Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Peter Učen: Approaching National Populism
Peter Učeň State-building nationalism against co-nationals: Non-nationalist Slovaks. Some Slovaks argued that the process of building of a truly Slovak state faced its greatest danger from those members of the Slovak group who were insufficiently conscious of or loyal to the Slovak nation. These suspicions of disloyalty led to calls for a variety of measures that ranged from the increase of national consciousness to withdrawal of “anti-Slovak Slovaks” from public life.” (Deegan-Krause 2004, 658-659). To sum up this section, the essence of nationalism is based on exclusion and inclusion. Its principal political expressions include making statements on who belongs to the nation and who does not. Setting up criteria for and emphasising implications of (not)belonging to the nation are quintessential tô nationalist politics along with the means of achieving the congruence of the ethnic and the political, if one is to remain within the modernist approach to nationalism. Therefore, similarities and differences in expressions of nationalism among various suspects of national populism in Slovakia should be meticulously examined within the framework of this project. PoSuCOMMUNiST NaTÍONaI PopuliSM ÍN ÄCTÍOIN Having separated in the sections above the populist radical right, populism and nationalism as concepts, the natural goal of this section is to outline how those got intermingled in post-communist Slovakia, thus resulting in both ‘movement’ and ‘situation’ of national populism. As it has been stressed throughout this text, but perhaps should be repeated, to grasp national populism in Slovakia we should treat separately nationalism and populism of individual actors in order to understand their affinities. Before embarking upon this task it would be useful to revisit traditional explanations of (re)emergence of nationalism and populism under postcommunism. We will resort to Blokker as an illustrative example even though we can’t help to object to his approach of treating nationalism and populism interchangeably, or, more precisely, considering populism largely as a political style of nationalism. Blokker (2005) presents the explanations at issue as falling into two broad categories - modernizatonist and historical-determinist. The former approach understands emergence of the phenomena in question as “as a radical form of protest against the degradation of the quality 22
