Abstract
The peaceful separation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic after the fall of Communism is an example of the uncontroversial political recognition of the cultural and historical differences in the old federation. The author describes Slovakia's path to democracy and freedom as deeply entrenched in the Catholic Church and the people's will to fight for religious freedom and human rights during the regime. Finally, the separate accession of Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the European Union symbolises a full recognition of their democratic path and the achievement of Slovakia's dream of ‘Coming back to Europe’.
Slovakia has not been an independent state for very long, so several kinds of events may be considered the beginning of Slovakia's integration into Europe. One such event is emigration from Slovakia, whether for economic or political reasons. Take, for example, the emigration of Jozef Gabčík in 1939, when he joined the Czechoslovak army in exile. In 1942, he was sent from London to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, together with Ján Kubiš, to assassinate the Deputy Reich-Protector Reinhard Heydrich. The assassination was carried out on 27 May 1942. Other events could be mentioned, such as various curious escapes through the Iron Curtain. In the 1970s, immigrants more frequently tried to escape across today's Slovak–Austrian border, since it was not guarded as heavily as the western border with the Federal Republic of Germany. One refugee made a balloon from raincoats and flew, at night, over the border to Austria. Another made a hanging chair. Over the Morava River there is a high-voltage line leading to Austria with an auxiliary work cable underneath. The daredevil climbed a tower on the Slovak side, hung the chair on the cable and at night pulled himself across to Austria, to a tower on the Austrian side. At that time there was a rumour in Bratislava about a museum in Vienna which included a room exhibiting the means of transport used by such emigrants to the West. After the fall of Communism, I asked my Austrian friends about the existence of such a museum in Vienna and got a negative answer. I was very disappointed.
Now, after the end of Communism, the resistance against it in different countries can be analysed and the differences explored. Resistance against Communism was possible only with the help of national traditions and prevailing social norms. These were different in Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In Czechoslovakia, there were also some differences between the resistance against Communism displayed in the Czech Republic and that in Slovakia. Czech resistance against Communism was a civil resistance initiated for the most part by those with rather liberal views. Resistance in Slovakia was based primarily on its Christian heritage and was provoked by the Communist government's fight against religion. Charter 77 in the Czech Republic and the underground Catholic Church in Slovakia represented the bearers of resistance against Communism. From a certain point of view, resistance against Communism in Slovakia resembled resistance in Poland more than that in the Czech Republic. The paradigmatic event of resistance against Communism in Slovakia was probably the candle-lit demonstration in Bratislava on 25 March 1988. It was the first mass public demonstration against the regime, to which the regime responded in various ways, including the use of water cannons, police arrests of participants and the blockage of streets to prevent more demonstrators from getting into the square. The demonstrators fought for three demands: the power of the Pope to appoint Catholic bishops in Slovakia, full religious freedom and respect for human rights. In any of the former Western countries, when I participate in a discussion on the fall of Communism I usually pose a rhetorical question: ‘Can you imagine that such a combination of demands would be made in any Western country?’
Resistance to any dictatorship generally follows the contours of national and state history. Slovakia had a problem building on national history, as the only political entity with the formal features of a state was the state of 1939-1945, which was associated with Hitler's policy. Building on the history of such a state was impossible. Along with national and state history, the other force uniting a society is religion. This was another reason why resistance to Communism in Slovakia was conducted largely under the flag of Christianity.
The main reason for dissatisfaction with Communism was that Communism was an artificial social system that simply did not work. The shortcomings of Communism had become increasingly apparent over time. After the First World War, Communism may perhaps have been attractive to intellectuals and workers in some countries. After all, Communism won the Civil War in Russia, with Russian assistance it could have prevailed in Germany and it almost did in Hungary. After the Second World War, Communism took credit for the Soviet Union's victory over Hitler. It managed relatively easily to usurp power in the whole of the future Eastern bloc. But that was not all. Countries of the Eastern bloc, which adopted Communism, were unable to keep pace with Western countries in any field.
The inability to keep pace started with the restriction on freedom and continued with the rebuilding of the economy. The restriction on freedom provoked, first, the formation of an underground church. The Church was the best-organised component in society, it had many supporters and it was able to respond to persecution by forming an underground church. It was not until much later that intellectuals were able to issue samizdat documents, criticise the regime, initially in disguised ways and later openly, and create various alternative associations.
That Communist countries were lagging behind economically could be seen on the streets. In the early 1960s, the state allowed foreigners from Austria and other countries to come for short visits. Their cars looked better than ours, their clothing was better than ours, and Western goods sold in a separate network of shops were better than domestic goods. Communist ideologists were becoming defensive.
