Petőcz Kálmán (szerk.): National Populism and Slovak - Hungarian Relations in Slovakia 2006-2009 (Somorja, 2009)
Annex
Annex - Kálmán Petőcz tical requirements formulated by the narrow group of Slovak intelligentsia. For Slovaks, it was much easier to attain full-fledged civil and/or political recognition if they gave up their national identity. However, one should bear in mind that it could be misleading to transpose modern-world concepts of minority rights mechanically into a different historical period and international law context. In the modem European understanding (thanks largely to the Holocaust and brutal cases of ethnic cleansing that took place in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s), the term of ‘harsh ethnic oppression’ evokes genocide or ethnocide, which does not correspond to the historical truth in the case of Hungarian minority policies, however flawed they may have been according to modem standards and whatever excesses they may have produced (most of which are described in great detail in available Slovak letters). Besides, if we study the rhetoric and administrative practices of the Hungarian Kingdom’s political and clerical circles following the Austro-Hungarian settlement, it is difficult to resist a feeling that they conspicuously resemble arguments used by some politicians and public officials in modern-day Slovakia. Like then like today, they vehemently emphasized the need to further the use of state language in schools and in official contact, the importance of good command of the state language for citizens of minority origin in order to ‘win recognition in economic and social life all around the country’, the need to encourage social cohesion in order to facilitate further economic growth, the need to establish the state language as the common means of communication for all citizens, etc. One could object that a comparison of national minorities’ situation in both countries since the split of the Austro-Hungarian Empire clearly reveals a telling difference: while ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia thrive, ethnic Slovaks in Hungary have become almost assimilated... The rebuttal of this assertion should perhaps be divided into several parts. 1. For ethnic Slovaks living in post-Trianon Hungary, the emergence of the Czechoslovak Republic and the system of peace agreements paradoxically represented a negative turning point. While the system guaranteed international legal protection of minorities living in successor states, it did not feature truly effective mechanisms and sanctions. The Czechoslovak Government did not take any special initiative with respect to ethnic Slovaks in Hungary either; it used a multitude of mechanisms to support Slovak and Czech enclaves in Romania and Yugoslavia but not in Hungary. The Slovak community in post-Trianon Hungary (165,000 persons according to official statistics; between 200,000 and 250,000 persons according to estimates) was thus left at the mercy of Horthy’s regime and its 290
