Czechs often refer to Slovakia as a nation without history. This is, of course, a ridiculous offence, unless it’s interpreted as follows: barring a half-mythical kingdom in the tenth century and six years as a Nazi puppet state during the Second World War, the Slovaks have never experienced national sovereignty (which doesn’t mean that they don’t have any history). From the tenth century right up until 1918, the Hungarians ruled Slovakia as the province of Felvidék (Upper Hungary) and at times, they behaved as if all its inhabitants were Magyars.
Partly because of harsh pressure from Budapest and partly because of its deep roots in agrarian society, both economic and cultural developments were slower in Slovakia than in the rest of Central Europe. “To the urban Czechs of the nineteenth century,” the writer Pavel Kosatik comments, “a trip to Slovakia was almost like a safari to an exotic and picturesque country, where the natives happened to speak a Slavonic language they understood very well.”
It’s fair to say that the emergence of Czechoslovakia in 1918 meant a giant leap forward for the Slovaks. The government in Prague made great efforts to develop the eastern and more backwards part of the young state (see: Ruthenians), not least by building a functioning educational system. After 1948, the communist regime followed suit with the large-scale industrialization of agricultural Slovakia, so by 1969 Slovakia’s standard of living had risen more than any other East Bloc country. Many Czechs, however, credited this amazing achievement more to generous financial contributions from better-developed Bohemia than to the Slovaks’ industriousness.
But didn’t the creation of Czechoslovakia also lead to the creation of Czechoslovaks? This was certainly the goal of the country’s “founder” and first president, Tomáš G. Masaryk, who had a Slovak father and Czech mother. The great national enthusiasm that flared after independence and lived on during the First Republic’s early years strongly suggested that a Czechoslovak national identity was under formation. But this process would take time — Masaryk himself suggested 50 years.
Unfortunately, history had other plans. The infamous Munich Agreement, which the governments of Great Britain and France signed with Hitler in September 1938, was practically a go-ahead for the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia six months later. Millions of embittered Czechs could never forget that the Slovaks — or more precisely, their political leaders — exploited this tragic event to establish an “independent” Slovakia lead by Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest.
Seen in retrospective, it appears that the Slovak and Czech political elites chose different paths at almost every important crossroads in the twentieth century. The divergence manifested itself not only in 1939, when the Slovaks ostentatiously preferred national sovereignty to solidarity with the Czechs. The same schism appeared in Czech and Slovak attitude towards communism.
In 1946, in the first elections after the war, a staggering 36 percent of Czech voters supported the Communist Party, and thus enabled them to establish a government. In Slovakia, however, the agrarian Democratic Party won in a landslide with 62 percent support. In other words, while the Czechs largely paved the way to the communist dictatorship themselves, the Slovaks got it stuffed down their throats.
Peculiarly enough, by the time of the political thaw of the late 1960s, the roles had changed completely. Now, a vast majority of the Czechs enthusiastically supported the Prague Spring’s reforms, while most Slovaks expressed reservation and sometimes even condemnation. The fact that the only Prague Spring reform that survived the invasion was the federalization of Czechoslovakia — the country was formally transformed into two republics — didn’t make the Slovaks particularly popular with the disillusioned Czechs. “While we have to put up with the Soviet occupation troops, they got their federative republic, which we subsidize with billions of korunas every year!” the Czechs groaned.
Given this background, it’s not too mysterious that Czechoslovakia finally fell apart once the Velvet Revolution put an end to the communists’ grip on power.
Sure, the Czechs had no intentions of breaking up the federation. They only took it for granted that Czechoslovakia consisted of two equal nations, and they were a bit more equal than the Slovaks. And yes, a majority of Slovaks wanted to keep the benefits (not least the economic ones) that the federation offered, but at the same time dreamt of international recognition of Slovakia’s sovereignty. Basically, the Slovak stance in the early 1990s was strongly reminiscent of Winnie the Pooh’s famous slogan: Yes please, I’ll have both milk and honey!
Another obstacle was the two nations’ diverging perceptions of how the communists’ command economy should be transformed into a market economy.
The Czechs declared that they wanted to move quickly and implement immediate reforms to regain what was lost during the communist stagnation. The Slovaks, on their side, knew perfectly well that a substantial part of their economy was based on heavy industry and military production, both of which were hard to reform overnight. A slow pace for reforms, they argued, was necessary to avoid social distress. What’s more, Slovakia’s Catholic Church, traditionally an important opinion maker, skilfully used people’s distrust of the market economy by warning against the godless Czechs’ addiction to consumerism.
If the Slovaks and Czechs had lived in a marriage, a therapist would have probably concluded: “The marital partners have never managed to establish a common identity. They have been living side by side for twenty years, and now their personal interests have become stronger than their will to keep the marriage together. Divorce is the most sensible solution.” And that’s how it ended. The Czechs and Slovaks conducted a divorce that was almost as smooth and quick as the Velvet Revolution four years earlier. Quite an achievement compared to the terrible slaughter that was going on in Yugoslavia.
So how has the separation affected the relations between the Czechs and Slovaks? As one might expect, lots of Czechs were maliciously pleased when the lugubrious Mečiar government in the middle of the 1990s led “separatist Slovakia” into international isolation and thousands of liberal-minded Slovaks into Czech exile. But the incredible work later governments in Bratislava have done to change the course has evoked great respect among most Czechs, and there is no more paternalistic talk about spoiled little brothers.
The same attitude also seems to apply for the Slovaks. Gone are the days when they could blame the “damned bureaucrats in Prague” for everything that went wrong. Now, the Slovaks can only rely on themselves, so in one sense, it seems that the separation has made relations between the Slovaks and Czechs better than they were before.
And, of course, not all ties from the Czechoslovak days have been broken. Some 300,000 of the Czech Republic’s citizens still regard themselves as Slovaks. What’s more, Slovaks make up the largest group of foreigners in the country (officially 61,000), and the Czechs are the largest minority in Slovakia — excepting the indigenous Hungarians living alongside the Danube.