The route to a better life in a non-Communist state was easiest in Berlin. People from the German Democratic Republic began using it increasingly, which caused the Eastern bloc to build the Berlin Wall in 1961. Before that, in Hungary and Poland, attempts to break out of the Eastern bloc were violently suppressed—in Poland by Poland's own forces and in Hungary by Soviet forces. Czechoslovakia learned from the experience of the Poles and Hungarians, and Dubček's policy in 1968 continued to follow consistent socialist terminology. It did not help, and since there were no internal forces to repress it, Soviet tanks again intervened in the situation, this time in a symbolic alliance with other countries of the Warsaw Pact.
Communism claimed to be the most scientific social system in history, but every major scientific discovery or sign of technical progress contradicted that claim. Communism could not philosophically explain and accept the big-bang theory, and technical inventions that improved communications were almost devastating for Communism. After introducing long-distance telephones from which one could call Munich and, the editorial office of Free Europe, for example, it was more difficult for Communists to isolate people from information. Even without Gorbachev's perestroika, Communism could not survive the arrival of computers and the transmission of inconspicuous discs. The general decline of Communism had to have been obvious to everybody, and especially to the leaders of Communist parties in the individual countries. It is claimed that the implementation of a more organised kind of perestroika was planned by Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief who was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. However, his early death prevented him from carrying out his intentions.
Gorbachev's perestroika and the gradual fall of adjacent Communist regimes found Czechoslovakia completely unprepared. After 1968, the Communist Party had expelled from its ranks all members who might have had the critical spirit to prepare the Communist Party for a new policy. This is why the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia was so rapid. The second factor was that the opposition was able to agree upon the leading figure of the transformation, Václav Havel. For the Slovak opposition, the fight against Communism was preoccupying issue; at that time they did not raise other issues such as the position of Slovakia in a joint republic or the interrelationship of the Slovak and Czech Republics.
External circumstances were even more important for the speed with which Communism in Czechoslovakia fell. On 17 November 1989, when the final demonstrations began that led to the fall of Communism, Czechoslovakia was surrounded on all sides by countries in which the Communist dictatorship no longer existed. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the end of the German Democratic Republic was only a question of time and form. At that time, Poland was ruled by the non-Communist government of Tadeusz Mazowiecky. The Soviet Union continued with the perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev, who made it clear to the leading Secretaries of Communist parties in the socialist countries of the Eastern Bloc that the Soviet Army would no longer keep them in power. Hungary opened its borders to East Germans fleeing through Austria to West Germany. Czechoslovakia remained the only island of orthodox Communism, which was the outcome of policies suppressing any opposition, policies implemented after the occupation of the country in 1968. Communists in Czechoslovakia knew better than the anti-Communist opposition that they were in a blind alley. In November 1989, the anti-Communist opposition depended only on demonstrations in town squares across the country, participated in by hundreds of thousands of people. If there had been any conflicts in the ranks of the opposition, people would simply not have come to the squares and the Communist Party would again have had all the power in its hands. But no such conflicts were evident. Following negotiations between the government and the opposition, a new government was formed with a slight majority of the opposition. Václav Havel was elected President. Under the Constitution, the President did not have great powers, but traditionally had great authority that originated from the time of T. G. Masaryk as President. The coalition government took office in December 1989, and already in February 1990 some Communist members began to defect from the Communist Party. During its existence, until the free elections in June 1990, no votes were taken in the government that followed a Communist/anti-Communist line.
One of the slogans that had spontaneously arisen in the streets of Czechoslovakia from the beginning of the Velvet Revolution was ‘Back to Europe’. The slogan reflected the desire of the Czechoslovak people to join today's European Union. First, however, it was necessary to terminate its membership in Eastern bloc organisations. After the collapse of the Communist governments in the German Democratic Republic and Poland, the Warsaw Pact had lost its purpose, and ceased to operate in 1990. The Czechoslovak government also proposed the dissolution of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which came about during a Council meeting on 28 June 1991. It became clear only later that the rapid dissolution of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was not the optimal solution. During the 40 years of building the Eastern bloc, many enterprises in Czechoslovakia had become economically linked with enterprises in other countries of the former Eastern bloc. Although mutual economic relations began to gradually stop working under the new conditions, the process did not need to be accelerated. Many enterprises in Czechoslovakia suddenly found themselves without suppliers or customers. Unemployment started to increase rapidly. The arms industry in Slovakia, which had been built up not only during Communism, but also in the time of the pre-war republic, began to decline.
In Central Europe, there was suddenly no power able to enforce its will. In this situation, the question of nationalism emerged. Slovaks and Czechs were closely connected by the proximity of their languages, culture, Slavonic identity and mutual assistance at different times in history, but they were still two nations. The model of a legal state established in 1968 and 1970, which was embodied in the Constitution, could not work under the conditions of a free society. Separate cultural, political and economic processes in Slovakia and the Czech Republic were developing independently, following their own paths. Between elections in 1990 and 1992, the political representatives of both republics were desperately looking for a way out, but they failed.
