalism and modernism.
           The violent break in the long-term evolutionary development of the country, the radical geo-political and cultural re-orientation from West to East was outwardly covered by the quantitative growth of some elements of modernization. Rapid industrialization transformed the country from mainly agrarian to mainly industrial. In 1948, 216,884 people worked in industry, in 1983 already 809,928. Industrialization accelerated urbanization, and the construction of transport and telecommunications infrastructure. A dense network of vocational schools arose. Universities in Košice, Nitra, Zvolen, Banská Bystrica, Trnava, Žilina and Prešov were added to those in Bratislava. The networks of theatres, libraries, scientific and cultural institutions, hospitals and social facilities were substantially extended. The undeveloped infrastructure had previously distinguished the country from regions further west.
           However, this quantitatively imposing growth was contradictory and limited. The Soviet model of the economy, the organization of society and the externally imposed cultural models destroyed much real, social and cultural capital. Thus, "construction", the basic paradigm of the regime only partially replaced the ruins of abandoned and destroyed values and institutions. The dictatorship, the monopoly of one ideology and one model of culture also limited and deformed the really new possibilities. For example, after isolated earlier attempts, production of Slovak drama films started in this period, but these first steps were taken under strict pressure from censorship and ideological demands. More extensive development of science and research occurred for the first time, but they constantly had to struggle with artificial and deliberate isolation from the "capitalist" world.
           Isolation was the basis of the survival, but also of the destruction of the communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Bloc was built and administered as a closed, separate world, controlled by Moscow. Economically it was organized around the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), and militarily around the Warsaw Pact. However, the exaggerated system of isolation - limitation of travel and personal contacts, control of the importing of magazines, books and films, jamming of foreign radio broadcasts - did not entirely stop the movement of information and ideas. Cracks in the isolation, information about the world, disturbed the officially proclaimed view that the "socialist camp" was the only possible model of progress, development and change in culture and politics. Politically and intellectually, the regime very quickly collided with the wall it had built by limiting creativity, initiative and informedness. However, since the communist dictatorship brutally suppressed and liquidated its opponents in the first years after the revolution, it could survive for decades. But it could not develop.
           After the real and potential opposition was destroyed by terror, the regime could change to less obvious instruments of social control, but the instruments of direct dictat were always ready. Brief periods of "thaw" from which culture also benefitted, were quickly replaced by the "normalization" of neo-Stalinist dictatorship. It occurred after the coming of Khrushchev in the mid fifties, then in a longer period of "liberalization" in the second half of the sixties. Culture not only benefitted from these weakenings of dictatorship, it actively participated in them. Culture, especially literature, theatre and film played the role of a sort of "smuggler" of reformist to opposition ideas, in the conditions of monopoly of power by one party. In the sixties, Kultúrny život, originally a literary weekly, became a national opinion forming institution and a centre of reformist ideas.

THE "SOCIALISM WITH A HUMAN FACE" OF ALEXANDER DUBČEK

The attempts at internal reform of the regime, especially the "socialism with a human face" of Alexander Dubček in 1968 appear rather illusory from the point of view of historical hindsight. No substantial changes in the Soviet power sphere were possible as long as Moscow remained strong, and the West refused, as they did during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, to risk turning the Cold War into a hot war. However, for society, culture and the younger generations, they were not only tests of ethics, but also breathing spaces, moments for renewing traditions and opening windows to the outside world. They maintained the continuity of the thing the regime most feared - plurality of thought.
           The direct occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 saved the dictatorship for another twenty years, but also ended the last illusions about its reformability. Outwardly, everything was as it should be in a communist dictatorship. The party decided and the government acted, the victories of construction were celebrated, decorations awarded, the "decadent" West was criticized, but in reality nothing was the same as before. "Us" and "them" were already very far apart, the ruling party stopped talking about the future and communism, and oriented itself towards survival. The dissident Milan Šimečka called the period after 1968 "the years of immobility". They were also years of waiting.

