Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
3. The settlement structure of Slovakia
The settlement structure of Slovakia suses, long debates and publicity campaigns took place so as to persuade inhabitants to declare themselves Hungarian or German. By that time the state power had already introduced laws that resulted in the deprivation of civil rights. According to the 1920 language act, the language of the ethnicity could not be used officially in a settlement if its proportion within the settlement's population was lower than 20%. After that each census became decisive for ethnic minorities, because this was what determined what the official language(s) of a village or a town would be. In everyday debates and newspapers words and expressions like ‘manly strength of character’, 'faith till death' or ‘cowardly retreat’ were opposed to each other (Cited in Popély 1991, p. 54). It was just as decisive for the Czechoslovak power, too, because they wanted to win and to demonstrate their power. That is why they did not even shrink back from distortion and abuse. The most criticised point was the practice of ethnicity data survey. The census-takers abused their authority in that only they were entitled to fill in the forms, whereas in the Czech part of the country, the people had the right to write their answers on the sheets. The census-takers themselves had been selected so as to make sure that they would behave in a militant way. Their arguments served the national goal when they tried to force Hungarian people to declare themselves Slovak: ‘Slovak officials will come here, and we are going to throw out Hungarian priests, cantors, teachers and notaries.’ (Cited in Popély 1991, p. 56). The census changed from an impartial means of demographic data collection into a political manoeuvre serving political purposes, i.e. it became a means of ‘statistical Slovakization’ between the two World Wars. The Czechoslovak state power wanted to prove the majority presence of the Czechoslovak national ethnicity in the new state at all costs. Meanwhile, the politicians representing minorities emphasized that they could gain or lose language usage rights if they kept or gave up their national identity. All this contradicts the idealized image that Slovak academics cherish about the first Czechoslovak republic. The above facts do not support the statement that Czechoslovakia was a model of tolerant coexistence of different kinds of urban population (speaking different languages and belonging to different religions) between the two World Wars (Bitusiková 2003). 52
