Slovakia in History

"Folia Historica Cracoviensia", 2019

The aim of this article is to show the attitude of Polish interwar literature (political commentary, historiography) towards the role of Slovaks in building the First Czechoslovak Republic and their situation in the state they shared with Czechs. The collected material has been divided into three categories: pro-Hungarian, pro-Czech (pro-Czechoslovak) and pro-Slovak, but the author also notes an interest in Slovakia related to the Slavic studies conducted during the Second Polish Republic. The works discussed in this article attempted to compare the Slovaks’ situation under the Hungarian rule and in Czechoslovakia; to answer the question whether the Czechoslovak nation existed; and to suggest with whom the Polish state should see its future on the international arena (support Hungary’s aspirations to recover Slovakia, establish good relations with Prague, or support the Slovak nationalist movement against Czechs).

Historický časopis, 2015

Ferenčuhová, B. - Zemko, M. Eds. In interwar Slovakia 1918-1939. Book review by Baka

2014

The article deals with the socio – political processes in Slovakia after gaining the independence. The author evaluates the processes from three points of view. First, he analyses the similarities between Slovakia and the states of Central and Eastern Europe. In the second part, he parses the different features distinguishing Slovakia on background of socio – political changes in the region. The last part of the article deals with the Slovak issue from the Polish perspective. The part contains the author ́s own research concerning the image of Slovakia in the main Polish electronic media

The aim of the paper is to analyse the development of Slovak historiography and the Slovak national story from its beginnings until 1948. The most important periods of the national story were identified on the basis of an analysis of the most important Slovak historical works of the period studied. The Slovak case is a typical example whereby a national story has been constructed despite the lack of a relevant state tradition. One of the major concerns of Slovak historiography has been to prove that the Slovaks have a national story which is distinct from those of the Czechs or the Hungarians. The seminal periods in the national story are those where the nation has been shown to be independent or autonomous. The development of views on particular nodal points open to dispute also depends on other factors such as the period, the historian’s aim, and ideological pressure. The aim by 1948 was the creation of an independent Slovak national story although its radical nationalist version was rejected after 1945.

"Historický časopis", 2020

The history of Slovakia and the Slovaks has for many years been perceived in Polish historiography as a component of larger wholes: the history of Hungary or the history of Czechoslovakia. For this reason, Polish historians usually paid little attention to the phenomenon of the national development of the Slovaks in the 19th century. This situation began to change only from the 1990s, when numerous studies finally appeared seeking to see the history of Slovakia and the Slovaks as a separate historical issue from the histories of the Hungarians and especially the Czechs. This text is aimed at presenting the achievements of Polish scholars over the last three decades with regard to the history of Slovakia and the Slovaks in the 19th century. The article describes the most important Polish synthetic studies, collective studies, and finally monographic works on the history of Slovakia and Slovak culture. Attention was also paid to the most important scientific centres in Poland, which initiate research in the field of Slovak culture and history. Despite the growing interest in Poland’s southern neighbour in recent years, significant shortcomings in Polish historiography are still visible. The article also attempts to draw attention to the desirable perspectives for further research in Poland.

Slovakia in history, 2011

The concept of ‘Czechoslovakism’ can be regarded as being both an ideology, which holds that the Czechs and the Slovaks comprise one nation, and a political programme designed to result in the unification of both nations in one state. Czechoslovakism as a political programme was first formulated during the First World War by the independence movement abroad, in order to justify the establishment of a Czechoslovak state, comprising the Czech Lands and Slovakia. The idea that the Czechs and Slovaks were twin aspects of a single nation had a far older pedigree, going back to the national revivals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Czechoslovakist ideology had its heyday during the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938), when it became the state doctrine, and it was officially abandoned after the Second World War. Czechoslovakism also existed in two versions: the first version held that Czechs and Slovaks jointly comprised a Czechoslovak nation formed from two tribes, Czechs and Slovaks; the second maintained that the Slovaks were actually less developed Czechs. During the First Republic, the theory of a unitary Czechoslovak nation was closely associated with administrative centralism. While there was little Czech opposition to official Czechoslovakism, Slovakia's political elite were split over this issue and the majority opposed their imposition. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the ideological composition of Czechoslovakism, and to give an overview of the role of Czechoslovakism in Slovak history.

2009

The official blurb: At the turn of the nineteenth century, Hungary was the site of a national awakening. While Hungarian-speaking Hungarians sought to assimilate Hungary's ethnic minorities into a new idea of nationhood, the country's Slavs instead imagined a proud multi-ethnic and multi-lingual state whose citizens could freely use their native languages. The Slavs saw themselves as Hungarian citizens speaking Pan-Slav and Czech dialects - and yet were the origins of what would become in the twentieth century a new Slovak nation. How then did Slovak nationalism emerge from multi-ethnic Hungarian loyalism, Czechoslovakism and Pan-Slavism? Here Alexander Maxwell presents the story of how and why Slovakia came to be.

Zwischen Krieg und Frieden. Festschrift für Erwin A. Schmidl zum 65. Geburtstag, 2021

The national movement, by which the modern Slovak nation was formed, was a process of seeking and defining the national identity through which the non-dominant ethnic group shed its linguistic, cultural, political and social inferiority. 1 In Slovak historiography, the concept of "national renascence/awakening" is normally used to describe this process even if, from the viewpoint of the theory of national movements, it is not fully adequate. These terms presuppose, namely, the existence of an entity of subject which, for a certain period of time, lost its identity or fundamental characteristics. It was the task of one or two generations of national "revivers" to bring it once again to life. 2 At first glance, the situation in which the Slovaks found themselves as an ethnic group at the dawn of the modern era did not provide evidence that they might have unique attributes defined in the past --a common language, a collective memory of a common shared history or a territory institutionally anchored. The Slovak ethnic group was not so much expressed in a distinctly social membership, since they belonged to an ethnic group with an incomplete social structure, but rather by confessional diversity. During the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century allegiance to one of two distinct and, in the past, antagonistic confessions, the Evangelical and the Catholic was a decisive factor from upon which depended the cultivated form of the language used, 3 the typical traditions which were fostered and way in which concepts of cultural orientation were articulated. The elements of a common consciousness, which in the case of the majority of the developed national collectives were a decisive bond, 4 had in the case of the Slovaks a different quality: the evangelical intelligentsia clung to the Czech literary language in public, in writing and in their liturgy and they

2009