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Social democracy and the Hungarian minority in Slovakia after World War I
| The paper addresses the origins of the ‘Hungarian minority question’ in Slovakia, which emerged after the national revolutions in Central Europe in 1918-19 and which is still a hot issue today. Special attention is paid to the milieu of the multi-ethnic (Hungarian, Slovak, and German) social democratic movement, and to the question of how the different ethnic elements of this movement tried to come to terms with the new political challenges posed by the radical change in inter-ethnic power structure in Slovakia. Now that the Hungarian social democrats had become part of a national minority in the Czechoslovak State, whereas before 1918 they had belonged to the ruling nation in the greater multinational Hungarian Kingdom that included Slovakia, there could be no question any longer of their trying to ignore the ‘national problem.’ Indeed especially the Hungarian social democrats in southern Slovakia began to put forward new ideas on possible ‘solutions’ for the question of Hungarian-minority status and peaceful inter-ethnic co-existence. These ideas, proposals, and considerations had as yet a rather tentative character, relating to forms of cultural and administrative autonomy in Hungarian minority regions and to conditions for co-operation on a basis of equality between the different ethnic sections of the labour movement in Slovakia. Interestingly, a closer look at these ideas reveals that they were actually not very new at all, but strongly similar to older pre-1918 ideas proposed by other groups of social democrats. The only novelty about them was the fact that it was now the Hungarians who were submitting them, whereas before the First World War it had been especially the Slovak social democrats who were looking for solutions for inter-ethnic friction and inequality in terms of cultural autonomy and national recognition. The thing that had really changed was inter-ethnic power structure, while a second important change was the fact that the Czechoslovak Republic was a democratic state in contrast to the old oligarchic and repressive Hungarian Kingdom. Although the Czechoslovak State had ‘ethnocratic’ features too, its democratic institutions and relatively liberal national-minority policies opened up new opportunities for the Hungarians in Slovakia to help design models of inter-ethnic co-existence as well as to formulate forms of democratic critique. The Hungarian social democrats were among the first to come forward with ‘new’ ideas, now understanding the need for them in their new situation.
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