Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest
44-4 | 2013
Clivages nationaux, transferts locaux au centre de
l'Europe
Komárno: A Flagship of Symbolic Politics at the
Slovak-Hungarian Border
Komárno: symbole d’un enjeu national à la frontière hungaro-slovaque
Muriel Blaive and Libora Oates-Indruchová
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URL: http://receo.revues.org/1439
ISSN: 2259-6100
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Date of publication: 15 December 2013
Number of pages: 93-122
ISBN: 9782358760874
ISSN: 0338-0599
Electronic reference
Muriel Blaive and Libora Oates-Indruchová, « Komárno: A Flagship of Symbolic Politics at the SlovakHungarian Border », Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest [Online], 44-4 | 2013, Online since 15
December 2016, connection on 28 March 2017. URL : http://receo.revues.org/1439
© NecPlus
Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest, 2013,
vol. 44, n° 4, pp. 93-122
KOMÁRNO: A FLAGSHIP
OF SYMBOLIC POLITICS
AT THE SLOVAK-HUNGARIAN BORDER*
MURIEL BLAIVE AND LIBORA OATES-INDRUCHOVÁ
Senior Lecturer, Chair of Historical Sociology, Charles University, Prague;
[email protected]
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Andragogy and Cultural
Anthropology, Palacky University, Olomouc; [email protected]
ABSTRACT : Ever since the 1920 Trianon Treaty that dismantled the former
Hungarian empire, Komárno’s signiicance in Slovak and Hungarian symbolic
politics has exceeded that of a town merely at the border with the former
ruler-nation. Instead, it has represented the entire Hungarian community in
Slovakia. On the basis of oral history interviews analyzed against the background of local and state-level politics in Slovakia and in Hungary, this article
considers the way Komárno Hungarians and Slovaks perceive themselves in
their bi-ethnic environment. It contrasts the local, everyday cohabitation
with the instrumentalization of the national question in Budapest and Bratislava. It shows how the continued dynamic development of the bi-ethnic community is undermined by the politicization of the national question, which in
itself is seen as a part of the post-communist legacy: as if the fading contours
of the physical border after the fall of the Iron Curtain had to be replaced by
a symbolic border of language and nationality.
KEY WORDS: Komárno (Slovakia), symbolic politics, post-communism, borders,
minorities.
* We kindly thank Erste Foundation, who inancially supported this local study in 20072008 in the frame of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public
Spheres’ research program on Cold War borders.
94 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
Komárno has had a tumultuous political history and has belonged
to numerous state entities throughout the twentieth century: AustriaHungary (until 1918), the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938),
the Kingdom of Hungary (1938-1945), the postwar Czechoslovak
democracy (1945-1948), the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (19481989), the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (1990-1992), and
Slovakia (1993 to the present). It houses only 35,000 people,1 but is
the largest border town after Bratislava. Sixty percent of its inhabitants
claim Hungarian nationality,2 which makes it the largest Hungarian
settlement in the country, a “Hungarian capital” of sorts. In fact,
Komárno has emerged as the urban center of the “imagined territory”
(echoing Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”) of southern
Slovakia (Mannová, 2009).
In this context and although we originally came to Komárno to
research traces of the Cold War at the Slovak-Hungarian border in
the frame of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Cold War project3, our
attention was rapidly diverted toward a more salient issue: the positioning of the town as a point of symbolic rivalry between Bratislava and
Budapest. In this article, we aim to consider this phenomenon in the
context of post-communist legacy. We argue, irst, that Komárno has
been elevated to the symbol of Hungarian-Slovak tensions by Slovak
and Hungarian politicians at the national level after 1989, and second,
that this process is rather at odds with the everyday social and cultural
practice of Komárno’s citizens as we recorded in oral history interviews
on the local level.
1. Data as of 31 December 2011. Štatistický úrad Slovenskej republiky, Mestská a
obecná štatistika. See http://app.statistics.sk/mosmis/sk/run.html.
2. This proportion has remained more or less stable ever since the end of WW2. See
Štatistický úrad Slovenskej republiky, Mestská a obecná štatistika. See http://app.
statistics.sk/mosmis/sk/run.html. We translate národnost as “nationality” but this
meaning must not be confused with that of “citizenship” in English. Národnost derives from národ, meaning “nation”, and also “a people”. The 1953 decree restored
the freedom to declare one’s belonging to “a people” of their choice regardless of
their ancestry.
3. Based on oral history interviews, this project was meant to record and analyze
the perception of the Cold War on border communities. See http://ehp.lbg.ac.at/
node/375 (last accessed 4 December 2013.)
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 95
Borderland and symBolic politics
The large body of research on Komárno ranges from local and
Holocaust history (Kecskés & Hegedűs, 1975; Kovács, 2007; Lukács,
2001; Mácza, 1992; Szabolcs, 2002), bordering issues and borderland
identity (Kovács, 2000 ; Mannová, 2000, 2001, 2009; Michela, 2205;
Szarka, 2004; Vajda, 2011), to the history of everyday life, memory
cultures and social practices (Bottoni, 2010; Kovács, 2003; Mannová,
2002). Komárno features also in literature on Hungarian-Slovak relations and on (Czecho)Slovak minority and language policies (Bakker,
1998; Daftary & Gál, 2003; Irmanová, 2005; Lanstyák & Szabómihály,
2009; Lévai, 2006; Paul, 2003).
