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

2. Towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) before 1918

Ethnie Composition of towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary)

state. However, it can already be seen in the text of the memorandum that the most important political actors were those who, while seeking political solutions, had language homogeneity in mind. They wrote about the purest Slav counties and called the counties with a Hungarian majority ‘mixed’ ethnicity counties. The question of the individual and collective protection of the language and cultural rights of all the Slovaks living in the territory of historical Hungary did not arise later, either, because their ambition was to establish a monolingual state in an acquirable area, which eventually was ensured by the Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920.

The 1910 data and the figures of the 2001 census regarding the same towns prove that the Slovaks managed to achieve their goal and established a state that, from the point of view of ethnic composition, has a new national structure {Table 4). The first remarkable factor to be seen is the considerable increase in the population.

The population of the towns formerly called ‘northern’ increased by over five times (there was an increase of 506.6%), whereas that of the towns in the south rose by nearly four times. However, the targeted and artificial results of changes enforced by political means are even more striking. In the north, the percentage of the population of Hungarian ethnicity decreased to only 0.3% and that of the Germans to 0.1%, while that of the Slovak ethnicity increased to 94.5%, meaning that it became more than ten times higher during this period.

In the south, not only was the increase in the population more modest (387.1%), but also the proportion of Hungarians (7.2%) and Germans (0.2%) remained higher than in the north, leading to a Slovak proportion of ‘only’ 88.0%, although the proportion of the Slovak ethnicity grew more than twelve times (1229.2%).

Apart from the dominance of the Slovak nation, the increase in the proportion of the ethnicities listed in the ‘others’ category by seven times in the north and by ten times in the south (773.8% and 1064.4%, respectively) indicates that this is a version of multiculturalism that rejects a thousand-year-old tradition and denies Hungarians’ and Germans’ inclusion since the new state has formed its ethnic composition in a way that would serve its own interests. We must remember that all this also concerns the ‘indigenous’ Ruthenian population, whose former territorial integrity, which can clearly be seen in statistics, has completely ceased by now. The only exception is the gypsy population, whose population explosion is not revealed in the official statistics. According to the Slovak statistical office,

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