László Szarka
Three Minority Groups Through Western Eyes
Edwin Bakker: Minority Conflicts in Slovakia and Hungary? Thesis Rijks-
universiteit Groningen. Capelle a/d Ijssel, Labyrint Publication, 1997, 279 pp.
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Whether a heritage of the 19th century or products of the 20th century, the national and ethnic minorities of East-Central Europe have proven to be a particularly fertile ground for antagonism. The civil war in which the ethnic and religious conflicts of the former Yugoslavia issued has directed the attention of political analysts in Western Europe and of scholars in the social sciences to the minorities of this region. The Clingendael Institute of International Relations in The Hague has contributed to the examination of the ethnic conflicts of the region on a regular basis since 1989. The Institute invites politicians and scholars of the countries and minorities concerned to conferences, and publishes the papers delivered at these conferences. 1
There have been only a handful of Western studies discussing the situation of the Hungarian minority outside Hungary or of the non-Hungarian minorities within Hungary. No doubt this lack has made a judicious assessment of the issues by Western European decision-makers even more difficult.
The past few years have seen the completion and publication of the first German-language political analyses on the minorities of the region. However, apart from a few comparative projects completed in international cooperation, most published studies do not go beyond an examination of particular problems or a mere recapitulation of the official government positions with regard to the issue at hand.2
Edwin Bakker's study should be all the more welcome. Bakker, a Ph.D. student at the University of Groningen, decided to continue the geographical interests of his father and to write his dissertation on the ethnic conflicts of the East-Central European region, using the examples of the Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and the Slovak and German minorities in Hungary. He repeatedly visited both countries, immersed himself in all available sources pertaining to his topic, and, assisted by his Slovak wife, familiarized himself with the cultures and languages of both countries.
His study has three parts and six chapters. Its theoretical and methodological introduction explains the basic concepts, research goals and methods informing the examination. According to Bakker, the East-Central European region has been characterized by numerous contradictions in the period following 1989. In particular, that between the consolidation of democracies and the escalation of ethnic conflicts has been a central problem for the countries of the region, which have tried to define themselves as nation-states, in spite of the considerable presence of ethnic minorities. As Bakker aptly points out, among the fourteen states that have recently become independent, the Czech Republic is the only one whose linguistic and national minorities make up less than ten per cent of its population.
Minority conflicts arise, writes Bakker, because the majority or dominant national government wants to establish the same conditions in regions where the majority population belongs to a minority as in other regions of that state. Political representatives of the minorities, on the other hand, formulate "specific demands for cultural and educational self-determination and/or regional self-determination" (p. 11) and seek to secure a special legal status for the minority region. The essence of such conflict resides, therefore, in an "active antagonism over the sharing of the control over the territory of the state". He construes the somewhat scary term "minority conflict" accordingly: "This kind of conflict is defined as a form of active antagonism between the government of a state and representatives of a minority over the extent of opportunities of minorities to influence the use and organization of the (sub-state) territories they inhabit" (ibid.).
By defining minority conflicts in terms of territory, Bakker narrows down the concept of conflict and identifies it with the symbolic and actual political struggle for ethnic territories. This definition appears especially problematic in the case of minorities of different types, such as the three target groups selected by the author. Discussing the political, cultural and legal situation of Hungarians in Slovakia, Germans and Slovaks in Hungary, Bakker's investigation focuses on the reality and depth of their conflicts, which are linked to territorial issues, and examines the relations among the various factors responsible for the intensification of antagonism. The ultimate objective of his inquiries is to assess and compare the potential for conflict inherent in the three minorities.
The theoretical introduction already makes it clear that Bakker, though trying to assimilate recent studies concerning the three minorities, relied chiefly on the most recent results and on the theoretical and methodological considerations of Western European and American minority studies. Although most of the East Central European research into minorities is still limited to mere description, recently East Central European scholars have been attempting to adopt the theoretical conclusions drawn from the comparative examination of minorities in other regions of the world. To be sure, these attempts are still only methodological in nature and scope. One thing is clear, however. It is absurd that Hungarian minority research—on the pathbreaking minority local representation in Hungary, on the political struggles of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe which have attracted international attention, or on the Gypsy issue in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, which threatens to give rise to a permanent ethnic conflict—should be conducted mostly without regard to research abroad.