If not an “Iron Curtain town”, Komárno is still half of a “twin town”
and this constellation certainly contributes to its signiicance. Lying
right at Slovakia’s border, it is separated from the Hungarian town of
Komárom only by a bridge across the Danube. Peter Sahlins dates the
rise of a border to a political symbol to the late nineteenth century, tied to
modern political nationalism (Sahlins, 1998, p.3), when frontier regions
became “privileged sites for the articulation of national distinctions”
(Ibid., p.5). The symbolic potential of Komárno is in this case further
augmented by the historical moment of the end of the Cold War and the
border regime of the Eastern Bloc. In her study of the dismantling of
the inner German border after the fall of the Berlin Wall as lived in a
borderland community, Daphne Berdahl observes that “in a borderland
situation […] [the] state of transition can be observed in particularly
bold relief” (Berdahl, 1999, p.1). The state of transition she refers to
here was of course the sudden collapse of the East German political
and economic system, when people had to “negotiate and manipulate a
liminal condition created by the disappearance of a signiicant frame of
reference” (Ibid.).
The border situation in Komárno is part and parcel of the same “collapse”. Its signiicant frame of reference, however, is national rather
than socio-economic: it is not linked to the fall of the Iron Curtain so
much as to the split of Czechoslovakia and the creation of an independent Slovak state in 1993. Indeed, the fall of the communist rule
opened the way already in spring 1990 to renegotiations of the relationship between the Czech and the Slovak Republics, encapsulated in
protracted parliamentary squabbles over the new name of the federal
96 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
state (Eyal, 2003; Krapl, 2009; Mark, 2010). The “Velvet Divorce”
that ended the Federation in December 1992 sharpened the discussion
on national identity in Slovak politics and in the media. The Hungarian
minority in Slovakia became the focal point of this self-deining discourse and Komárno often found itself in the limelight. As a town in
the borderlands, it became not only one of “the best places to study the
implementation of, and resistance to, state-sponsored identities” (Hurd,
2006, p.14), but also a stage for their political performance.
In the following pages, we outline the construction and instrumentalization of Komárno’s symbolical status in the post-communist
period and contrast it with the peaceful if separate, everyday ethnic
cohabitation of Komárno Hungarians and Slovaks. For this purpose,
we mobilize the concept of “symbolic politics” as applied to discursive
constructions of territorial and cultural belonging.
The term was coined by Murray Edelman (1964) to denote the behavior of politicians “making strategic use of symbols, myths and rituals
in order to deceive and control the mass public and in order to maximize
their own interests” (Murray summarized in Blühdorn, 2007, p.257). In
contemporary usage, symbolic politics refers to “a publicly displayed
deception or surrogate action that is used to detract from actual political reality. In this sense, symbolic politics is considered to be a surrogate for politics” (Sarcinelli, 2008) and is different from actual policy.
Nevertheless, it can and does have an effect (Ibid.). Symbolic politics is
also a “strategy of media management, whereby political acts are carefully choreographed in order to maximize the chance that journalists
and media makers take them up” (Blühdorn, 2007, p.255).
The political uses of Komárno that we discuss below can be interpreted in both senses of symbolic politics: they are medialized or even
staged for the media, but they are not merely “surrogates for policy“
(“placebo politics”, as Blühdorn calls them; Ibid., p.256): they intentionally detract from the political reality (the lack of conlict in ethnic
cohabitation) to pursue a speciic manipulative agenda.
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 97
methodology
As mentioned above, we originally came to Komárno to investigate
the signiicance of the Iron Curtain in the memories of Komárno inhabitants as part of a larger project on border communities conducted
at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public
Spheres and that consisted of case studies of twin border towns (ideally,
towns severed in two by a newly created border either after 1918 or in
1945-1948).4 In Komárno, we conducted 23 semi-structured interviews
with Hungarians (in Hungarian) and seven interviews with Slovaks
(in Czech and Slovak) in 2008. This proportion corresponds to the
approximate statistical population ratio by nationality.5 Consequently,
our analysis is mainly focused on the Hungarian interviews, but we also
used the Slovak ones for comparative purposes. Although we did not
aim at a mechanical representation of the town’s demographics – we
used snowball sampling –, both sexes are evenly represented among
our interivewees, and an effort was made to include different socioeconomical, professional, and age categories. The oldest interviewee
was born in 1923, the youngest in 1991. Most interviews took place at
the interviewee’s home, a few at their workplace or in a restaurant. The
average length of the interview was one hour. All names used here are
pseudonyms.
The interview questions included personal biographical trajectory
and then the following areas of experience: the interviewees’ life at the
state’s periphery; their views on the Cold War; their relationship to the
Hungarians on the other side of the border, past and present; to the other
national community inside their own town; to capitalism and socialism;
their view on local history; on Hungarian minority rights under communism and today; on Slovak politics since 1993; and on Slovakia’s
4. The other case studies were conducted at Bad Sooden-Allendorf (D/FRG) – AsbachSickenberg / Wahlhausen (D/GDR), Gmünd (A) – České Velenice (CSSR/CZ), Gorizia
(I) – Nova Gorica (SLO) Salonta (RO) – Méhkerék (HU), and Görlitz (D/GDR) –
Zgorzelec (PL). For details see http://ehp.lbg.ac.at/node/375.
5. Muriel Blaive conducted the interviews in Komárno, while Barnabás Vajda from
Selye János University interviewed for his own case study in Komárom (i.e. on the
Hungarian side of the border), and Libora Oates-Indruchová provided background
research to the Komárno study, while also supervising the overall border project
since 2010 (Blaive, oates-indruchová & vajda, 2011). This article is concerned
only with the case of the town in the Slovak territory.
98 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
accession to the EU, as well as that of Romania, Bulgaria and other
prospective states like Turkey and Ukraine.6
The importance of the Iron Curtain between those two Eastern bloc
countries was rapidly relativized. In fact, the main issue at stake in the
town’s recent history proved to be remarkably disconnected from any
political events other than those strictly relating to the nationality question. The Trianon Treaty of 1920, the entry of Admiral Horthy’s troops
in 1938, and the Beneš Decrees of 1945 were practically the only dates
mentioned by the interviewees. The 1989 “Velvet Revolution” was not
mentioned often and some of the Hungarian interviewees even had
trouble remembering exactly when communism had fallen. Living side
by side in Komárno and in Slovakia proved to be the salient issue for
Slovaks and Hungarians alike. In fact, the interviews show a marked
tendency to reduce all social, economic and political questions to their
national aspect; the geographical signiicance of the border became a
mirror to both communities’ self-perception.
