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

the Vienna Arbitration and whether apologies are a matter for the
Hungarian minority and Slovak representatives. However, another
point emerges when we look at the responses to certain questions.
For the question of whether apologies are a matter for the Hungarian
minority in Slovakia and Slovak representatives, 33.9% of
respondents chose variables in the negative area of the scale (with
41.4% unable to express a view and 22.4% giving responses in
the positive area of the scale). When it came to the question of
whether a line should be drawn under the past, the negative response
rate was similar, though with a lower number of don’t know
responses and a preference for the positive area of the scale:
34.5% of responses were in the negative area of the scale, 20.7%
of respondents could not say and 44.8% gave responses in the
positive area of the scale.
Our respondents, who were all of Hungarian nationality, unambiguously
responded in the positive area of the scale when considering
questions of whether Slovaks should apologise for the
Beneš decrees (63.9%), whether apologies for injustices should
be mutual (56.2%) and whether mutual apologies are a matter for
the Slovak Republic and the Republic of Hungary (51.5%).
As regards Slovak apologies for the Beneš decrees, the modal
response was yes (29.1%), while only 12.8% of respondents did
not agree that apologies should be made.
In this article, we are trying to demonstrate several age-related factors
that influenced their responses. In contrast to our previous research,
here we had set a lower age boundary of 20 and moved the upper
boundary delimiting the oldest group to over 64, thus obtaining a
clear-cut group whose opinions were already formed in the post-war
period. The graph on the next page gives an overview of the results.
201 Štefan Šutaj