“Komárno, A Flagship of Symbolic Politics at the Slovak-Hungarian Border”, Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest, Vol. 44, 4/2013, p. 93-121.

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 significance 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 financially 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, first, 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 significance. 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 significant frame of reference” (Ibid.). The border situation in Komárno is part and parcel of the same “collapse”. Its significant 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; Krapfl, 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-defining 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 conflict in ethnic cohabitation) to pursue a specific 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 significance 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 significance of the border became a mirror to both communities’ self-perception. In the rest of this article, we will, first, 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 reflect 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 first legislative measure to define Slovak as the official 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 affiliation.

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 flirting 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 first 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 find in Komárno a large Hungarian-speaking audience available to debate Hungarians’ rights as a minority in Slovakia; Bratislava leaders find 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 traffic 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 definitely 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 identified 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 reflect 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 first 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 first 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 “reunified” 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 figure. 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 briefly 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 difficult 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 testifies: 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, flowers … [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 fight 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 defined at the national level.

104 Muriel Blaive and Libora Oates-Indruchová

political correctness on the part of the Hungarian community, but it also reflects 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 fled to London in October 1938, headed a provisional government, first 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 fields … 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-affirming 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 first 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 official 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 significant role). A deeper analytical investigation shows, however, that Komárno Hungarians have redefined 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 conflict 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 offices 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 selfdefined, 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 defined 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 defiance 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-definition” 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, artificial stability, are therefore clearly not ethnic but political. Komárno Hungarians and Hungary Beyond the “Hungarian nationalist” first 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 find 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 testified 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 find 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 finalize 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 artificial 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 definition 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 difficult 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 pacified, 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 insufficient 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.

Bibliography Bakker Edwin (1998), “Growing Isolation: Political and Ethnic Tensions in the Slovak Republic”, Helsinki Monitor, Vol.9, n°1, pp.23-36. Berdahl Daphne (1999), Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland, Berkeley: U of California Press. Blaive Muriel (2009), “České Velenice, eine Stadt an der Grenze zu Österreich”, in Muriel Blaive & Berthold Molden, Grenzenfälle: Österreichische und tschechische Erfahrungen am Eisener Vorhang, N.p.: Bibliothek der Provinz, pp.137-267. Blaive Muriel (2007 ), “De la démocratie tchèque et des ‘décrets Beneš’”, in Georges Mink & Laure Neumayer (Eds), L’Europe et ses passés douloureux..., Paris: La Découverte, pp.118-127. Blaive Muriel (2005), Une déstalinisation manquée: Tchécoslovaquie 1956, Bruxelles: Complexe.

116 Muriel Blaive and Libora Oates-Indruchová

Blaive Muriel & Mink Georges, eds. (2003), Benešovy dekrety: Budoucnost Evropy a vyrovnávání se s minulostí, Prague: Dokořán. Blaive Muriel & Molden Berthold (2009), Grenzenfälle: Österreichische und tschechische Efahrungen am Eisener Vorhang, n.p.: Bibliothek der Provinz. Blaive Muriel, Oates-Indruchová Libora & Vajda Barnabás (2011), “Komárno-Komárom: A Bridge Between Slovakia and Hungary?”, Final report on The “Long European Post War Period” in Communicative Memories and (Trans)National Public Spheres oral history research project, conducted in the border towns of Komárno (Slovakia) and Komárom (Hungary), Vienna: Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres, June. Blühdorn Ingolfur (2007), “Sustaining the Unsustainable: Symbolic Politics and the Politics of Simulation”, Environmental Politics, Vol.16, n°2, pp.251-275. Bottoni Stefano (2010), “Komárom/Komárno: Offizielle und inoffizielle Beziehungen in einer ungarisch-slowakischen Zwillingsstadt (1960-1985)“, in Włodzimierz Borodziej, Jerzy Kochanowski & Joachim von Puttkamer (Eds.), “Schleichwege“: Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989, Cologne: Böhlau, pp.67-89. Daftary Farimah & Gál Kinga (2003), “The 1999 Slovak Minority Language Law: Internal or External Politics?”, in Farimah Daftary & Francois Grin (Eds.), Nation-Building, Ethnicity and Language Politics in Transition Countries, Budapest: Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative, Open Society Institute, pp.31-71. Edelman Murray (1964), The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Urbana, IL: U of Illinois Press. Eplényi Kata (2009), The Language Rights of Hungarian Communities in Slovakia and Romania: The Impacts and Perspectives of EU-Membership, Master of Arts Thesis, Central European University, Budapest.

VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013

Komárno: A flagship of symbolic politics 117

Eyal Gil (2003), The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Haughton Tim (2002), “Vladimír Mečiar and His Role in the 19941998 Slovak Coalition Government”, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol.54, n°8 (December), pp.1319-1338. Hurd Madeleine, ed. (2006), Borderland Identitities: Territory and Belonging in North, Central and East Europe, Vol. 8: “The Centre for Baltic and East European Studies”, Soedertoern: U College. Irmanová Eva (2005), Maďarská menšina na Slovensku a její místo v zahraniční politice Slovenska a Maďarska po roce 1989 (The Hungarian Minority in Slovakia and its Place in the Foreign Policy of Slovakia and Hungary after 1989), Ústí nad Labem: albis international. Kecskés László & Hegedűs Béla (1975), Komárom utcanévadói, műemlékei és emlékművei (Street, Monument and Memorial Names in Komarno), Kománo: Városi Tanács. Kovács Éva (2000), “Határváltó diskurzusok: Komárom, 1918-22, 1938” (Border Exchange Discourses), in Nándor Bárdi (Ed.), Konfliktusok és kezelésűk Kozép-Europában (Conflicts and their Management in Central Europe), Budapest: Teleki L.  Alapítvány, pp.181-212. Print. Kovács Éva (2001), “Alteritás és identitás: A két világháború közötti határtérségek, különös tekintettel a szlovák-magyar határra” (Alterity and Identity: Border Regions in the Interwar Period, Particularly the Slovak-Hungarian Border), in Károly Tóth (Ed.), Ezredforduló (Millenium), Dunaszerdahely: Fórum Társadalomtudományi Intézet, Lilium Aurum, pp.126-39. Kovács Éva (2003), “A házassági piac alakulása Komáromban (19001940)” (Evolution of Marriages in Komarno [1900-1940]), in Zsolt K. Horváth, András Lugosi & Ferenc Sohajda (Eds.), Léptékváltó társadalomtörténet (Changing Scale in Social History), Budapest: Hermész kör and Osiris, 366-394.

Kovács Tamás (2007), “Komárom Megye” (The District of Komarom), in Randolph L. Braham (Ed.), A Holocaust földrajzi enciklopédiája (The Holocaust Geographic Encyclopedia), Budapest: Park, pp.616-34. Krapfl James (2009), Revolúcia s  ľudskou tvárou: Politika, kultúra a spoločenstvo v Československu po 17. novembri 1989 (Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture and Society in Czechoslovakia after 17 November 1989), Bratislava: Kalligram. Krivý Vladimír (1997), “49 Städte: Wandel und Kontinuität”, in Elena Mannová (Ed.), Bürgertum und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in der Slowakei 1900-1989, Bratislava: AEP, pp.37-59. Lanstyák István & Gisella Szabómihály (2009), “Hungarian in Slovakia: Language Management in a Bilingual Minority Community”, in Jiří Nekvapil & Tamah Sherman (Eds), Language Management in Contact Situations: Perspectives from Three Continents, Vol.1, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp.49-74. Lévai Csaba (2006), “The Hungarian Minority in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War”, in Steven G.Ellis, Guðmundur Hálfdanarson and Ann Katherine Isaacs (Eds), Citizenship in Historical Perspective Pisa: Edizioni Plus – Pisa UP, pp.305-315. Lukács László (2001), “Städte an beiden Ufern der Donau in den historischen Komitaten Komárom und Esztergom”, in Eugen Scherer, Gottfried Stangler & Ilona Slawinski (Eds), Niederösterreich Kultur. Kulturparks. Tagungen 2001, St. Pölten: Amt der NÖ Landesregierung, Abt. Landesamtsdirektion/Europareferat, pp.41-56. Mácza Mihály (1992), Komárom: torténelmi séták a városban (Komarno: Walks in the Town), Bratislava: Madách. Mälksoo Maria (2010), The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries, Londres, New York: Routledge. Mälksoo Maria (2009), “The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol.15, n°4, pp.653-680. Mannová Elena (2009), “Southern Slovakia as an Imagined Territory”, in Steven G.Ellis & Raingard Esser (Eds. ), Frontiers, Regions and Identities in Europe, Pisa: Plus-Pisa UP, pp.185-204.

