Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Interethnic spaces
118 Károly Tóth a result of external forces of power acting upon a given community in a defenceless position. The community, Dlhá nad Váhom3, which I would like to describe in this paper, without considering the broader social and political environment, is not in the situation of “power defencelessness”. Its local leaders have never been so “Hungarian orientated" as in the last decade; in more than one electoral period the municipality was composed of persons with Hungarian nationality (during the last decade the representatives of the municipal office were members of the Hungarian parties). Moreover, it has a Hungarian school (to be more precise, its Hungarian school has been reestablished), the village has a Hungarian priest, etc. The political climate, apart from a couple of years, has been very positive. In spite of all this, the process of natural assimilation has begun and has been continuing for some years now. According to some, this process cannot be resisted. Why do local inhabitants think that the ethnic structure of their village is changing to a noticeable extent in their everyday? Somewhere in the depths, landslide-like processes are taking place that are changing even the lives of the “strongest Hungarian” families. Or are the community’s members solely witnessing a natural process? Is it only our intensified sensibility that makes us experience the formation of a multicultural community as the loss of our own ethnic identity? The Hungarian population in Slovakia demographically is at its lowest level in many years. Although recently the village’s population has shown a slight increase, it is the proportion of the nationalities within the community that is changing. My survey sought answers to these questions and even if I did not find clear answers to all the problems, I achieved very instructive results which might indicate long-term impacts. The results of the national census in 2001 lend a sad actuality to this study. The proportion of Hungarians in Slovakia has fallen from 10,7% to 9,7%. This means a decrease by almost 47,000 Hungarians. The population
