Choosing Slovakia

Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language and Accidental Nationalism

Alexander Maxwell

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781786729798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Hungary was the site of a national awakening. While Hungarian-speaking Hungarians sought to assimilate Hungary's ethnic minorities into a new idea of nationhood, the country's Slavs instead imagined a proud multi-ethnic and multi-lingual state whose citizens could freely use their native languages. The Slavs saw themselves as Hungarian citizens speaking Pan-Slav and Czech dialects - and yet were the origins of what would become in the twentieth century a new Slovak nation. How then did Slovak nationalism emerge from multi-ethnic Hungarian loyalism, Czechoslovakism and Pan-Slavism? Here Alexander Maxwell presents the story of how and why Slovakia came to be.

1

NATIONAL AWAKENING AND CONTINGENCY

This book tells a story about the emergence of Slovak particularist nationalism, here understood as the belief in a “Slovak nation” speaking a “Slovak language.” It reinterprets an established narrative known to historians of Central and Eastern Europe as “national awakening [národní obrození]”, which covers a historical period roughly approximating the so-called long nineteenth century. The ubiquitous metaphor of “awakening” has several problems and detractors, and if it were not so firmly established as a historical genre, I would compare this book to Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So” stories: where Kipling explained how the leopard got his spots, I explain how and why the Slovak nation came to be.

As a study of nationalism, this study contributes to a gigantic scholarly literature that encompasses both theoretical works and numerous case studies. While seeking to engage with nationalism theory, I do not wish to begin with abstract definitions of key concepts such as “nation” and “language”: such terms will be discussed as they enter the narrative. This introduction will instead discuss “national awakening” as a historical narrative with distinctive conventions, problems and opportunities.

Historians of Central and Eastern Europe have written many sophisticated works examining “national awakening,” but the most eloquent expression of the basic idea comes from Eugen Weber’s 1976 study of French national feeling. Weber observed that French nationalism in 1789 was mostly a Parisian phenomenon: French peasants gave their loyalties to king, church, or village; not to “the nation.” The general popular enthusiasm for the First World War, however, suggests that something important changed during the nineteenth century. Weber studied the nationalization of the peasantry in a series of thematic chapters, highlighting schools, military service, railroads, technological progress, changing consumption patterns, and so forth.¹ Weber’s descriptive gifts were ultimately undermined by his analytical dependence on an ill-defined “modernity,” but nothing can diminish the brilliance of Weber’s book title: Peasants into Frenchmen. Numerous scholars have adapted and copied this title for their own articles,² book chapters,³ and full-length scholarly monographs.⁴ “Peasants into patriots”: this is the essence of national awakening.

Most studies of national awakening belong to what might be called the “modernization theory” school of nationalism. Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, the leading scholars in this school, do not share Weber’s fascination with the word “modernity,” but focus on a similar list of causal variables: industrialization, bureaucratization, mass education, improved living standards, and other mutually reinforcing processes.⁵ Scholars working in this school disagree about the relative importance of different variables, and their disagreement stems not only from differing theoretical approaches, but also from the diversity of research topics: the decisive variable in one case may not be particularly important in another.

One scholar working in the modernist tradition, Czech theorist Miroslav Hroch, has developed a schematic and generalizable stage theory of “national awakening.” Hroch schematized the spread of nationalism into three phases imagined as steps in an evolutionary progression: (A) the “period of scholarly interest,” (B) “patriotic agitation,” and finally (C) “the rise of a mass national movement.”⁶ Hroch then compared various nationalist organizations in “Phase B” to see if they shared a common social basis; he found, mostly, that they did not.

Hroch’s stage theory influenced many scholars of Central and Eastern Europe,⁷ and has also inspired some tinkering. Roman Szporluk reformulated Hroch’s theory into “academic, cultural, and political” phases. Paul Robert Magocsi has “heritage-gathering,” “organizational” and “political” stages, but denied that they represent an evolutionary process.⁸ Tomasz Kamusella has added a Phase (D) to discuss the moment “when the nation establishes its own nation-state in fulfillment of the equation of ethnic nationalism: language = nation = state.”⁹

At first glance, the stage theory approach would seem relevant to Slovak national awakening, and Hroch took Slovakia as one of his case studies. The narrative proposed here, however, differs considerably from Hroch’s, because it highlights two themes that have only rarely been discussed in the broader literature on nationalism: contingency and failure. This book takes the process of nationalization (and “modernization”) more or less for granted and focuses instead on the competition between different national concepts. The various academic heritage-gatherers and patriotic agitator-organizers working in Central and Eastern Europe promoted several different national concepts. Why did some succeed while others failed? Let us pose this question specifically and concretely for the Slovak case: Slovak nationalists began the nineteenth century as proud citizens of Hungary dreaming about an All-Slavic language and culture, and then spent the short twentieth century in Czechoslovakia. Why did the Hungarian, Slavic and Czechoslovak national projects fail?