Komárno: A flagship of symbolic politics 119

Mannová Elena (2002), “Von Nationalhelden zum Europa-Platz: Inszenierungen des kollektiven Gedächtnisses in Komárno an der slowakisch-ungarischen Grenze“, in Moritz Csáky & Klaus Zeyringer (Eds.), Inszenierungen des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Eigenbilder, Fremdbilder, Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, pp.110-131. Mannová Elena (2001), “Konštrukcia menšinovej identity v mestskom prostredí: Maďari v Komárne a Lučenci (1918-1938)” (Construction of Minority Identity in an Urban Environment: Hungarians in Komarno and Lucence), in Peter Salner & Daniel Luther (Eds.), Etnicita a mesto: Etnicita ako faktor polarizácie mestského spoločenstva v 20. Storočí, (Ethnicity and Town: Ethnicity as a Polarization Factor of Urban Society in 20th Century), Bratislava: Ústav etnológie SAV, pp.111-140. Print. Mannová Elena (2000), “‘...aber jetzt ist er ein guter Slowake’: Varianten nationaler Identität im Vereinswesen zweier südslowakischer Kleinstädte. 1918-1938”, in Peter Haslinger (Ed.), Regionale und nationale Identitäten, Würzburg: ERGON, pp.215-225. Mark James (2010), The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe, New Haven: Yale UP. Michela Miroslav (2005), “Slovakia – Hungary: South-Slovakian Border Region.” In Alfred Lang, Nicole Ehlers & Lenny van Kempen (Eds.), Education across Borders: Adult Education in European Border Regions, Eisenstadt: Burgenländische Forschungsgesellschaft / Research Society Burgenland, pp.74-80. Paul Ellen L. (2003), “Perception vs. Reality: Slovak Views of the Hungarian Minority in Slovakia”, Nationalities Papers, Vol.31, n°4, pp.485-493. Sahlins Peter (1989), Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, Berkeley: U of California Press. Sarcinelli Ulrich (2008), “Symbolic Politics”, in Wolfgang Donsbach (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication, n.p.: Blackwell; http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode? id=g9781405131995_yr2013_chunk_g978140513199524_ss132-1

120 Muriel Blaive and Libora Oates-Indruchová

Schaefer Sagi (2012), “Re-Creation--Iron Curtain Tourism and the production of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Cold War Germany”, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, n°40, pp.116-131. Sheffer Edith (2011), Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain, Oxford: Oxford UP. Szabolcs Szita (2002), A komáromi deportálás 1944 őszén (The Deportations from Komarom to the East in 1944), Budapest: Magyar Auschwitz Alapítvány – Holocaust Dokumentációs Központ. Szarka László (2004), “Border Region or Contact Zone: Ethnic and Ethno-Social Processes in Small Language and State Border”, in Davide Torsello & Melinda Pappová (Ed.), Social Networks in Movement: Time, Interaction and Interethnic Spaces in Central Eastern Europe, Vol.8, Šamorín: Forum Minority Research Institut, pp.141-153. Vajda Barnabáš, ed. (2011), Államhatár és identitás – Komárom/ Komárno (State Border and Identity), Monographiae Comaromienses 3, Komárom: Selye János Egyetem Tanárképző Kara. Waterbury Myra A. (2010), Between State and Nation: Diaspora Politics and Kin-State Nationalism in Hungary, New York : Palgrave Macmillan. Press Articles Barát Andrej (2010), “Premiér odhalil v Komárne sochu Cyrila a Metoda” (Prime Minister Unveiled a Statue of Cyril and Methodius in Komarno), Správy.Pravda.sk, 4 July; http://spravy.pravda.sk/ domace/clanok/166768-premier-odhalil-v-komarne-sochu-cyrila-ametoda/. Moravčík Michal (2011), “Pamätníková prax v meste Komárno. Rozhovor s Mihálym Máczom” (Memorial Practices in the Town of Komarno. Interview with Mihaly Macz), jeToTak.sk, 12 February; http://www.jetotak.sk/autonomna-zona/pamatnikova-prax-v-mestekomarno Pravda.sk (2009a) “Sólyom zastal na hranici, slovenská strana mu odoprela vstup”, (Solyon remained at the Border, Slovaks Forbade Him

VOLUME 44, DÉCEMBRE 2013

Komárno: A flagship of symbolic politics 121

Entry), 21 August; http://spravy.pravda.sk/domace/clanok/163073solyom-zastal-na-hranici-slovenska-strana-mu-odoprela-vstup/ Pravda.sk (2009b), “Sólyom: Do Komárna prídem” (Solyom: He Will Come to Komarno), 21 August; http://spravy.pravda.sk/domace/ clanok/163063-solyom-do-komarna-pridem/ Santa Martin & Than Krisztina (2008), “Slovakia and Hungary Fail to Resolve Tensions,” Reuters, UK edition, 15 November; http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/11/15/uk-slovakia-hungaryidUKTRE4AE2OU20081115 SME (2007), “Sólyom navštiví Komárno, bude rokovať aj s predstaviteľmi SMK” (Solyom Will Visit Komarno, He Will Talk to the Representatives of SMK), 1 October; http://www.sme. sk/c/3513237/solyom-navstivi-komarno-bude-rokovat-aj-s-predstavitelmi-smk.html