The conception of Czechoslovak national unity upheld by the so-called centralist
Slovaks is based on the view that only the closet possible intellectual, cultural and
political unity between Czechs and Slovaks can ensure full development for Czech and
especially Slovak life. Czechoslovak national unity means that the Slovaks can feel
themselves to be the State nation everywhere throughout the whole country, not merely in
Slovakia, but also in the Czech territories, that the Slovak language can find full and
free application not only in the restricted limits of its own home but also in all the
other parts of the Republic. In other words, the Czechoslovak conception gives the Slovaks
an all-State, more universal consciousness. This conception makes us a 10-million strong
nation and not a mere 2-million fraction. How is it possible that there should be Slovaks
who do not understand this conception, and accept a different conception---the
autonomistic conception? Why is it that in place of seeing to it that the Slovak language
and the Slovak element should take a full and expanding part in the all-State affairs,
they prefer to content themselves with the modester position offered by autonomy?
On this occasion I cannot go into all the causes of this phenomenon. One of the causes
is Hungarianism, a Hungarian mentality. For nearly a thousand years the Slovaks
were part and parcel of the Hungarian State. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
when the Magyars fell under the Turkish yoke, Hungary consisted really only of Slovakia
and one or two smaller territories. The Slovaks in those days had no importance
whatsoever. They lived in economic, social and political subjugation. Hungary was
represented in the economic, social and political spheres by the free classes, the gentry,
the nobles, the priesthood and the townspeople. When serfdom was abolished in 1848, these
ruling classes attempted to dominate the liberated masses by means of Magyarization. It
was only this Hungarianism that separated the Slovaks from the Bohemians and Moravians.
The Hungarian State therefore directed its energies not merely towards maintaining a
Hungarian spirit in the ruling and upper classes but systematically inculcating such a
spirit in the broad masses of the Slovak people. The autonomist efforts, directed as they
are towards an artificial separation of the Slovaks from the Czechs, are in substance
relics of the thousand-year-old Hungarianism. This Hungarianism, despite the tremendous
harm it did the Slovaks, never succeeded in breaking up the national unity of the Czechs
and Slovaks. It produced, however, in the numbers of Slovaks, the desire to see Slovakia
separated at least to a certain extent from the Czech lands. This gave rise to the demands
for autonomy. The autonomy movement is a relic of the thousand-year-old Hungarianism.
As I have already indicated Hungarianism meant the dominance of the ruling classes and
the subjugation of the masses. In the days when Hungarianism manifested itself in the
process of Magyarization this meant the predominance of not only the nobility and gentry
but also of the townspeople, the bulk of the priesthood and the intelligentsia who had
been Magyarized in the schools, over the Slovak masses, totally neglected spiritually and
mentally as they were and living a wretched existence. This process of Magyarization, of
implanting a Hungarian mentality in the Slovaks, was so intense throughout many centuries
in former Hungary, and so completely dominated generation after generation, that even the
breaking up of Hungary and the liberation of Slovakia has not entirely freed the Slovaks
from the moral conseqluences of the thousand years of subjugation and serfdom.
These conditions are finely described by the Slovak authoress Timrava in her novel
entitledTwo Ages. She there portrays the life of a Slovak village before the War.
She draws a plastic picture of the moral and mental degradation of the Slovak masses who
allow themselves to be the object of every possible provocation on the part of the
denationalized intelligentsia, for the thousand-year yoke has blunted them so that they
are no longer conscious of human and national dignity. Indeed they have sunk so low that
they laud their own murderers and abuse those who make a stand against tyranny. The
authoress has found the right expression for that aspect of Slovak life when she exclaims
with a pained cry: "Slaves!"
The authoress goes on to describe this same village at another epoch, after the War,
after the triumph of the Slovak cause and the Slovak language, after the attainment of all
that the best men of the nation had formerly dreamed of in vain. She describes how the
masses were helped not merely by the inculcation of self-respect and self-consciousness,
by the making of their language the official language and the making of their interests
the interests of the State, but also by a cultural, economic and social uplift. With
admirable cogency she depicts the characters who have only by pretence or superficially
changed their former attitude of enemies to the people, who exploit the slightest possible
mistake or shortcoming on the part of the new regime for indulging in ironical, spiteful
and trouble-stirring criticism. And the masses, in whose interest the great change has
taken place, succumb to these seducers and abuse their own freedom. The one-time apathetic
spirit who used to take the greatest oppression as quite a natural thing today
passionately criticizes and exaggerates the most insignificant faults; he is satisfied
with nothing, and all is too little for him. Again the authoress relieves her feelings
with the cry of "Slaves!"
Yes, many of the former Slaves are only nominally free, for the servile spirit is still
within them. The autonomist movement is the expression of this survival of servile spirit.
The child which awakes out of a long and sound sleep rubs its eyes and does not yet
realize that it is no longer asleep, it would like to roll over for another sleep and is
angry when its parent rouses it up to greet the bright and happy yet work-filled day. Such
is still the state of many Slovaks. That is the very substance of the autonomist and
separatist movement. It is a passing condition. I have already pointed out from the
results of the elections that the greater part of Slovakia has already arisen from its
sleep to the fulness of Czechoslovak life. But there is a minority of the Slovaks who
would continue their barren autonomist dreaming. Yet this relic of a thousand-year-old
servitude will also disappear. Things proceed slowly of course in the life of nations, and
so we shall have to do with the autonomy movement for some considerable time yet to come.
The process must be solved by us Slovaks ourselves. It is our affair. We shall also
solve it. I have not the slightest doubt that the Czechoslovak idea will triumph.
Source:
From: Ivan Derer, The Unity of the Czechs and the Slovaks: Has the Pittsburgh
Declaration been Carried Out? (Prague: "Orbis" Publishing Co., 1938
[Copyright Expired]), pp. 74-78, reprinted in Alfred J. Bannan and Achilles Edelenyi,
eds., Documentary History of Eastern Europe, (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970),
pp. 307-310.
Scanned by Jerome S. Arkenberg, Cal. State Fullerton.
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© Paul Halsall, October 1998