In the rest of this article, we will, irst, look in greater detail at the
representations of Komárno on the Slovak-Hungarian political scene,
before we turn our attention to two main themes that emerged from
the interviews: the interviewees‘ perceptions of three historical periods
(pre-1945 history, the period of communist rule and post-1989 history)
and of Hungarians in Hungary. Our conclusion will relect on the discrepancy between the local practice and national symbolic politics in
the light of the post-communist development.
Komárno in post-1989 slovaK politics
Since 1989 and communism’s fall, political parties in Slovakia
were created on a national basis, either to curtail minority rights
(Slovak National Party, SNS), or to broaden them (Unity/Hungarian
Christian Democratic Movement, ESWMK). The Slovak National
Council passed its irst legislative measure to deine Slovak as the
oficial language already in 1990, providing an impulse for Komárno
6. We also recorded sex, place and year of birth, how long the interviewee has lived
in Komárno, mother tongue and nationality, education level, occupation of parents,
family status and religious afiliation.
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 99
Hungarians to demonstrations and demands for autonomy (Daftary &
Gál, 2003, p.43).
After the “Velvet Divorce” (1993), Slovakia continued enforcing a
“one nation, one state, one language” policy under Vladimír Mečiar’s
nationalist-populist rule (Ibid., p.44; Eplényi, 2009, p.34). This policy sparked considerable international criticism, leading to Slovakia’s
exclusion from European Union accession talks in December, 1997
(Luxemburg summit)7 – talks that were reopened in February, 2000 at
the Helsinki summit only after Vladimír Mečiar’s departure from the
government coalition. Even if the Hungarians’ situation improved after
Mečiar’s electoral defeat in 1998 (the new, Hungarian-speaking Selye
János University opened in Komárno in 2004, for instance), SlovakHungarian relations as they are portrayed in the public sphere at the
national level in relation to Komárno are, to all appearances, tense and
even hostile.
A case in point is the so-called “Komárno Proposal.” In 1994, the
Mečiar government was preparing to redraw the administrative map
of Slovakia, a project that alarmed the three Slovak Hungarian political parties. These argued that the new administrative lines carved a
territorial division from north to south so that in most areas the proportion of Hungarians would drop below the 20% needed for the exercise
of minority rights within a given administrative unit. The Komárno
Proposal aimed for the exact opposite, i.e. for a division from west to
east alongside the southern border so as to ensure maximum autonomy
for the Hungarians. The Slovak media gave the proposal considerable
negative attention, claiming that it threatened Slovakia’s integrity and
that the Hungarian map proposal was disturbingly similar to that of
the territories annexed by Hungary in 1938. The Slovak National Party
even called for a ban of the Hungarian parties (Bakker, 1998, p.29).
It was in Komárno again that the Slovak and Hungarian Prime
Ministers, Robert Fico and Ferenc Gyurcsány, met in November 2008
to allegedly “resolve differences over the large ethnic Hungarian
minority in Slovakia”, as well as over what Slovak politicians called
“provocations” by “extreme-right Hungarian groups.” Prime Minister
Fico told the journalists at the press conference that “the biggest
7. For the internal Slovak context and governmental crisis that led to this exclusion,
see Haughton (2002).
100 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
problem for the Slovak government [was] the import of fascism and
nationalism from Hungary,” to which Prime Minister Gyurcsány
answered coldly: “Many of us think in Hungary that Slovak politics
is not only lirting with nationalism, but has become engaged in it”
(Santa & Than, 2011). Both statements created a media and political
uproar in the two countries.
Our third and last example concerns the even bigger scandal caused
by the Hungarian President László Sólyom when he announced his
intention to come to Komárno on 21 August 2009 to unveil a statue
of St Stephen, the patron saint celebrated in Hungary on 20 August.
This was not his irst visit; he had already come in October 2007 to
unveil the statue of another Hungarian king, Andrew II (SME, 2011).
In 2009 however, his Slovak counterpart Ivan Gašparovič advised
him not to come and implied that his visit was undesirable insofar as
20-21 August is also the anniversary of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that put a violent end to the reform process
of the Prague Spring – an invasion in which Hungarian forces took
part. Moreover, the Hungarian president intended to come to Komárno
over the Elisabeth Bridge, the very same bridge, noted the media, used
by the occupation forces in 1968 and by Admiral Horthy in 1938.8
President Sólyom nevertheless insisted on the visit. He was stopped
by Slovak border guards and denied entry into Slovakia. He then held
an impromptu press conference in the middle of the bridge, causing
indignation on both sides (Pravda.sk, 2009a and b, 2011).
This last example shows Komárno as an ideal location for a photo
for both Bratislava and Budapest: it has good railway and motorway
connections, the aesthetic quality of the bridge complete with shipyard
cranes in the background, and of course the poetry of the Danube, at
the same time joining and dividing the two countries. Budapest leaders ind in Komárno a large Hungarian-speaking audience available
to debate Hungarians’ rights as a minority in Slovakia; Bratislava
leaders ind in it a privileged scene to make a repeated statement on
Slovakia’s sovereignty over Slovak Hungarians whom they often sus8. It needs to be said that the choice of crossing places is limited since there are
only three bridges across the Danube between Hungary and Slovakia: one in
Esztergom/Štúrovo, one in Komárom/Komárno, and then a small bridge for local
trafic in Medveďov.
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 101
pect to be nationalist if not revisionist (i.e. to wish for the return of
southern Slovakia to Hungary).
