The Slovaks lived under Hungarian rule for centuries, with no clear sense of political separateness, preserving Slovak as their spoken language, but using Czech as their written language. In the last decades of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries, the efforts made by clerical intellectuals to develop a language more closely attuned to Slovak needs led to the rise of Slovak nationalism. The Slovak National Awakening describes the three major stages in the development of national consciousness. In the 1780s Catholic intellectuals began to write in the vernacular; a Catholic priest, Bernolàk, produced a Slovak grammar and dictionary and an influential treatise in defence of Slovak as a language separate from Czech. However, while Slovak ethnic distinctness was being asserted, the sense of belonging to the Hungarian nation was not questioned. The next steps were taken by the Protestant intelligentsia, who had been pro-Czech since the Reformation. Influenced by German concepts of linguistic nationalism, they began to assert Slovak cultural and linguistic separateness, but still within the political framework of the Hungarian State. The third stage in the Slovak Awakening came in the mid-1840s when a group of young Protestant intellectuals, led by L’udovít Štúr, rejected their predecessors’ ‘Czechoslovakism’ and advocated a Slovak language and a Slovak nationality. In 1851, the Catholic Bernolákites and the Protestant Štúrites were able to agree on the language that became the basis of modern Slovak. This study of the relation between language and nationalism will appeal to specialists in European history and will be of interest for the light it throws on modern separatists and anti-imperialist movements.

The Slovak Dilemma is a case-study in nationalism. Accepting the view that the four and a half million Slovaks who inhabit the eastern part of Czechoslovakia are a separate Slav ethnic group, Dr Steiner describes their position in Czechoslovak history, their role in political life, the extraordinary persistence and continuing frustration of their national aspirations. After a brief survey of the history of the Slovaks under Hungarian rule, Dr Steiner examines their position in the democratic Czechoslovak Republic which was established in 1918. He analyses the causes of Slovak discontent and shows that although the new constitution granted full expression to Slovak culture, it limited complete development of Slovak national rights. Nevertheless he suggests that Slovak separatism played little part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and that the real attitude of the people towards Hitler's puppet Slovak State was eloquently expressed in their tragic rising against it in August 1944.

67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.

Winner of the BASEES George Blazyca Prize In 1945, just six years after coming to power, the Slovak People's Party (SLS) was disbanded as a 'criminal organisation' and its leader - Jozef Tiso - hanged for treason. What made it possible for the SLS, initially founded in 1905 by priests to represent the Catholic Slovak minority residing in the north of the Kingdom of Hungary, to form an openly pro-Nazi government in 1939? And what put Slovakia on the path to a 'fascism' that would see more than 45,000 Jews deported to their deaths in 1942? To answer these questions, Thomas Lorman draws on more than a decade's research in archives across the region in Hungarian, Slovak and Latin, and studies the party's formative years in depth for the first time in English. Lorman examines the various strands which fused to form the party and its popularity, including a complex and nebulous nationalism, Catholicism and a resounding mistrust of liberalism and 'modernity'. The Making of the Slovak People's Party is a vital and timely study of the genesis and success of far-right movements that will be essential reading for all scholars working on 20th-century Eastern European history, nationalism and the interplay of religion and politics.

National identities and nationalism, especially in the European context have aroused lots of current interest among scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines, and the topic most certainly will continue to attract further attention also in the future. A great number of the studies dealing with national identities have emphasized the long time span and the role of the national intelligentsia in the evolution of a national identity. This study uses another approach by underlining the short time span and a number of practical issues that contributed to the strengthening of the national identity of the Slovaks during the first two years following the independence of Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, the conflicting interests of the states of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland and the ethnic groups in Slovakia at that time have been given special attention. The study also aims to help us understand why it was initially so difficult for the Slovaks to agree with the idea of the one and united Czechoslovak nation.

Ultimately, he argues, the Utraquist legacy and its transmission by the Awakeners contributed to democratic vigor in twentieth-century Czechoslovakia.