Adjudicating Loyalty: Identity Politics and Civil Administration in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938–1940

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses loyalty trials conducted in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland region known as Felvidék after it was reannexed to Hungary by the First Vienna Award in 1938. All civil servants who had worked for the Czechoslovak state had to appear before local loyalty commissions to prove their loyalty to the Hungarian state. The commissions' task was complicated by two competing conceptions of loyalty – one investigating civic loyalty, the other national loyalty – and the politicisation and ethnicisation of peoples' daily practices for the previous two decades under Czechoslovak rule.