The absence of local Komárno politics in the national media lies in the
striking contrast to the prominence of the town when Slovak-Hungarian
relations are discussed. The articles reporting on the events above did
not include a single comment by a Komárno representative or even a
local politician, although at least in the case of the statues of Hungarian
kings and saints and the President Sólyom’s visits, obviously the town
hall and local cells of political parties must have been involved. Local
political scene made an appearance only in the report on the visit of
President Sólyom in 2007 with a mention that he was going to meet
with representatives of the Party of the Hungarian Coalition (Strana
maďarskej koalície – Magyar Koalíció Pártja; SMK).
But how representative are these national politicians of their respective national communities in Komárno? Judging again by the journalistic coverage above, there deinitely was a receptive audience, even
occasionally with more radical nationalist sentiments, but it cannot be
determined what percentage of that audience was constituted of actual
Komárno citizens, rather than visitors from the outside. The quotes
from the participants who are identiied as Komárno citizens that are
presented in the articles rather emphasize the distancing of Komárnians
from the nationalist discord. It is again impossible to assess how representative of the community these journalistic representations are. In any
case, the results of our oral history case study allow us to claim that leaders at the state level have often put the mixed community of the town to
uses that do not relect the community’s everyday social practice. Other
studies have already pointed this out in other contexts; for instance,
Elena Mannová analyzed the contrast that already existed in the interwar period between the Komárno population, who did not perceive its
mixed ethnic and language usage as problematic, and the Czechoslovak
political elite, who did (Mannová, 2009). Edwin Bakker also observes
that “the attitudes of ethnic Slovaks towards ethnic Hungarians are
more positive in the ‘ethnically mixed’ regions” (Bakker, paraphrased
in Daftary & Gál, 2003, p.39).
Our interviews, to which we now turn, also suggest that until today
and despite the antagonisms fomented by nationalist and populist
politicians in the post-communist period, notably Vladimír Mečiar on
102 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
the Slovak side and Viktor Orbán on the Hungarian side, a sense of
Schicksaalsgemeinschaft is at work in Komárno, a trans-national community of experience as an important part of both nationalities’ everyday life. Admittedly, this positive impression is not the irst one the
external observer can get: we will have to sift through numerous historical clichés still present in the Hungarian community before we get to
the core of their self-perception in today’s Slovakia.
Komárno hungarians Before 1945
At irst glance, Komárno Hungarians’ perception of the town’s recent
history is disturbingly different from that of the Slovaks. The Second
World War and the onset of the communist rule left a complex and
paradoxical imprint. In 1938, after the First Vienna Arbitration that
redrew the border between Slovakia and Hungary and under Hitler’s
tutelage, Komárno was “reuniied” with Komárom to the great joy of
its Hungarian population and regained its status as the county seat of
the Komárom County.9 Against the standards of political correctness
established by the communist regime and by the successor Slovak state
that condemn the Hungarian fascist leader, Admiral Horthy, and this
invasion of Southern Slovakia, young Komárno Hungarians still value,
if not worship, Horthy’s igure. Students at Selye János University such
as Lajos Bártok (21 years old) share this positive view:
L.B.: “[When Admiral Miklós Horthy entered Slovakia in 1938] it
was an occupation, but actually it was the implementation of a historical promise. A liberation. At the time, the Hungarians constituted a
much bigger majority here.”
János Erdei (36-year-old), even though he is a high school history
teacher and is supposed to teach the Slovak state’s interpretation of history10, is tempted to see Horthy’s entrance as a liberation as well:
9. Komárno historically developed on the left bank of the Danube, i.e. in today’s
Slovakia. Although it had administrative, political, ethnic and cultural links to the
largely industrial settlement of Újszőny on the right bank, i.e. today’s Komárom
in Hungary, the two entities merged into one administrative unit only in 1896. The
union lasted till the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and was again briely
renewed from 1938 to 1945.
10. Slovak Hungarians have the choice for their education language ever since
primary school, and the vast majority of them choose Hunagarian, i.e. go to
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 103
J.E.: “I think that it was a liberation to some extent, since it was for 20
years that Czechoslovakia did not respect the rights of the minorities.
[…] In this sense it was a liberation. Now if you consider that for
part of the people, the communists, the Jews, the persecution began,
they don’t see it this way. That makes it really dificult to answer ...
because everybody experienced it in a different way”
This ambivalence towards the past is maintained by a fragmentary
history teaching on this topic among Hungarian pupils (in Hungarian
secondary schools), as Lajos Bártok testiies:
L.B.: “We never really dealt with Horthy’s invasion of Komárno. …
the little I know is what I read, but we didn’t particularly deal with it.
There are few enough hours of history teaching in school. ... of course
we heard about the Viennese Arbitration … I saw a picture of how
they welcomed Horthy, music, people, lowers … [We] would have
[been interested in this] if there had been enough time for teaching
twentieth century history, but there wasn’t much.”
Similarly, young and middle-aged Komárno Hungarians tend to
see the arrival of the Red Army in 1945 (marking the defeat of Nazi
Germany and fascist Hungary) as an occupation at least as much as a
liberation. This distinguishes them not only from Komárno Slovaks (all
seven Slovak interviewees saw Horthy’s entrance as an occupation and
the Red Army arrival as a liberation) but from some older Hungarians
as well. Gábor Czár (an 85-year old retired worker) says he welcomed
the Soviet troops, even though he had to ight in the Hungarian army
during the war:
G.C.: “Look, the situation was such that in fact the Russians came
as liberators, because we had attacked them. It’s not the Russians
who attacked the Germans or the Hungarians, but the Hungarians,
the Germans, the Italians, the Romanians who attacked the Russians.
They were forced to come here and to defeat this regime. So after all
they were liberators.”
His attitude can certainly be retraced to a form of postwar opportunism and quick adaptation to the communist rule’s new canons of
Hungarian school. However, indeed, even though secondary education, including
history, can be taught in Hungarian, it still answers to the curricula deined at the
national level.
