Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)

4. Towns in Slovakia after 1993

Administration as a means of organizing the town network

The change of regime gave a sudden impetus to the country. After 40 years of inflexibility and standstill in the socialist era, we have been able to witness incredibly rapid changes in Slovakia. The new, independent country has been able to adjust to the new conditions by radically reorganizing its administration system.

Table 31. The administrative system of present-day Slovakia

Large territorial unit

Small territorial unit (district)

1918

8 counties + 12 fragmentary counties

97

1920

16 counties

95

1923

6 large counties

77+Bratislava and Košice

1928

1 province

77+Bratislava and Košice

1939

6 counties

58+Bratislava

1945-77+Bratislava and Košice

1949

6 regions

90+Bratislava and Košice

1960

3 regions

32

1969

4 regions (Bratislava included)

36+Bratislava and Košice

1991-121 small districts (obvod)

1996

8 regions (kraj)

79 districts (okres)

2004

8 regions (kraj)

50 small districts (obvod)

Source: compiled from Kuhnl (1982), K.Petőcz (1998) and K.Kocsis (2002)

The most decisive change in the administrative system was that the former, strictly hierarchical council system based on central directives was replaced by the municipality system; in 1991 administration and self-governance were separated again. Due to the political debates in the country, that was all the Slovak policy aimed to change the regime could achieve. They could not set up either the regional organs of local governance, or the correspondent administrative levels. Apart from the executive organs of a national sphere of authority, only a settlement-level local government system, although not the final one, was set up and 121 smaller districts were established for carrying out administrative tasks. It is typical of the extreme character of Slovak political action that in the new state after 1918 the number of the district-level administrative units was gradually decreased (from 97 to 32), and always in the name of centralization. Now that there is democracy, an unprecedented number of districts have been marked out. It was a reaction to the ‘large independence' of the particular settlements that the 121 district offices became controlling and inspecting organs of the settlements in the particular districts.

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