Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
4. Towns in Slovakia after 1993
Towns in Slovakia after 1993 1918 and had rather vague, centuries-old boundaries, into an easternwestern orientation. This ‘gravitation’ could best be illustrated by the railway lines. In 1914 the area of present-day Slovakia was connected with Galicia by four, with Moravia and Silesia by three, with Austria by two and, with the area of present-day Hungary, by ten railway lines (Lipták 1994). Since the neighbouring country of the new state, so also that of Slovakia, was Poland in the north and in the east, and Sub-Carpathia was bordered by Romania, the economic interest that had connected it to Austrian Galicia and Bucovina ceased to exist. The reduction of eastern relations, a trend that lasted till 1945, was another reason why the towns in Eastern Slovakia, including the towns in Spiš, which were in need of a 'structural change’, lost importance and the role they used to play. As a result of being close to the Hungarian border, the towns along the new border, between Bratislava and Košice, lost their geopolitical weight. The positional value of the eastern part of the country and the towns along the Hungarian border fell at that time. It was in these towns that the most factories went bankrupt. Lipták adds in his paper that such a decline of the industry had nothing to do with the minority policy; it had an effect both on the Hungarian borderland and the purely Slovak Upper Garam area (Lipták 1994, p. 81.). Consequently, we have returned to the above-mentioned situation: the Váh Valley, which was geographically close to the Czech section of the country, became more valuable. The factories built in this area made and have been making the successive waves of modernization possible up to the present day. The 19th century industrial and handicraft industrial crisis of the towns in Szepesség [Spiš] was ‘solved’ by the continuous industrialization in the Váh Valley. The German threat and the 1939 Czech occupation accelerated the development of the economy in the western Slovak areas. The industrialization and development priority of Slovakia was only modified by the 40-year presence of the Soviet sphere of interest: Košice was allowed to build the iron works in the 1960s and the towns along the Soviet border were permitted to build factories that were in accordance with Soviet interests (Humenné, Medzilaborce, Michalovce, etc.). Mention must be made of the fact that it was between 1939 and 1945 that Slovakia first became independent. The geopolitical situation of the first ‘independent’ Slovak state was obvious, because it was a satellite state of the Nazi Germany, even if its independence had not been granted, only approved, by Germany. 96