104 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
political correctness on the part of the Hungarian community, but it
also relects a widespread position on democracy and communism until
today; it is based in the peculiar Hungarian understanding of the postwar events that we review in the following section.
Komárno hungarians and the communist regime
A skeleton collective Komárno Hungarian narrative shared by our
interviewees across generations unravels as follows: President Beneš,
the head of the “democratic” camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945-1948,
planned to expel the Hungarians from Slovakia as he expelled the
Germans from the Czech lands; only the Allies’ refusal to endorse his
plan saved Slovakia’s largest minority. The Czechoslovak authorities
then forced a bilateral agreement upon Hungary to “exchange” its
Slovak Hungarian population against the repatriation of Slovaks living
in Hungary.
Indeed, about 90,000 of the estimated 600,000 Slovak Hungarians
were moved south across the border between 1945 and 1948 (Irmanová,
2005, pp.227-230), including approximately 6,000 Komárno Hungarians
(Bottoni, 2010, p.70; Daftary & Gál, 2003, p.38) – not enough in
Czechoslovak eyes, but 90,000 too many in Slovak Hungarian eyes.
Additionally, tens of thousands of Slovak Hungarians were coercively
resettled in the Czech borderlands (Irmanová, 2005, p.232), causing a
major trauma within the community. As a result of the infamous Beneš
decrees that deprived all non-Czechs and Slovaks of their minority
rights and dispossessed them of their property,11 Slovak Hungarians
were subjected like the Czechoslovak Germans to the postwar discriminatory minority legislation; Hungarian schools were closed, and the
public use of Hungarian forbidden.
The Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) originally supported
this discrimination of minorities. However, after the communist take11. Between the end of 1938 and the fall of 1945, Czechoslovak President Beneš,
who had led to London in October 1938, headed a provisional government, irst in
his London exile and later back in Prague. In the absence of any functioning parliament, he issued 143 ordinances or “decrees.” Four of those, dating from spring and
summer 1945, proclaimed the expropriation of the Sudeten Germans, as well as of
Hungarians from Slovakia, “collaborators” and “traitors”, without compensation
(Blaive & MinK, 2003).
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 105
over in 1948 the new president Klement Gottwald signed an agreement
with Hungary that put an end to the population exchanges, while the
Hungarians sent to the Czech lands were repatriated to Slovakia in 1949
(Irmanová, 2005, pp.232-235). The regime renewed school instruction
in Hungarian (Ibid., p.235) and gradually rebuilt a system of elementary and secondary schools – a privilege which was not granted to the
German, Roma, and Ukrainian minorities (Daftary & Gál, 2003, p.38).
The use of Hungarian was again allowed in the local administration.
Culture and media in Hungarian developed anew, be it by means of
newspapers or Hungarian plays at the Jókai Theatre in Komárno (inaugurated in 1952).
As a result, the scale on which members of the Hungarian community judge the communist regime differs from that of the Czech and
Slovak majority. Far from seeing in communist rule as an oppressor,
Komárno Hungarians of all ages think it was more “democratic” than
the pre-communist 1945-1948 “democratic coalition”, tainted as the
latter was, in their eyes, by the “Beneš decrees.” As Tünde Belai (16year old female high school student) put it, the Beneš decrees were a
“prejudice”, while Gábor Czár (85-year old retired worker) even stated
that “Gottwald was the real democratic president.”
Let us also not forget that Komárno is an industrial town, with major
shipyards: already in the interwar period, the communist party was
strong in the town, notably polling 28.4% of the local vote in the 1929
elections (Mannová, 2001, p.137; Krivý, 1997, p.56). Gábor Czár (85year old retired worker) values the opportunities provided by the communist regime to the working class:
G.C.: “… Under socialism, I managed as a specialized worker in
two different ields … to pull my family out of the terrible poverty
in which I was born. … without communism, my son would never
have become an optician and I wouldn’t have been able to build three
houses – I built two for myself and one for my daughter, thanks to my
double specialization as a worker. Inherit, I didn’t inherit anything
because my parents were so poor. I’m not denying it, I would tell to
anybody [that I supported communism.]”
These positive feelings toward the communist regime were shared
by all the other former workers, small employees, and agricultural wor-
106 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
kers we interviewed. The Hungarian community in Komárno held to a
social contract of sorts with the regime: it served the regime faithfully
(interviewees were not embarrassed to admit having been party members), it kept expressions of Hungarian nationalism under check, and
in exchange it was left in peace concerning its national existence and
culture.
This socio-political understanding has had lasting effects. On the
one hand, the “advantages” of the communist period imply a respect
of Hungarian identity and a minimal integration. On the other hand, the
regime did not offer any alternative or improvement to the nationality
policy of the democratic interwar period, whose utter failure had led to
the dismantling of Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939. The communist policy placated the Hungarian question in Slovakia, but did so by imposing
seclusion and a self-afirming isolation leading to parochialism. It led to
the construction of a “nationality prison”, a deep-seated self-perception
of Slovak Hungarians.
Against the backdrop of this complex heritage, it is easier to understand why, in 1999, the Komárno (Hungarian) mayor erected a “Memorial
to the Forcibly Removed Komárno Inhabitants” that clearly equated the
drama of the Holocaust with that of the Komárno Hungarians’ fate in
the postwar years: this monument is simultaneously dedicated to the
Jewish population deported and exterminated during the war, to the
(Hungarian) citizens sent to forced labour camps in the Czech borderlands in 1946-1947, and to the (Hungarian) citizens forcibly re-settled
in Hungary in 1947-1948 (Moravčík, 2011).
hungarians in post-1989 slovaKia
At the irst glance the interview material suggests an uneasy
relationship of Komárno Hungarians with the Slovak state, and
also a decreasing level of their integration since the breakup of
Czechoslovakia: within our sample, the young Hungarians felt even
less connection to the Slovak language and to Bratislava as their oficial capital than their elders; they had little or no friends among the
Slovak community; they spoke little or no Slovak, which meant that
they saw themselves as condemned to live in the Hungarian-speaking
island in Slovakia – or to move abroad; and they could envision
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 107
marrying an ethnic Slovak only if their children would be Hungarian,
speak Hungarian, and go to Hungarian school (religion played no
signiicant role).