The European Community played an interesting role in this process. Negotiations between Czechoslovakia and the European Community on associated membership began very early in 1990. Of course, negotiations were led by the Czechoslovak Republic, even for sectors that did not exist at the federal level, for example justice and education. These sectors in the Slovak Republic and in the Czech Republic existed only separately. At the beginning of 1990, I put forward a slogan for Slovakia: ‘We want our own chair and our own star in Europe’. The intent of the slogan was that Slovakia and the Czech Republic each have independent status—in other words, that Czechoslovakia be practically dissolved in what would become the European Union. This resulted in many national debates, but in the end it was shown that the European Community was not prepared to accept that a state be dissolved into two units within today's European Union. The consideration of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia was also intended to gain some time for calm discussions on the setup of a legal state and to suppress demagogy, which manifested itself throughout the discussions. There were loud voices in Slovakia requiring an immediate declaration of Slovakia's independence. In the Czech Republic, some politicians required that each partial republic should ‘live from its own resources’. However, this is a principle of confederation and not federation, which was required in the legal framework of the state.
Such discussions came to an end after the June 1992 elections, when different political forces won in Slovakia from those in the Czech Republic. It is necessary to note that since the end of the Communist era, elections were organised in Slovakia separately from the Czech Republic. After several rounds of intense negotiations, the leaders of the winning parties—Vladimír Mečiar of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, and Václav Klaus of the Civic Democratic Party in the Czech Republic—agreed on the division of Czechoslovakia. Based on such political agreement, a draft constitutional law was enacted on the division and dissolution of Czechoslovakia and on the establishment of the independent Slovak Republic and the independent Czech Republic. The law was adopted by the prescribed two-thirds majority.
The disollution of Czechoslovakia raised no political storms in either of the two republics. According to opinion polls, the Czech nation has been the most popular foreign country among Slovaks and the Slovak nation among the Czechs, from disintegration until the present day. There are no open problems between the Slovak and Czech Republics. On fundamental issues, both republics support each other in international forums. After having been elected, the Slovak President pays his first official visit to Prague and the Czech President does likewise in Bratislava. It could be said that mutual relations between Slovaks and Czechs are, at all levels, better after disintegration than they were during the existence of Czechoslovakia.
Both republics then separately applied for accession to the European Union and were separately admitted on 1 May 2004. In Slovakia, however, an important internal political fight preceded the entry of Slovakia to the European Union. The fight was not about entry to the European Union but about the character of Slovak democracy. After Slovakia was declared independent, the first two elections were won by populist parties which, of course, formed populist governments. This trend continued until 1998, when the election was won by the centre-right parties, who formed a government led by Mikuláš Dzurinda. His government implemented many reforms that several Western governments have failed to make. For example, Slovakia succeeded in the implementation of a flat-rate tax, the privatisation of social insurance and other reforms. Slovakia attracted massive foreign investment, and unemployment dropped below the average of the European Union. Today, Slovakia is the world's largest manufacturer of motor vehicles per capita.
The rapid economic rise of Slovakia also left behind its victims. Slovak legislation was not prepared for new kind of bankruptcy: that of people who had given all their assets to the banks as a pledge against loans for starting new businesses. After the collapse of their businesses, many lost their houses and flats and ended up in complete poverty. Even though Social Democrats came to power in 2006, allied with a nationalist party and the party of the former Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, the fundamental reforms of the previous government of Mikuláš Dzurinda remained unchanged.
Relatively little has remained of the Christian message of the anti-Communist resistance. The Slovak Republic entered into a basic agreement with the Vatican. Religious and public schools were given equal status. Property seized from churches during the Communist regime, and property that had been seized from the Jewish community since 1938, was returned to the original owners. Slovakia exercised the option of not validating same-sex marriages in its territory. There are 18 recognised churches and religious societies in Slovakia. Clerics of such churches receive their salaries from the state. Attempts to change the liberal abortion legislation, adopted in the time of the Communist government, failed. Relationships between churches and Slovak governments have been generally harmonious. There are no controversial issues, in contrast to Prague with its issue of the return of Saint Vitus' Cathedral to the church. Clerics are able to act in the Slovak Army and clerics of registered churches have access to prisons. The second government of Mikuláš Dzurinda, which was in power from 2002 to 2006, included a provision in its programme to conclude a treaty on conscientious objection with the Holy See. This commitment was included thanks to the governing coalition member, the Christian Democratic Movement. The Prime Minister, however, avoided fulfilling this obligation as it was considered it to be politically controversial. Consequently, the Christian Democratic Movement withdrew from the government in early 2006. This provoked a government crisis and early elections, which were then won by the Social Democratic Party of Prime Minister Róbert Fico.
