Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
3. The settlement structure of Slovakia
3. The settlement structure of Slovakia The Hungarian settlements that were mostly inhabited by Slovaks became an important factor in a political sense when, following Pan-Slav ambitions, Czech politicians began to work at endowing the Slovak people with equal rights so as to strengthen their own ambitions. This policy was justified by the 1920 Peace Treaty. It was Masaryk who proposed that they should claim territories for the Czech and Slovak people (important economic living space and militarily défendable borders) with great power politics, rather than the Austro-Slav equality idea propagated by Palacký. The great powers that dictated peace were open to these claims, because it was the reflection of their own logic in acquiring new territories. With the foundation of Czechoslovakia, it became obvious that the process of the Slovak people becoming a nation was so slow that the issue of Slovak autonomy did not even come up when the new state organization was established. Slovakia was at the level of an annexed territory with all its constitutional conclusions. (Zelenák 2002). The emerging system of settlements, among them that of towns, was formed to meet the general needs of the new, unified state, and not the Slovak people’s own local needs. Slovak interests were subordinated to the uniform Czechoslovak interests. Self-governance could not be enforced in the democratic, legislative and administrative operation of the new state, which, by acting on the principle of majority vote, suppressed minority needs, and thus Slovak claims too, by simply voting them down. The asymmetric system manifested itself in the fact that the political division of Czechoslovakia took place on a national basis, in the form of national parties, which involved the possibility of the new state breaking up. The effect that this phenomenon had on administration has been analysed in literature written on the subject (Kocsis 2002). 3. 1 Factors forming settlements in Slovakia The settlement structure of a country depends on several factors, some of the most important being its geographical location, natural conditions, his-37