A deeper analytical investigation shows, however, that Komárno
Hungarians have redeined their geographical and linguistic territory
so as to symbolically belong neither exactly to Slovakia, nor exactly
to Hungary, but somewhere in between. Accordingly, they dislike the
very notion of the border: “The border”, said 21-year old student Lajos
Bártok, “is not a good thing.” Our interviewees would much rather
live in a world without cultural and national hindrances, in which they
could come and go without being suspicious in anyone’s eyes. A Europe
without borders is much more appealing to them than to the Czechs,
for instance (who are wary of their Austrian and German neighbours;
Blaive, 2009).12 Gábor Czár, our 85-year old retired worker, explains
his views of borders:
G.C.: “In my opinion, there shouldn’t even be a border. If people
wanted to live a human life together, there shouldn’t be any need for
a border. Because all men, Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, have a right
to live, because everybody arrives naked into the world. But they just
shouldn’t impose this with violence on one another. Because I don’t
make anything out of the fact that I was born as a Hungarian or that
you were born as a Slovak. So why hurting each other? ... there is no
need even for a symbolical border. No border at all, this would be the
thing. The world would become international.”
János Erdei, our 36-year old history teacher, denies the very existence of a border:
J.E.: “... there is a sort of zone between the two countries. As if there
were no real border. So there is something like a 50-kilometer wide
belt where one encounters several cultures. More precisely two of
them.”
12. Komárno inhabitants, both Slovak and Hungarian, also have a much more positive opinion of the European Union than the Czech interviewees in a similar study
we conducted at the Czech-Austrian border (Blaive, 2009). Most of them spontaneously mentioned 2004 (Slovakia’s entry into the EU) and 2007 (Slovakia’s entry
into Schengen) as important dates for their life at the border and as positive events.
108 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
This claimed collective “open-bordered” attitude carved itself also
onto the local monument landscape. The historian Elena Mannová outlined how politics played out in the “rival and conlict scene of Komárno
monument landscape” (2002, p.120), that is, how cultural memory had
been constructed through monuments and memorials – each successive government seeking to imprint its ideology, national or proletarian
internationalist, upon the public space of Komárno’s parks, streets and
squares. The local town hall was not always consulted and had to abide
by these national imperatives (Ibid.).
Mannová follows the “peripeties” of three Komárno monuments –
dedicated to György Klapka, Milan Rastislav Štefánik and Mór Jókai –
while occasionally referring also to others to further her overall argument. Klapka is discussed as a symbol of Hungarian resistance against
the Habsburgs in 1848, Štefánik as a symbol of Slovak self-determination within the First Czechoslovak Republic and Jókai as a symbol of
Hungarian cultural heritage. She describes the several moves of each of
the monuments from their original places to less prestigious locations
in town or into museum depositories during politically less favourable
times (in particular, Stalinism and the later period after the defeat of
Prague Spring 1968), until their restoration to prominence.
Mannová notes the emergence of a current monument dispute: over a
statue of Cyrillus and Methodius, the Christian missionaries to Slavdom.
The dispute began in 1992 when Matica slovenská commissioned the
monument, reached high political levels and was not resolved at the
time of Mannová’s article (Ibid, p.118-121). In 2010, that is, after we
conducted our oral history study in Komárno, the statue was moved
from the Matica slovenská building to a roundabout – ostensibly, where
the roads to Bratislava, Budapest and Nové Zámky meet – downtown.
The reason for this location, however, seems much more pragmatic:
as the town hall did not offer a suitable location, Bratislava politicians
decided to erect the statue not on a municipal, but a state property, thus
bypassing the local politics. The then (and now) Prime Minister Robert
Fico unveiled the statue, while Tibor Bastrnák, the Mayor of Komárno,
was not invited to the ceremony (Barát, 2013).
However, when local initiative can express itself, the message it
conveys is of a different nature. The opening of the European Union
accession talks with Slovakia in 1999 provided Komárno inhabitants
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 109
with an impulse to construct a belonging that would depart from the
Slovak-Hungarian top down dichotomy. As a symbol of this new belonging, a Square of Europe (Európa udvar, Nádvorie Európy) was erected
in 2001 in the pedestrian center (Mannová, 2002, pp.127-128). Private
ofices and shops occupy buildings of all colors and styles, each symbolizing the architecture and culture of one European country. Walking
daily through this optimistic central square, Komárno Hungarians and
Slovaks pay tribute to their ideal world of tolerance, freedom, and selfdeined, undoctored belonging.
national sense of Belonging vs. official nationality
The latest expression of this local take on national belonging
and mutual tolerance has taken a clear form: despite the two-third
Hungarian majority in the town, the latest mayor, Anton Marek, was
elected on an independent list in 2010 as a Slovak. More precisely, he is
a typical representative of the bi-ethnic composition of the local community: his father is Slovak, his mother Hungarian, and he is married
to a Hungarian woman. But he cannot present himself as being both
Slovak and Hungarian; he had to make a choice and he is in this sense
a perfect symbol of the national ambiguity created by criteria deined in
Bratislava for Bratislava’s intents and purposes.
Individuals in Komárno, just like in the rest of Slovakia, can indeed
choose in the state census only one nationality regardless of their family
history, even if it comes in deiance of their everyday practice of cultural
belonging. Aware that their choice has important consequences in terms
of minority rights, individuals are cornered into making a political statement out of their mere physical existence. Could the superimposition of a forcefully unique “national self-deinition” upon an ethnically
mixed population be better symbolized than by this lack of choice?
