Whither Slovak Historiography After 1993?

Abstract

The appearance of a new state on the international scene offers the historiography of the nation that created it opportunities for interpretation and explanation that are linked to the conditions, circumstances, institutions, and personalities that brought about its creation. It must, however, also take into account the various forces, historical or other, that are connected to it. These opportunities are offered not only to national historians but also to foreign scholars who study the nation; they are all the more challenging if their historiography has been hitherto influenced by specific exogenous and endogenous factors. Such is the case of Slovakia and the Slovaks when they were a constituent part of Czechoslovakia.1 As Stanley Z. Pech writes: Although Western specialists in Eastern European history have usually regarded it as their task to make the West familiar with the entire ethnic panorama of the polyglot region, they have in practice often been selective in the favours they bestowed on each nation [...]. The history of the Slovaks in the West has usually been presented from the point of view of ' Czecho slovakism' and has appeared as hardly more than a postscript to Czech history.'To understand the importance of the challenge that Western scholars face, a few words about the meaning of Czechoslovakism are necessary. It was first and foremost a state ideology that also came to define an approach to historical scholarship and to the study of the new state that was created in 1918, when Austria-Hungary was dismembered and the Czechs of the Kingdom of Bohemia, of Moravia, and of Silesia (then in Austria) joined the Slovaks of Upper Hungary (as Slovakia was known in the Kingdom of Hungary). The new state also possessed sizeable German and Hungarian minorities. Czechoslovakism appeared after 1920, when Czecho- Slovakia became Czechoslovakia, signifying thereby the existence of a single nation, rather than two, and also defining the state as a national state. Its aim was to develop a Czechoslovak civic nationalism and was based on two premises: first, that the creation of the new state was an historical culmination arising out of the sporadic contacts and co-operation in the past between the two linguistically closely related nations; and second, that the smaller nation, the Slovaks, would freely and willingly accept the ultimate objective of the state's nationalism, namely the creation of the new nation, by agreeing to fuse, as the smaller, into the numerically larger one. But both premises were wrong. In the first place, Czecho- Slovakia was created because it was the solution to the application of the principle of self-determination for both nations when Austria-Hungary was broken up, to which historical contacts and linguistic similarities between them merely provided some justification; and secondly, because the Slovaks did not consider this application of the principle of self-determination as meaning the abandonment of their national identity, culture, and language, nor of their right one day to exercise that principle on their own.The fact that the Slovaks were little known in the West was one of the most important factors in the creation of Czechoslovakia. In addition, as A. J. P. Taylor writes: Ci [Tomas G.] Masaryk [Czech politician and first president of Czechoslovakia] revived the radical idea of 1848 [of one nation] and proposed to create a single 'Czechoslovak' nation by will-power. Masaryk knew little of the Slovaks; others knew even less. That was his strength in dealing with the allied leaders.4 His approach had support in the West, in particular among academics like Ernest Denis5 of France and journalists like Robert Seton- Watson of the United Kingdom. Czechoslovakia underwent thereafter a turbulent history. It was Central Europe's only democracy in the inter- war years; it became the target of German expansionism in the late 1930s; it was dismembered in 1939 with the German occupation of Bohemia-Moravia and a declaration of independence by Slovakia; it was re-created in 1945 only to succumb to a communist coup in 1948; it challenged Soviet ideology through a liberalization process in 1968 that was terminated by a military occupation by Warsaw Pact troops, but which also saw the federalization of the state; it abandoned communism and embraced democracy in 1 989 only to break up peacefully on 31 December 1992, creating on 1 January 1993 the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia. …