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

thousands of Hungarian and Slovak citizens of the Jewish faith, the
persecution and forced settlement of Germans and Hungarians in
Slovakia, the expulsion of a significant proportion of Germans in
Hungary, and the resettlement of Slovaks from Hungary by population
exchanges.
The Treaty of Trianon and the Paris Peace Conference that drew the
Czechoslovak-Hungarian border, created minority communities of
Hungarians and Slovaks in the two countries. From Hungarian and
Slovak specialist literature on ethnic conflicts, a number of approaches
to dealing with the question of minorities can be identified
during the 20 th century. These can be distinguished from each other
to varying extents and were applied either mutually or unilaterally by
the leaders of each country. In the first place, assimilation was most
persistently present in the policies of both Hungary and Slovakia.
The ethnic, economic and historical revision of borders was the
defining endeavour of Hungarian foreign policy between the two
World Wars, and for the Slovaks or Czechoslovaks after 1938 and
1945. The reciprocity principle of ‘an eye for an eye’ frequently
cropped in minority policies. After the Second World War, the
Czechoslovak state in particular threw all the tools of the homogenous
nation state at the Hungarian question. By signing the population
exchange agreement, however, the Hungarian government
also bore responsibility for the reduction of the Slovak community
in Hungary and the decrease of its cultural force.
Of the positive approaches to minority issues in both Hungary and
Slovakia, the greatest tradition is that of attempts at integration. In
many cases this led to assimilation, when emancipated minorities
became involved in the exercise of power at local, regional and national
level. Finally, the principle and practice of minority self-government
is only gaining ground very slowly. Autonomous minority
government of Slovaks in Hungary has been restricted to reorganising
local Slovak communities that are small in number and live in
the hallway of assimilation anyway, in addition to developing Slovak
cultural society at the national level. In Slovakia, on the other hand,
in the absence of a similar cultural, regional and community- building
strategy, local autonomous government of Hungarian settlements
have mainly been based on beginner’s luck.
189 László Szarka