No doubt as a consequence of this policy, the proportion of the
Komárno population declaring Hungarian nationality has remained
almost unchanged since the 1930s, from 64 per cent in the 1930 census
(Mannová, 2009, p.195) to 63.6 per cent in 1991 and 60% in 2001.13
Given the substantial movements of populations during and after the
13. Štatistický úrad Slovenskej republiky, Mestská a obecná štatistika. See http://
app.statistics.sk/mosmis/sk/run.html
110 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
Second World War, more dramatic and permanent changes could have
been expected. Moreover, as indicated both by common sense and by
our interviews, Slovaks and Hungarians have been marrying each other
in Komárno for generations. The reasons for this long-term, artiicial
stability, are therefore clearly not ethnic but political.
Komárno hungarians and hungary
Beyond the “Hungarian nationalist” irst impression of the interviews, what is additionally remarkable is that the answers indicate that
the Komárno Hungarians’s entertain an ambiguous relationship also
to the state and people of Hungary. The Hungarian communities on
both sides of the Danube have been drifting away from each other for
decades. Already in 1956 and even at a moment of heightened danger
to the Hungarian nation during the anti-communist uprising, Slovak
Hungarians’ concern did not extend to helping their fellow compatriots
in any active way (Blaive, 2005). As Gábor Czár (85-year old retired
worker) casually formulated it: “Well, it was not important because it
was there and I was here. It hurt all right, but what could I do, it was
quite a pity.”
Hungarians (from Hungary) have never had a good image among
Czechs and Slovaks; they have typically been seen as “less civilized”,
more vulgar – a negative national stereotype that greatly contributed to
contain the Hungarian anti-communist uprising in 1956 (Ibid.). Many
of the Komárno Hungarian interviewees still partly share this feeling
of cultural superiority and support Komárno as being “closer to their
hearts” than Komárom, if only under the pretext that they perceive
Komárno as “more elegant” (Gábor Czár).
The said Gábor Czár could also not ind any real kinship with the
Hungarians from Hungary: “For me, I don’t feel such a […] big feeling for the Hungarians. I respect them because you have to respect
everybody, but I don’t feel linked to them in any way.” The only time
he went there, he candidly explained, was under Horthy, “when there
was more work for us in Hungary [than here].” Tünde Belai’s heart
feels “closer to Komárom than to Komárno,” but by her own admission this 16-year-old Hungarian high school student hardly ever goes to
Komárom or to Hungary in general. Most interviewees similarly admit-
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 111
ted to limiting their border crossing activity, if at all, to shopping at the
hypermarket Tesco, located at the foot of the bridge on the Hungarian
side. The reassuring presence of Hungary right across the river thus
seems more psychological than practical. Lajos Bártok (21-year old
student) acquiesced and points to a historical pattern:
L.B.: “ I think that people here didn’t cross over to Hungary very
often. That’s why they didn’t have many friends there before 1989,
even though there were some people who went there even when they
didn’t have any family in Hungary. So there are not many relationships
at the level of the individual, of the families, you can’t really say yet
that the two towns would belong together.”
János Erdei (36-year old teacher) reminds that a taboo about the
Hungarian issue was maintained in both countries during the communist period; in Hungary, “it was not allowed to know about us, it was not
allowed to speak aloud about us.” Consequently, he claims, Hungarians
from Hungary know next to nothing about what it was (and still is) like
to be a minority Hungarian in Slovakia.
Mutual ignorance, limited contacts, and the postwar reconstruction
of a Hungarian sense of belonging as a minority within a majority
Czechoslovak state thus led to a partial estrangement. The rift might go
even deeper. Lajos Bártok (21-year old student) observes that “many
people here [think] that the Hungarians from over there reject us and
that they don’t consider us Hungarian. I don’t think it’s entirely true
but that’s what many people here think.” Consequently, Komárno
Hungarians...
L.B.: “ ... don’t always have a very good opinion of [Hungarians from
Hungary], I think. […] Maybe they have the feeling that [Hungarians
from Hungary] don’t know what it is like, what it is to be part of a
Hungarian minority, and they don’t appreciate the fact that they can
live at home in Hungary, they just complain, complain, whereas [they
are really lucky]. Maybe that’s why. ... [It] is always an open question
for us as a minority, we are concerned with how we deal with our
Hungarian consciousness, how we are as Hungarians, the vital question of how we belong.”
The self-perception of Komárno Hungarians as a distinct community
led some of them to see themselves as a more authentic representative
112 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
of Hungarianness than their southern compatriots. János Erdei (36-year
old teacher) underlines revealing semantics:
J.E.: “ For instance, there is an expression, quite a contemptuous
expression, [showing] how we despise Hungarians from the other
side of the Danube, some of us say that they are orange-drinkers
[Jaffások.14] You haven’t heard it?, it’s kind of a bit negative. […]
Those [of us who say this] think that [...] we are the real Hungarians.”
When the borders were reopened after 1989, the reunion was
sometimes awkward and the Hungarian attitude did not help to
dispel stereotypes:
J.E.: “At the beginning of the 1990s, it turned out that if someone
[from over there] came over here to give us a hand, they exaggeratedly tried to help us, as if we were some kind of starving Africans; they
didn’t know anything about our situation.”
János Erdei then came into closer contact with Hungarians and his
perception did not improve:
J.E.: “ In most cases, we are not even Hungarian in their eyes but just
Czechs or Slovaks. For instance, I went to university in Hungary and
I was always the Czech kid there. I don’t have anything in common
with the Czechs, but for them it was easier, anything north of the
Danube is simply Czech and I was a Czech kid. It used to make me
angry [laughter.]”
The same János Erdei, in the mirror of this rather negative perception
of his southern neighbours, praises his own community by contrast.
