scale and at the heart of Europe, the limitations of such an interpretation.
There was certainly no shortage of ‘history’ on which to call. Czechs and Slovaks, however indistinguishable they might appear to perplexed outsiders, had markedly different pasts. Bohemia and Moravia—the historical territories comprising the Czech lands—could boast not merely a remarkable medieval and Renaissance past at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire but also a pre-eminent share in the industrialization of central Europe. Within the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire Czechs enjoyed growing autonomy and a marked prosperity. Their major city, Prague—one of the aesthetic glories of the continent—was by 1914 a significant center of modernism in the visual arts and literature.
Slovaks, by contrast, had little to boast about. Ruled for centuries from Budapest they lacked any distinctive national story—within the Hungarian half of the Empire they were regarded not as ‘Slovaks’ but as slav-language- speaking peasants of rural northern Hungary. The urban inhabitants of the Slovak region were predominantly Germans, Hungarians or Jews: it was not by chance that the largest town in the area, an unprepossessing conurbation on the Danube a few kilometres east of Vienna, was variously known as Pressburg (to German- speaking Austrians) or Pozsony (to Hungarians). Only with the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and the Slovaks’ somewhat reluctant incorporation therein, did it become the second city of the new state under the name Bratislava.
The inter-war Republic of Czechoslovakia was democratic and liberal by prevailing regional standards, but its centralized institutions strongly favored the Czechs, who occupied almost all positions of power and influence. Slovakia was a mere province and a poor and rather disfavored one at that. The same impulse that led many of the country’s three million German-speaking citizens to listen to pro-Nazi separatists thus also drove a certain number of Czechoslovakia’s two and a half million Slovaks to look with sympathy upon Slovak populists demanding autonomy and even independence. In March 1939, when Hitler absorbed the Czech regions into the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’, an authoritarian, clericalist Slovak puppet state was established under Father Jozef Tiso. The first ever independent state of Slovakia thus emerged at Hitler’s behest and over the corpse of the Czechoslovak Republic.
Just how popular Slovakia’s wartime ‘independence’ ever was is hard to know after the fact. In the post- war years it was discredited both by its own record (Slovakia deported to death camps virtually all of its 140,000 pre-war Jewish population) and by its intimate dependence upon its Nazi patron. After its liberation, Czechoslovakia was re-established as a single state and expressions of Slovak nationalism were frowned upon. Indeed in the early Stalinist years, ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalism’ was one of the accusations levied at putative defendants in the show trials then being prepared—Gustav Husak spent six years in prison on the charge.
But in time the Communists in Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere, came to see the advantage of encouraging a moderate degree of national feeling. Reflecting a growing sentiment in Bratislava the reformers of 1968 (many of them of Slovak origin) proposed, as we have seen, a new federal constitution to comprise two distinct Czech and Slovak Republics; of all the significant innovations discussed or implemented in the Prague Spring this was the only one to survive the subsequent ‘normalization’. Having initially treated Catholic, rural Slovakia as hostile territory the Party authorities now came if anything to favor it (see Chapter 13).
Slovakia’s backwardness—or rather, the absence there of large concentrations of educated middle-class urbanites—now worked to its advantage. With fewer cars or televisions and worse communications than the more advanced western provinces, Slovaks appeared less vulnerable to foreign influence than Prague-based radicals and dissidents with their access to foreign media. Accordingly they suffered far less in the repression and purges of the seventies. Now it was
With this history in mind, the break up of Czechoslovakia after 1989 would appear, if not a foregone conclusion, then at the very least a logical outcome of decades of mutual ill-feeling: suppressed and exploited under Communism but not forgotten. But it was not thus. In the three years separating the end of Communism from the final split, every public opinion poll showed that some form of common Czecho-Slovak state was favored by a majority of Czechs
The initial unimportance of the ‘national’ question can be seen from the results of the first free elections, in June 1990. In Bohemia and Moravia Havel’s Civic Forum secured half of the vote, with most of the remainder divided between Communists and Christian Democrats. In Slovakia the picture was more complex: Civic Forum’s sister party Public Against Violence (PAV) emerged as the largest group, but a sizeable share of the vote was split between Christian Democrats, Communists, Hungarian Christian Democrats and Greens.[333] But the newly re-emergent Slovak National Party scored just 13.9 percent in the elections to a Slovak National Council, 11 percent in the vote for delegates to the Federal Assembly (parliament). Less than one Slovak voter in seven opted for the only party which favored dividing the country into its separate ethnic constituencies.
But in the course of 1991 Civic Forum began to disintegrate. An alliance based upon a common foe (Communism) and a popular leader (Havel), it now had neither: Communism was gone and Havel was the President of the Republic, ostensibly above the political fray. Political differences between erstwhile colleagues now came to the fore, with doctrinal free-marketeers led by Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus (a self-described Thatcherite) increasingly influential. In April 1991, followingparliamentary approval of a broad law on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, Civic Forum split and Klaus’s (dominant) faction became the Civic Democratic Party.
Klaus was determined to drive the country rapidly forward towards ‘capitalism’. But whereas there was a real constituency in the Czech lands for such an objective this was not the case in Slovakia. Privatization, the free market and a reduced state sector held little appeal for most Slovaks, who depended far more than Czechs upon jobs in unprofitable, outdated state-owned factories, mines and mills—‘enterprises’ for whose products there was no longer a protected market and that were unlikely to attract foreign capital or private investors. In the eyes of certain business and political circles in Prague, Slovakia was a burdensome inheritance.
Meanwhile Public Against Violence also broke apart, for analogous reasons. Its most effective public figure was now Vladimir Meciar, an ex-boxer who played a relatively minor role in the events of 1989 but had since proved far more adept than his colleagues at maneuvering through the shoals of democratic politics. Following the June election he had formed a government in the Slovak National Council, but his rebarbative personal style produced a split in his coalition and Meciar was replaced by the Catholic politician Jan Carnogursky. Meciar duly departed PAV, forming instead his own Movement for a Democratic Slovakia.
From the autumn of 1991 into the summer of 1992 representatives from the Czech and Slovak administrations conducted lengthy negotiations, seeking an agreed basis for a decentralized, federal constitution— the preference of the clear majority of politicians and voters on both sides. But Meciar, in order to establish a constituency for himself and his party, now took up the cause of Slovak nationalism—a subject in which he had not previously evinced great interest. Slovaks, he informed his audiences, were threatened by everything from Czech privatization plans to Hungarian separatism to the prospect of absorption into ‘Europe’. Their national existence (not to mention their livelihoods) was now at stake.
Buoyed by such rhetoric and his kitschy but charismatic public style, Meciar led his new party to a clear victory at the Federal elections of June 1992 with nearly 40 percent of the vote in Slovakia. Meanwhile, in the Czech regions, Vaclav Klaus’s new Civic Democratic Party, in alliance with Christian Democrats, also emerged victorious. With Klaus now prime minister of the Czech region, both autonomous halves of the federal republic were in the hands of men who—for different but complementary reasons—would not be sorry to see the country fall apart. Only the Federal President himself now stood, in constitutional form and in his own person, for the ideal of a united, federal Czechoslovakia.
But Vaclav Havel was no longer as popular—and therefore as influential—as he had been less than two years before. In his very first official journey as President he had traveled not to Bratislava but to Germany—an understandable move in the light of longstanding Czech-German animosity and his country’s need to make friends in Western Europe, but a tactical misstep nonetheless from the point of view of Slovak sensibilities. And Havel was not always well served by his staff: in March 1991 his spokesman Michael Zantovsky declared that Slovak politics were increasingly in the hands of ex-Communists and ‘people who recall the Slovak state as the golden period of
