Milan Ducháček
The Czechoslovak nation as an ideal and a desire
This study attempts to point out several paradoxes which during the last four decades before the Great War gave rise to the Czech idea of the ‘Slovaks’ and ‘Slovakia’. The initial thesis is that the idea of a ‘Czechoslovak nation’, adopted by a considerable proportion of Czech society in the decades leading up to the Great War, was to a large extent a self-mystification, but that at the same time it formed a logical part of their collective imagination, basically independent of the Upper Hungarian reality and the changing face of modern Slovak society. Although thanks to the Hlasists and the activities of Czechoslovak Unity before the war Czech-Slovak contacts intensified, the majority population did not reflect this change. After the declaration of an independent Czechoslovakia the deep-rooted stereotypical image of a ‘poor but hospitable people beneath the Tatra mountains’, which was not actually based on authentic experience, became one of the sources of communication difficulties between the Czech and Slovak societies.
Czechoslovak nation – Slovakophilism – Karel Kálal (1860–1930)
design by Bedřich Vémola
