NATIONALIST POPULISM AND POST-COMMUNISM

countries and underlined the spiritual closeness of these states to the West, the idea of Central Europe was mainly an intellectual construct, even though there appeared a few political attempts to revitalise the “mythological” Central Europe after 1989. 3.1.3. Experience of independent statehood Although both Poland and Slovakia were under foreign domination for a significant part of their history, their experience of independent statehood has been different. The same is true when the conditions for national self determination under the foreign rule are considered. For significant part of its history, Poland was partitioned between the Habsburg, Prussian and Russian Empires. 64 However, what makes the Polish historical experience different from the Slovak one is the existence of the Polish Kingdom, which was ruled by kings of a Polish origin. This experience became a widely-used point of reference for the developers of the Polish national identity. 65 The territory of Slovakia continuously remained part of the Hungarian Kingdom and the Habsburg Empire for more than one thousand years. Although some nationalist-oriented Slovak historians and politicians often refer to the existence of the ancient Slovak motherland, a “quasi-state” called “Great Moravia”, which existed before the arrival of the Huns in the Carpathian basin and whose political centre lies in the present day territory of Slovakia, serious historians would claim that this theory is based on myth instead of real facts. With the exception of a short period of the existence of the fascist Slovak state, prior to 1993 the Slovaks did not have any experience of an independent statehood. 66 Such a heritage of foreign domination resulted in hostile attitudes towards the oppressing nations and states being maintained by a significant part of the population. In the case of Poland, especially Russia and Germany (and Russians and Germans) have been perceived negatively and with suspicion. For the Slovaks, the nation perceived the most negatively is the Hungarian one, although for a limited period of time there also existed a certain amount of animosity towards the Czechs. The stress placed on the ethnic element of national identity in both the Polish and Slovak cases results from their historical experience, which was marked by foreign domination. As in the case of other 64 See, for instance, P. S. Wandycz Střední Evropa v dějinách . (Praha: Academia, 1998), W. Roszkowski Historia Polski 1914-2004 . (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2004). 65 Ibid. 66 See Ľ. Lipták Slovensko v 20. storočí. (Bratislava: Kalligram, 1998), D. Kováč Dejiny Slovenska . (Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, 1998), etc.

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