To explain the Slovak national awakening, this book tells a story about failed Hungarian, Slavic and Czechoslovak national awakenings. Indeed: this narrative consciously emphasizes those historical forces working to turn peasants into Hungarians, Slavs or Czechoslovaks, even at the risk of understating Slovak particularism. The chapter on Hungarian nationalism even invokes the Hroch schema. To explain why peasants became Slovaks, this book asks why peasants did not become Hungarians, All-Slavs, or Czechoslovaks.

Contingency and failure imply discontinuity, which in turn leads to the “Warwick debate” about the merits of modernization theory. Anderson and Hobsbawm have their critics; and while “primordialism” sometimes serves as a generic term for alternatives to modernization theory,¹⁰ Anthony Smith, the leading critic of the modernist approach, distinguishes his own approach, “ethnosymbolism,” from both primordialism and “perennialism.”¹¹ These other approaches, however, all emphasize what Smith has called “preexisting traditions and heritages which have coalesced over the generations.”¹² The debate between modernism and its critics has become extensive, and it may be worth highlighting the common ground: all scholars agree that the last two hundred years have witnessed a dramatic transformation in national sentiment; disagreement concerns only the relative importance of continuity or change. Theorists on both sides of the debate routinely acknowledge each other’s arguments with appropriate caveats, and differ from each other mostly in emphasis, not substance.¹³

The “peasants into Slovaks” narrative, however, inevitably emphasizes discontinuity and transformation. During the “national awakening” process, historical actors selectively appropriated, reinterpreted, or discarded preexisting heritages in light of political goals. National traditions could acquire an air of timelessness in a short period, as shown in a memorable volume on the “invention of traditions.”¹⁴ The study of these processes is compatible with a continuity-emphasizing ethnosymbolism, but owes more to modernization theory.

Perhaps, however, the study of failed nationalism can help break the deadlock between the two camps. This book examines several failed attempts to appropriate, reinterpret or discard existing traditions. The future, indeed, depends on the legacy of the past. By emphasizing failed national concepts, this narrative delineates some of the limitations on imagination and invention.

This book’s emphasis on failure and contingency has another advantage: it undermines problematic popular narratives of national awakening. All too often, historians describe national awakening as a triumphal morality tale in which heroic national awakeners found or redeem the nation, saving it from destruction. The national awakeners themselves, of course, understood their work in such heroic (and primordialist) terms. Nevertheless, historians who accept heroic narratives uncritically may go badly astray, treating failed national concepts as either pathetic objects of ridicule or existential threats.

Theorists of nationalism, speaking in the abstract, realize that the possibility of an alternative national community is morally neutral. Ernst Gellner, for instance, wondered aloud whether minority intelligentsias “might not have done just as well out of assimilation.”¹⁵ Such equanimity, however, is rare among scholars examining concrete case studies, where heroic narratives remain perniciously hegemonic. Slovak-American Lev Dobriansky, for example, characterized “the story of Slovakia as a story of a nation’s fight for freedom and survival.”¹⁶ Stanislav Kirschbaum took survivalist rhetoric to the point of farce: each chapter of his book finds the Slovaks facing a new “struggle for survival.”¹⁷ His narrative has the false drama of a James Bond film: no matter how grim things may look for our heroes, somehow the Slovak nation always triumphantly escapes certain doom.

I therefore justify my emphasis on failed national concepts as a corrective. Several authors have already traced the roots of modern Slovak nationalism for the Anglophone audience: the canonical Slovak success story needs critical debunking, not repetition or elaboration. This book therefore concentrates instead on the failure of Czechoslovakism, Slavism, and Hungarianism. Of these three themes, furthermore, only Czechoslovakism has received any serious attention in Anglophone scholarship.

Indeed, few scholars of Central or Eastern Europe have examined failed national movements, and fewer still have placed contingency in the forefront of analysis. A brief summary of such works may be instructive. Andrew Wachtel has studied the failure of Yugoslavism, usefully replacing the normal heroic narrative with tragedy.¹⁸ Wachtel’s background, however, lies in literary theory: his focus on exceptionally gifted artists restricts his narrative to an unrepresentative cultural elite. Larry Wolff ’s Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment shows how the Morlacchi “vanished from the catalogue of nations”;¹⁹ in an intriguing reversal of Hroch’s schema, the Morlacchi made their last appearance on the public stage at a folklore exhibit. Wolff, however, worked almost exclusively from Italian sources: the Morlacchi themselves rarely appear in his narrative. Frederick Heymann attempted a joint history of Poland and Czechoslovakia, apparently seeking to explain why no common West-Slavic nation-state emerged, but his research seems to have persuaded him that Poland and Czechoslovakia were in fact quite different entities.²⁰ Mary Fulbrooke examined “the necessary conditions for the construction of nations” taking East Germany “as an example of failure,”²¹ but her brief essay only discussed what Hobsbawm called “the government perspective”: she did not examine the character or extent of popular East German patriotism.²²