He is convinced that the dual culture of the (Slovak) border region is
leading to open-mindedness in contrast to the Hungarian side:
J.E.: “ On the other side of the border they are a lot less aware of how
people live on this side, it’s instructive. In my profession, it means a
lot if one understands another language, Slovak or Czech.”
14. “Jaffa-ites”, referring to Jaffa, a chemical orange drink allegedly made from
Jaffa oranges that was available only in Hungary during the communist period.
This « liminality » of the Slovak Hungarian experience reminds Maria Mälksoo’s
analyses on the ambivalent relationship entertained by the Baltic populations towards “Europe”: Hungarians from Slovakia might have the feeling that they are
“more” Hungarian than Hungarians from Hungary but that this “purer” identity is
not valued enough. See Mälksoo (2009, 2010).
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 113
This collectively self-praising, local patriotic attitude is characteristic of all interviewees, including that of Slovaks, as testiied for instance
by Božena Ebertová (a 47-year old Slovak employee):
B.E.: “ There is a difference [here as opposed to the rest of the
country.] There has to be more tolerance here, since we live right at
the border and we are used to encountering other nations and we have
to solve this communication problem, especially me, since I don’t
speak good Hungarian. This means that we always ind a way to say
what we want to say or to answer them if they ask something. ... So
here there is more tolerance. […] These border towns are, I don’t
know if you could say cosmopolitan or not, because they are small,
but there is more open-mindedness.”
What is particularly interesting to analyze in this case is that
limited language abilities do not hinder this self-perception; Božena
Ebertová does not speak much Hungarian, while János Erdei, by his
own admission, speaks very little Slovak, and all his “Slovak friends” proved to be, after a more detailed examination, ethnically mixed
(i.e. part Hungarian): in effect, he speaks only Hungarian with them.
His “Slovak wife” also turned out to be in fact of Hungarian descent:
he speaks only Hungarian with her, and their two daughters are both
registered as Hungarian and go to Hungarian school. Nevertheless,
both he and Božena Ebertová were genuinely proud and keen to share
a collective self-imagined construct that differentiated Komárno inhabitants, Slovaks and Hungarians, both from Hungarians from Hungary
(Komárom) and from inland Slovaks. That almost none of the young
Hungarian interviewees actually had any real personal relations within
the Slovak community (not even high-school friends) did not prevent
them from unanimously staking a claim on a philosophy of tolerance
and mutual respect with Komárno Slovaks – and vice versa.
Consequently and to inalize our point about the discrepancy between
the self-perception of Komárno Hungarians and the political usage of
the Slovak Hungarian issue at the state level, both Lajos Bártok (21year old student) and János Erdei (36-year old teacher) spontaneously
denounced an artiicial instrumentalization of the Hungarian minorities
question by Viktor Orbán in Budapest. They denounced in particular the
referendum on “dual citizenship” he orchestrated in Hungary in 2005 for
having little or no regard for, or even knowledge of, their actual situa-
114 Muriel Blaive and liBora oates-indruchová
tion and position.15 It is to be noted that this ambivalence of Hungary’s
“kin-state nationalism” with its diasporas taints its relationship not only
with the Slovak, but also with the Romanian, Ukrainian, and Serbian
Hungarian minorities (Waterbury, 2010).
conclusion
If we return to Sarcinelli’s deinition of symbolic politics as “a
publicly displayed deception or surrogate action that is used to detract
from actual political reality” (Sarcinelli, 2008), we see that Komárno
is a privileged ground for such attempts. Komárno Hungarians and
Komárno Slovaks are the instrument of nationalist and political issues
in current Slovak-Hungarian relations that have little or no relation to
their actual situation. Seen from Bratislava or Budapest, their daily
cohabitation might appear as dificult and tense, whereas the interviews dispel this impression: they might not be closely intertwined,
but they are not hostile to each other. Their mutual indifference comes
in sharp contrast to the staged ‘problematic’ value of Komárno on the
national scale.
Since national formation is a dynamic process, we come to the
conclusion that the Hungarian and Slovak population of Komárno
must be analyzed not as static entities but as communities in the
making – a process easily submitted to, and endangered by, external political pressures. Where Czechoslovak communist policies had
paciied, if not solved, the Hungarian question in Slovakia before
1989, post-communist politicians at the state level in Hungary and
Slovakia have been keen to play the nationalist card and to capitalize
with their respective public opinion on outbidding each other in terms
of national provocation.
15. This referendum, that took place in Hungary in 2005 with the support of Orbán’s
Fidesz right-wing party, proposed to grant Hungarian citizenship to all Hungarian
minorities living abroad. While Fidesz argued that it was a moral obligation for the
Hungarian homeland, and while it tried to mobilize the Hungarian public along
“patriotic” and demagogic lines, this attempt renewed tensions with all neighbouring countries. It was also criticized within Hungary for being unrealistic and threatening to bring about the immigration of some 800,000 new Hungarian citizens. In
the end, the referendum was approved by a majority but failed to pass due to insuficient participation. For a good summary of the issue, see: http://www.eurofound.
europa.eu/eiro/2005/01/inbrief/hu0501101n.htm
VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013
KoMárno: a flagship of syMBolic politics 115
Against the background of everyday ethnic cohabitation and societal
self-description in Komárno that we presented here, these politicians
have apparently substituted the fading contours of the physical border
after the fall of the Iron Curtain by a symbolic border of language and
nationality, using the town’s local issues for their own purposes. This
phenomenon is all too frequent in post-communist states; still, 24 years
after the demise of communist regimes in Central Europe, nine years
after both Hungary and Slovakia entered the European Union, and six
years after Schengen had erased the last traces of the physical border,
we cannot but wonder how long this discrepancy between center and
periphery, and this petty instrumentalization of the latter by the former,
will be allowed to last.
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