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

ians to evaluate the extent to which assertion of the official ‘idea of
the Hungarian state’ in political practice formed the Magyar nation’s
relationship to non-Magyar nations living inside the old Hungary
and also to ethnic minorities living in the post-1918, reduced
Magyar state.
I shall attempt to outline briefly the changing fortunes of Slovak historical
argument, or arguments, which did not end with the demise
of the old Hungary in 1918, but continued during the period of the
two Czechoslovak states (1918 - 1939 and 1945 - 1992) and the
wartime Slovak state, and still persist today in the Slovak Republic,
founded in 1993.
When considering the historical arguments of Slovak scholars in
the old Hungary, the vital point is that in the Middle Ages the Slovak
ethnic group was not a separate national Estate, ‘natio slavica’;
the ethnic Slovak nobility always formed part of the Hungarian,
or Magyar, national Estate, and in the modern era, especially the
19 th century, the great majority of Slovak aristocrats assimilated –
Magyarized – thus linking their fate with that of the modern Magyar
nation. And when, politically, economically and culturally, the history
of the Hungarian national aristocratic Estate began to be perceived
as the history of the Magyar civic nation, the Slovaks
remained, as it were, outside history – even though in fact they
shared historical experience with the other inhabitants of Hungary.
The few 19 th -century Slovak historians unintentionally linked themselves
with this ‘historylessness’, since they highlighted as ‘Slovak’
only certain epochs in the thousand-year existence of Slovaks in
the Hungarian state. So the history of the Slovaks lost any clearly
visible continuity, which is an important factor contributing to the
effect of history on the formation of national identity, and became a
kind of ‘underground stream’. We see it come to the surface again
chiefly in relation to the beginnings of Slovak history, especially the
9 th century (in the period of the Great Moravian Empire – that is, before
the Kingdom of Hungary was established); it then ‘waxes rhapsodic’
about the Hungarian Middle Ages and the Early Modern
period; it was rediscovered on the threshold of the Modern period,
at the end of the 18 th century, and has remained continuously visible
up to today. And it was only with difficulty that this interpretation
of history became a solid constituent pillar of Slovak national
identity.
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