After the fall of communism in central and eastern Europe, one compelling argument for bringing the region into the European Union was that the experience of prosperity, democracy and everyday multinational co-operation would ease national and ethnic tensions there. Who knew, perhaps eventually it would get rid of them altogether, just as France and Germany were gradually reconciled after the second world war?
A flare-up of tensions last month between Slovakia and Hungary will serve as proof, to those western Europeans who were always hostile to enlargement, that such hopes were premature. Worse still, it will confirm them in their opinion that, by admitting the two countries in 2004, all the EU succeeded in doing was to trap a nasty virus inside its own borders.
They are wrong, in my view, but that doesn’t mean that the Slovak-Hungarian tensions should be glossed over. The spark for the trouble was the Slovak government’s decision to deter Hungary’s head of state from attending a statue-unveiling ceremony in the ethnic Hungarian-populated part of southern Slovakia. The statue was of Saint Stephen, Hungary’s first king, who ruled 1,000 years ago.
To many Slovaks, Hungary’s attempt to send its president to the ceremony marked yet another example of interference in a region that Hungary had ruled since the Middle Ages, until forced to cede the area after the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s collapse in 1918. To Hungarians, however, the origins of the episode lie in the anti-Hungarian outlook of Slovakia’s coalition government, manifested in a new language law which stipulates that only Slovak can be used in most public institutions. Thousands of ethnic Hungarians went on the streets last week to demonstrate against the law.
All this is reminiscent of the Slovak-Hungarian tensions that persisted throughout the 1990s, especially after Slovakia became an independent state in 1993 in the wake of Czechoslovakia’s break-up. Sixteen years ago, I spent some time in the part of Slovakia where the latest troubles broke out and, re-reading what I wrote back then, it is tempting to conclude that not a great deal has changed in the meantime.
And yet that is not really so. There are ultra-nationalist elements in Slovakia, and they are even represented in the country’s coalition government. But overall Slovakia is more confident in its statehood. It joined the eurozone this year and has no interest in fomenting instability in its region. Meanwhile, Hungary has every right to take an interest in the status of ethnic Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries. Perhaps sometimes Hungary oversteps the mark in a rather disconcerting way, but there is never any suggestion of violence or attempted subversion.
Tensions of this kind have such deep roots that it would be silly to expect them to disappear as a result of five years of EU membership. But in the end, the chances that they really will disappear will be much higher if Slovakia and Hungary are in the EU than outside.
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