SLOVAKIA IN A NEW HISTORICAL SITUATION

The cruel defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War by the end of the eighties, and on all fronts - ideological, economic and military-strategic - created a new situation in Slovakia's geo-political space. For the first time since the Second World War, the balance of internal and external political forces placed decision-making, responsibility and risk in the hands of the domestic political representation. Without Soviet support, the communist regime collapsed so quickly and easily that its fall was called the "velvet revolution". Civic Forum in Prague and Public Against Violence in Bratislava forced the government into retreat with mass demonstrations and a general strike on 27th November 1989. The political monopoly of the Communist Party was removed from the constitution, freedom of the media was renewed. The gate to a democratic society and the recovery of state sovereignty was open.
           The historic symbol of Slovakia is a cross with two pairs of arms on three hills. In the period after 1989, they could also symbolize the three huge mountains of problems, which the country had to solve. Firstly: the creation of democratic structures on the ruins of communist dictatorship. Secondly: the transition from a centralized state economy to a market economy. Thirdly: a new solution to the position of Slovakia in Czecho-Slovakia and in the international community. Each of these tasks would have been enough to occupy a whole generation, but they had to be solved quickly and simultaneously.
           At first sight, the constitutional position of Slovakia was the most serious problem. In the Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, similar problems led to long-lasting and bloody conflicts, but in Czecho-Slovakia it was solved relatively smoothly and quickly. The history of the common state from 1918 showed various movements from centralism to freer union and the reverse. The permanent relapses into centralism were based on the real continuing numerical imbalance - two to one - of the Czechs towards the Slovaks, and the fact that the Czech Lands were historically more developed in economic, cultural and social terms. This difference in level of development was gradually reduced, but it continued. Czecho-Slovakia entered the new historical stage after 1989 as a federation of two republics: Czech and Slovak. It was a federation of Soviet type, that is, only formal, and paralysed by the absolute centralism of the Communist Party. After the November revolution of 1989, Czech and Slovak constitutional ideas substantially diverged. In Slovakia, the majority wanted at least a "functional" or "real" federation or confederation. In the Czech Republic, the existing federation was regarded as something superfluous imposed by the occupiers of 1968. Views varied from traditional centralism to the existing federation as the maximum. The endless talks, proposals and counter-proposals unsettled society and delayed other essential reforms. On the Czech side ideas about the geo-political advantages of being separated by an independent Slovakia from the power sphere of Russia and the disturbed Balkans began to spread. This would improve the chance of the stronger Czech economy to rapidly enter the European structures. The idea of independence also gradually gained ground among the Slovak political elites.
           Two days after the parliamentary elections of June 1992, the leaders of the winning parties - Václav Klaus from the Czech Republic and Vladimír Mečiar from Slovakia - met and started the "velvet divorce". The Constitution of the Slovak Republic was adopted on 1st September, and the Federal Parliament in Prague passed the Act on Dissolution of the Federation on 25th November. The two states, the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic, joined by a customs union were established on 1st January 1993. The Slovak Republic became the 180th member of the United Nations.
           The peaceful separation after more than seventy years of coexistence in a common republic and almost 400 years of coexistence in the Habsburg Monarchy was a small miracle in relation to the climate in the post-communist countries at the time. All the structures of parliamentary democracy: an elected parliament, a government responsible to parliament, a constitutional court and other institutions, were successfully created in a relatively short time. President Michal Kováč was elected by parliament in 1993. A direct election by the citizens elected the next president - Rudolf Schuster - in 1999. The "control levers" controlled by the Communist Party - trade unions, youth, women's and cultural organizations - were replaced by voluntary associations, and a constellation of political parties appeared. The effectiveness of the system has been demonstrated by four parliamentary elections and several referenda in the period 1990 - 1998. Formation of the new democratic tradition and political culture were hindered by the most difficult and long-term of the "three mountains of problems": the economy.
           For decades, the Slovak economy was planned and built as Czecho-Slovakia's link to the Soviet Union. Many factories exported almost all their products to the East, and huge arms works were the basis of the engineering industry and nourished whole areas. After the fall of the Soviet Union, they lost their markets. Re-orientation to Western markets was difficult and sometimes impossible. The decline of the economy was deep and long. By 1993, industrial and agricultural production fell by a third, and even at the end of the nineties real incomes had not reached pre-revolutionary levels, while unemployment reached 20%. Confiscated houses, workshops, agricultural land and forests were returned to their original owners in the restitution programme, but the problem of ownership of the large number of factories, hotels, stores and buildings erected after 1948 remained problematic. The privatization of a large part of this huge property by persons with political connections contaminated public life with clientelism and corruption. During the period of the coalition governments of Vladimír Mečiar from 1992 to 1998, this led to the international isolation of Slovakia. Although all the post-revolution governments proclaimed entry to NATO and the European Union, that is "returning to Europe", Slovakia fell behind its more consolidated neighbours from the so-called "Visegrád Four" - Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - in this effort.
           Like all great changes, the fall of communism in 1989 left many things unsolved, but it opened space and renewed hope. It also brought to the surface the questions the dictatorship had suppressed and left unsolved. A fifth of the population of Slovakia belonged to various minorities - Hungarians, Czechs, Rusyns, Ukrainians, Romany and Germans. Relations between the majority nation and the minorities are a constant feature of political life. Some of these relationships are mainly a problem of communications and consensus. For example, this is the case with Slovak - Hungarian relations. They are solvable in a standard way. The social and economic problems of Slovakia's community of almost half a million Romany are solvable only in the long term, over generations, but their pressure is already immense.
           The academic dispute from the first post-revolutionary years over whether "we are returning to Europe" or we were always there, has moved into the sphere of practical politics: coordination of law with the European Union, achievement of the norms of the armies of NATO, international cooperation between cultural and academic institutions, local government and non-governmental organizations. Slovakia was always in Europe. Even dictatorship did not succeed in destroying the foundations laid by Christianity, the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and democracy. This is something to build on, but it is also obvious that the world and Europe, from which Slovakia was separated by the Iron Curtain for decades, are also different after half a century.
           Confrontation of the different, one of the pillars of European tradition, can be destructive, but also fruitful. It has many forms and spaces. Slovakia, with its 5.4 million inhabitants, with an area similar to Denmark and Switzerland, has fortieth place in the geo-political indicator of the so-called Index of Human Development of 174 states. The basic data of the index, such as national income, length of life and level of education can be exactly measured and compared. In what place is Slovak culture? Nobody thinks of answering this question, or even of asking it. It would be nonsense to deny two basic dimensions of culture: the national and the universally human. However, nothing changes its importance. Undervaluing of culture is scarcely imaginable from the point of view of Slovak culture. It is one of the basic factors continuing through the centuries of changing dynasties, states and frontiers. It was and is, that which survives.