Choosing Slovakia

Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language and Accidental Nationalism

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Hungary was the site of a national awakening. While Hungarian-speaking Hungarians sought to assimilate Hungary's ethnic minorities into a new idea of nationhood, the country's Slavs instead imagined a proud multi-ethnic and multi-lingual state whose citizens could freely use their native languages. The Slavs saw themselves as Hungarian citizens speaking Pan-Slav and Czech dialects - and yet were the origins of what would become in the twentieth century a new Slovak nation. How then did Slovak nationalism emerge from multi-ethnic Hungarian loyalism, Czechoslovakism and Pan-Slavism? Here Alexander Maxwell presents the story of how and why Slovakia came to be.