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

Table 2
Opinions of respondents of Hungarian nationality about reconciliation (data in %)
Statements
Legend:
1 – 3
Negative area
of the scale
Scale variables
4
Neutral area
of the scale
5 – 7
Positive area
of the scale
A 42.5 42.4 15.1
B 12.6 23.3 63.9
C 20.4 23.4 56.2
D 34.5 20.7 44.8
E 33.9 41.4 24.7
F 20.3 28.2 51.5
A – Hungarians should apologise to Slovaks for the 1938 Vienna Arbitration
B – Slovaks should apologise to Hungarians and Germans for the Beneš
decrees
C – Slovaks and Hungarians should apologise to each other for past wrongs
D – No apologies are necessary; a line should be drawn under the past
E – Apologies are a matter for the Hungarian minority and Slovak representatives
F – Apologies are a matter for Hungary and Slovakia
Before we start to look at the internal dependencies of these responses,
we shall examine the responses from the point of view of
our quantitative results.
We focus first on the statements that in some way affect the respondents
themselves or their affiliation to the Hungarian minority,
or which mark this minority or the Hungarian people as the one that
should be apologising. Overall, respondents selected the don’t
know variable as their modal response (the response that appeared
more frequently than any other): this was how they responded to the
questions of whether Hungarians should apologise to Slovaks for
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