While Bakker insists on the importance of establishing the exact nature of the differences among the three minority groups in the comparative examination based on his case studies, neither in the introduction nor in the conclusion does he provide a sufficient formulation of the differences among the typologically different groups.
The second part of the book consists of the three case studies. The longest chapter in the entire work is devoted to
the Hungarian minority in Slovakia (pp. 37–137).
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Slovak minority politics has persistently tried to deny in demographic terms the existence of regions with a Hungarian majority in Slovakia and to eliminate the Hungarian presence in these areas. Edwin Bakker's book attempts to give a judicious picture of the means and consequences of this policy. In 1970 the Hungarians living in a local majority made up 88 per cent of the entire Hungarian minority community, but in 1980 this figure was down to 83 per cent, and the last population census established it at 77 per cent (p. 47). Since it was in regional centres that such a transformation of the ethnical make-up of the population was the most rapid, after 1918—when Czechoslovakia was established—Slovak governments have sought to have their way by more or less arbitrarily assigning and re-assigning municipalities, counties and districts, as well as by changing election and court district boundaries in ways which benefitted the majority.
Using highly revealing maps, the author demonstrates the redistricting strategy by which the zone of land inhabited by a Hungarian majority, stretching from East to West, was sliced into fifteen parts, each integrated in a district with a Slovak majority. This gerrymandering had the declared objective of precluding any effort to seek autonomy that might emerge in regions with a Hungarian majority. Indeed, the state nationalist approach, which is also that of the third Meciar-government, is so intent on thinking in terms of "enemy" figures that it sees the most important benefit of the new administrative boundaries in "the final elimination of Hungarian irredentism". What Bakker emphasizes when discussing the territorial politics of the Hungarian Coalition (the umbrella of the Hungarian minority parties in Slovakia), however, is the fact that initially the minority programmes were based on the principles laid down in 1985 by the Council of Europe in the European Charter of Self-Governments. When evaluating the Komarno proposal, for territorial self-government, made in January 1994, the author suggests that it was a mistake on the Hungarian minority's part to demand the administrative-regional integrity of the South Slovak regions with a Hungarian majority. According to the Komarno Proposal, the Hungarian-majority region—or the three regions specified in the alternative proposal—would be made up of twenty-one administrative sub-regions. Three of these subregions would have a Hungarian majority, eighteen Slovak. Nothing shows better the ethnically heterogeneous nature of the regions adjacent to the Hungarian–Slovak border (political or linguistic) than the fact that seven of the twenty-one regions specified in the Komarno Proposal have a minority (Slovak or Hungarian) larger than 40 per cent. Ten of the regional centres have a Slovak majority, in seven the proportion of the Slovak minority exceeds 30 per cent.
1 - The proceedings of the conference on Hungarian-Slovak relations are published in German and English in: Robert Aspeslagh/Hans Renner/Hans van der Meulen (ed.), Im historischen Würgegruff: Die Beziehungen zwischen Ungarn und der Slowakei in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft. Baden-Baden, Verlagsgesellschaft, 1994, 180 pp.
2 - Notable exceptions are the studies published by the Südost-Institut in Munich and edited by Gerhard Seewann, and the works by Georg Brunner, who works at the Ostrecht Institut of the University of Cologne. There are also English-language publications from both countries, such as The Slovak State Language Law and the Minorities: Critical Analyses and Remarks. Budapest, Minority Protection Association, 1995; Situation of the Hungarian Minority in the Slovak Republic (Comparison with International Documents, Bratislava, Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1995.
László Szarka
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is on the staff of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
He is the author of Csehország a Habsburg Monarchiában (Bohemia in the Habsburg Monarchy, Budapest, 1989) and
A szlovákok története (A History of the Slovaks, Budapest, 1993).