As for foreign policy, Slovakia follows the prevailing line of the European Union. The only exception is the recognition of Kosovo. Slovakia did not acknowledge the independence of Kosovo because of its historical connections with the Serbs, which range back to the nineteenth century. Its position was also influenced by the fear of secessionist tendencies among the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. Slovakia has sent its forces on foreign missions, including Afghanistan, where it has about 200 soldiers, mostly in the southern part of the country, in Kandahar. Historically, Slovakia's relations with Russia, Germany and other powers are not burdened. Therefore there are no obstacles to the development of relations with the European Union or any other countries. This is why the European Union, Russia, and the United States agreed on Slovak diplomats occupying high positions in the Balkans, Central Asia or the OSCE.
Hidden tension, which break out into the open on various occasions, dominate between Slovakia and Hungary. This tension has historical roots in the coexistence of Slovaks and Hungarians in one state, the Kingdom of Hungary. Slovaks and Hungarians have a divergent assessment of almost all historical events from the early nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. Hungarians consider the 1920 Treaty of Trianon as their national disaster, while for the Slovaks it is an international document establishing their borders. There are many differences like this in Slovak and Hungarian history. Hungarians routinely argue that the Treaty of Trianon cost them two-thirds of their territory and two-thirds of their population. These figures include the whole of Slovakia and all Slovak citizens.
There are Hungarian minorities in all neighbouring countries, but the Hungarian minority in Slovakia is perhaps the most important. Almost all of the important events in Hungarian history happened in Slovak territory. Slovakia appears to be the weakest neighbour of Hungary, and a constitutional change in the status of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia would be an important precedent for Hungarian minorities in other countries. The Hungarian minority in Slovakia has its own political party, currently even two of them. The party of the Hungarian minority has been alternately in government as well as in opposition. When it is in the government, the tension between Slovakia and Hungary weakens, even though it does not disappear entirely. There are some purely Hungarian schools in Slovakia, including elementary and secondary schools and a university, and their number is not a subject of controversy between Slovaks and Hungarians. There are also two Hungarian theatres in Slovakia, financed from the national budget. However, suspicions were raised in Slovakia when, for example, the first post-Communist Hungarian Prime Minister, József Antall, declared that he felt himself to be the Prime Minister of 15 million Hungarians, which also included Hungarians in neighbouring countries. Similar statements were also made in the past by Viktor Orbán. An ‘older brother’ complex was shown by the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Balázs, when in an interview with the newspaper
In 2009, Slovakia adopted an amendment to the State Language Act, which prescribes that the state language, Slovak, be used in official communication. The amendment came about because of cases when, for example, only the Hungarian language was used in the deliberations of municipal councils in which Hungarians were in the majority and where the Slovak members, who did not understand Hungarian, were in fact excluded from the course of such deliberations. Slovakia had the amendment to the State Language Act reviewed by the authorities of the OSCE and the Council of Europe. At first they expressed their consent, but then, perhaps under the pressure of international debate that resulted from the amendment, they expressed moderate reservations to the law. The Hungarian minority accounts for about 10% of the population of Slovakia. In municipalities where the Hungarian minority exceeds 20% of the population, bilingual names are given to the municipalities and their institutions.
In 2009, Slovakia entered the Eurozone. The adoption of the euro did not bring about any increase in prices or financial or technical complications. There was no major criticism in the Slovak media to using the euro. The countries neighbouring Slovakia, such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, have not adopted the euro and goods and services in these countries are considerably cheaper than in Slovakia. Speculation against the currencies of such countries in early 2008, however, did not affect Slovakia as the euro was already on its way.
By joining the European Union, Slovakia achieved a historic advancement. For centuries, it did not have its own statehood, having to prove its national existence in the Kingdom of Hungary as well as in Czechoslovakia, and when it joined the European Union it gained its chair and a star in an integrated Europe. Membership in the European Union is still popular in Slovakia, reaching a majority percentage. In Slovakia, the East meets the West. In small eastern Slovak towns, Orthodox churches with five towers are neighbours to Catholic churches of different architectural styles. In Bardejov, a town in eastern Slovakia, there is a Gothic church from the thirtieth century, the easternmost tip of Gothic culture of that period. In Bratislava, there is the coronation church of Maria Theresa. Approximately at today's Slovak–Hungarian border, battles between the Ottoman and Christian armies took place for 150 years. Slovakia is full of the scattered ruins of the medieval castles that defended the country and the population against invaders. All of this is the contribution of Slovakia to an integrated Europe.