Introduction: from nationhood to statehood

The story of post-communist Slovakia tends to be a story of political turmoil, ethnic mobilization, and a cautiously declared success. Slovakia has been a difficult case of post-communist transition, always hovering on the verge of regression to authoritarianism; every election was “critical” to the continuation of democracy, despite the fact that Slovakia managed to enter the EU in the first wave of eastern enlargement in May 2004, after having had only two years to complete the negotiation process. Currently, Slovakia is one of the most successful examples of “Europeanization” both politically and economically and shows impressive levels of foreign investment into the country. The question that begs to be answered, though, is whether the effects of Europeanization are longer lasting than the effects of the communist and pre-communist past, which I have argued elsewhere constitute an accumulation of negative conditions for the process of democratization.

The Slovak national question, 1918–89

Slovakia came into existence on 1 January 1993 as a result of the breakup of Czechoslovakia which split under the pressure of anxiety about the pace of economic transformation on the Slovak side and what in the turmoil of the early post-communism appeared to be an irreconcilable difference in cultural and historical understanding of the common Czechoslovak state from both sides – the Czech and the Slovak. The Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) had a markedly different past from Slovakia.