Two further studies have highlighted both contingency and choice. In an excellent study of politics and culture in Moldova, Charles King asked the same theoretical questions that inspired this book:

[W]hat are the limits to which ethnic groups, nations and languages can be forged — in both sense of the term — out of heterogeneous cultural practices? In the marketplace of identities, why do only a few visions of the nation attract buyers? Why do some nationalisms fail?²³

King, like Fulbrooke, examined these questions mostly from above, discussing successive Russian, Romanian and Soviet policies of state building. This book, by contrast, examines nationalism “from below.” While the final chapter discusses the first Czechoslovak republic, most of this narrative examines popular reactions to state policy during the nineteenth century.

Finally, Paul Robert Magocsi’s classic study of Subcarpathia started from the observation that national awakeners “were not only faced with fostering a national consciousness among a particular ethnic group, they were also engaged in a struggle over which national orientation to accept.”²⁴ Magocsi classified the Subcarpathian intelligentsia into Russophile, Ukrainophile and Rusynophile camps, and while he has subsequently worked to promote Rusyn-particularist sentiment, in 1978 he concluded that only the Ukrainian national orientation had proved “enduring.”²⁵

This book differs from Magocsi’s in two important ways. Firstly, I found it impossible to divide the Slovak intelligentsia into camps: the same individuals who outspokenly proclaimed their loyalty to Hungary also proclaimed their passionate Slavdom; and while a party of interwar Slovak nationalists vigorously rejected Czechoslovakia, the majority of Slovaks combined Czechoslovak and Slovak loyalties. I have therefore introduced a theory of multiple and simultaneous national loyalties.

Secondly, I have analyzed patriotic discussions of the “nation” separately from patriotic discussions of the “national language.” Magocsi equated linguistic and national loyalties: in his narrative, belief in a Rusyn (or Ukrainian) language implied belief in a Rusyn (or Ukrainian) nation, and vice-versa. In Slovakia, national and linguistic concepts have diverged considerably, and influenced each other in a surprising fashion.

This narrative pays particular attention to linguistic debates, which perhaps reflects the peculiarities of the Slovak case. Several scholars have highlighted the importance of linguistic loyalties in Slovak nationalism. Hugh Seton-Watson, for example, wrote that “the creation of a Slovak nation in the nineteenth century is essentially the emergence of a language group into national consciousness.” He saw Slovakia as an ideal type: “there is no more striking example than the Slovak case of the role of language in nation-forming.”²⁶ Tibor Pichler made similar claims to Slovak exceptionalism: “All nationalisms in the Habsburg Empire had a very strong linguistic ingredient, but Slovak nationalism was entirely language based.”²⁷ These remarkable assertions of linguistic monocausality are all the more extraordinary when juxtaposed with the conclusions of linguists working on the history of the Slovak language. Jaromír Bělič dated “the contemporary linguistic border” dividing Slovak from Czech to “the decisive age when modern nations crystallized,”²⁸ and Ľubomír Ďurovič categorically claimed that “the formation of a [Slovak] literary language was the most evident symptom of the formation of their nation [emphasis added].”²⁹ So did Slovak language loyalties generate Slovak nationalism, or did Slovak nationalism generate Slovak language loyalties? Clearly belief in a “national language” reinforces belief in a “nation” and vice-versa, but which came first: the nation or the language? The chicken or the egg?

This apparent paradox probably arises from disciplinary divisions: neither linguists nor historians seem to reach each other’s works. Linguists understand that the creation of a Slovak “national language” is a contingent process, but sometimes seem to believe in a primordial Slovak nation. Conversely, serious scholars of nationalism, particularly those wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Illustrations
• Note on Conventions
• Acknowledgements
• 1. National Awakening and Contingency
• 2. The Hungarian Context
• 3. Hungaro-Slavism: Imagining a Slavic Hungary
• 4. Slovak Theories of Dual Nationality
• 5. The Slavic Language
• 6. Linguistic Czechoslovakism Before 1843
• 7. Ľudovít Štúr and Slovak Tribalism
• 8. The Dialect Argument and Slovak Literacy
• 9. Czechoslovakia as a Slovakizing State
• Notes