The Making of the Slovak People's Party: Religion, Nationalism and the Culture War in Early 20th-Century Europe by Lorman Thomas (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 371 clear that it preferred the Hungarian spelling and, if available, the Hungarian equivalent of given and family names. Numerous Ions and Alexandrus now found themselves named János and Sándor. Local authorities had to manage popular resentment towards such infringing measures. As an escape, Romanian parents began to make ample use of names with Latin origins, such as Liviu or Lucian that were officially recognized as untranslatable. Superficial Magyarization, Berecz concludes, defied its purpose, since it produced new cleavages. Only the elites, their status being secure, could afford a playful approach to the politics of naming that was mostly meant to demonstrate political power and arrogance. This approach finally shaped the great toponymic manoeuvre, launched in 1898, whereby every village, town and city in the Kingdom of Hungary should receive its proper, unique Hungarian toponym. Berecz skilfully explores the frictions and absurdities of this undertaking which epitomized the nationalist claim to impose its vision of the past. The gazetteer published in 1913 fixated this highly artificial vision on paper. It never came to life, and seven years later, it was already waste paper. Now, at the distance of a century, the Hungarian government has engraved it in stone. It comes once more as a demonstration of power and arrogance, and it remains to be seen whether it has similar alienating effects like its predecessor. At the moment when it was inaugurated, Ágoston Berecz’s fine scholarly work has exposed its shallowness. Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena Joachim von Puttkamer Lorman, Thomas. The Making of the Slovak People’s Party: Religion, Nationalism and the Culture War in Early 20th-Century Europe. International Library of Twentieth Century History. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2019. xi + 307 pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00: $114.00. The study of Slovak history is complicated by the fact that over the last century and a half, Slovaks faced a series of changing borders, political systems, linguistic and cultural challenges, all of which often resulted in searches for identity and stability. Historian Thomas Lorman, an Associate Lecturer at the SchoolofSlavonicandEastEuropeanStudies,UniversityCollegeLondon,seeks to address some of these challenges in his study of the Slovak People’s Party — the Slovak abbreviation SLS (Slovenská Ľudová Strana) is used throughout the book. Lorman’s primary expertise is in Hungarian politics which enables him to make extensive use of Hungarian sources and archives — the depth of research is evidenced by an impressive sixteen-page bibliography. As the title suggests, the focus is on the period before 1918, thus the first four chapters SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 372 of the book (138 pages), are devoted to Slovaks in the Hungarian Kingdom. Only the last two chapters (fifty-nine pages), carry the themes into the period 1918–38. The fundamental question that Lorman addresses is how and why a Slovak Catholic political movement developed in the last third of the nineteenth century and morphed into the Slovak People’s Party. While the themes are religion, nationalism and culture war, the principal elements are Catholic resistance to the attempt at reducing the power of the church, thus producing what Lorman calls cultural wars between secularization and religious authority. The first chapter analyses the nature of the liberal policies of the Hungarian government, which precipitated the rise of resistance movements. He rightly addresses the nature of those policies; ‘liberal’ is in quotation marks, to indicate the parameters of Hungarian national goals. Lorman makes clear that the word ‘liberal’ is rooted in objectives which would not merit the modern application of the term. Other factors which fuelled opposition movements among the Slovaks included economic policies, centralization and intense Magyarization. The resistance to the Hungarian policies was not limited to Slovak Catholics. The late nineteenth century witnessed a significant increase in Slovak political activism, including the so-called Hlasists, a derivation from their journal, Hlas, and the efforts of Milan Hodža. But as Lorman points out, the Catholics had the benefit of the largely Catholic Slovak population which enabled them to produce print publications and form associations, clubs, banks and cooperatives. These efforts were instrumental in promoting Slovak Catholic interests in existing parties. These groups ultimately concluded that a...