Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

The conference concentrated, as the title already suggests, on the
broader issue of national identity and its connections to the common
past of Hungary and Slovakia. Some high level politicians from
both countries were also participating in this event. We have printed
below two of the contributions that in our view give a fair representation
of the views expressed at the seminar, and one article
that contains the analysis of a very interesting ‘historic’ opinion poll
in Slovakia.
There seems to be quite a gap between the more nationalist public
expressions of politicians and the moderate approach of the historians.
Many Hungarian officials tend to idealize the thousand years
of common Hungarian and Slovak history, while Slovaks often describe
this period in terms of having been oppressed. Historians
reject these black and white interpretations that are used to
underpin the separate national identities. These concepts, they say,
were developed only after the abolition of the feudal structures of
the old Hungary which were replaced by the civic concept of the
nation. To interpret the common history from before the 19 th century
in these terms is unhistorical. Only later statehood became the
vehicle of the nation and part of political history, which had and has
a divisive impact. Recent historical studies that concentrate more
on cultural and social history show that Hungarians and Slovaks
often had a lot in common. The work of the Mixed Committee of
Historians should certainly be continued because whatever the
merits of the debate, one thing we would like to emphasize is that
indifference towards each others histories is an unacceptable form
of denial.
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