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

eason for any apologies. Another possible explanation would be
that they view the Arbitration as having arisen from the way the border
was established after the First World War, as righting a wrong
that had occurred with the Trianon Peace Treaty – meaning that
they do not consider it to have been unjust. A 1992 research study,
conducted using a sample of teachers, demonstrated that as many
as 41% of respondents of Hungarian nationality thought that the
border created after the Vienna Arbitration was fair; 26% of respondents
could not answer and 22% did not even want to respond
to what was, at that time, a ‘provocative’ question. Only a
minimal number of respondents indicated that they viewed the post-
First World War (Trianon) border, or the post-Second World War
border based on the 1947 Versailles Treaty, as fair. On the other
hand, the majority of respondents of Hungarian nationality thought
that Slovaks should apologise to Hungarians for the Beneš decrees
(Statement B) – that is, for events that took place after the Second
World War, leaving visible scars on the fate of Slovak Hungarians.
From the point of view of age, statistically significant differences
were revealed for this statement. We can say that the higher the
age of the respondents, the greater the extent to which they called
for apologies from Slovaks for the Beneš decrees. This involves a
clear shift away from the results of our 2003-2005 research, which
was conducted on a smaller respondent sample. We can also say
that the younger generation is calling for apologies from Slovaks to
a lesser extent than the oldest generation; here the research results
are clearly influenced by the fact that, in this representative
research project, we raised the age boundary of the fourth group to
over 64.
We also found statistically significant differences, from the age point
of view, for variable D – No apologies are necessary; a line should
be drawn under the past (F – 2.71; p