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

3. The settlement structure of Slovakia

Urban structure in Slovakia

Table 16. Number and proportion of the three main ethnicities according to censuses in the area of present-day Slovakia

total

Slovak%

Hungarian

%

German

%

other

%

1910

2,926,824

1,686,712

57.6

896,271

30.6

196,958

6.7

146,883

5.0

1921

2,998,244

1,941,942

64.8

634,827

21.2

139,800

4.7

281,675

9.4

1930

3,329,793

2,224,983

66.8

571,988

17.2

147.507

4.4

385,315

11.6

1950

3,442,317

2,982,524

86.6

354,532

10.3

5,179

0.2

100,082

2.9

1961

4,174,046

3,560,216

85.3

518,782

12.4

6,259

0.1

88,789

2.1

1970

4,537,290

3,878,904

85.5

552,006

12.2

4,760

0.1

101,620

2.2

1980

4,987,853

4,321,139

86.6

559,801

11.2

5,121

0.1

101,792

2.0

1991

5,274,335

4,519,328

85.7

567,296

10.8

no data

no data

187,711

3.6

2001

5,379,455

4,614,854

85.8

520,528

9.7

5,405

0.1

238,668

4.4

Source: the author’s own calculations on the basis of Popély (1991) and Štatisticky úrad SR, Bratislava

During the war the ethnic composition continued to change. As a result of the 1938 Vienna Award, the southern areas populated by an overwhelming majority of Hungarian people was returned to Hungary. The Czech and Slovak people who had moved there and occupied the leading positions in the towns or worked as farmers in fields confiscated from Hungarians started to move back to Czechia and Slovakia. In the remaining Slovak area they declared the new Slovak Republic. The new state started Slovakization immediately. They resettled the people with Czech citizenship from Bratislava to Czechia and sent the Jews to concentration camps. Within the German alliance system, they could not take hostile steps against the Hungarians, although the removal of the Hungarian population was the subject of political common talk and opinions published in newspapers.

After the war the Czechoslovak state interfered with the ethnic composition in the most aggressive way. The new Czechoslovak government had sided with the winners and thought it was time to create an ethnically homogeneous national state. This was included in the infamous 1945 government programme of Kosice. Giving the false arguments of Hungarian and German people having been the reason for the collapse of Czechoslovakia, they did all in their power to expel Germans and Hungarians from the country. Since the victorious powers did not allow the method of mass removal of the population, they tried to achieve their goal by population exchange, deportation and different means of intimidation. How ‘successful’ this was is proved by the census figures. While the proportion of the population of Slovak ethnicity increased from

53