Authors

Dirk Dalberg¹;  ¹ Institute of Political Science/Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia

Discussion

In Slovakia during the 1990s the processes of “national-state building” and “democratization” led to political and social cleavages, around which collective identities were formed. Collective identities denote the consciousness of belonging to a certain social and/or political group. They are formed both internally, through self-identification, and externally, through categorisation by others. External categorisation is sometimes described as "othering." This othering became particularly significant in the years from 1992/1994 to 1998, during the period of so-called Mečiarism. Those Slovaks who were sceptical about Slovak independence and about the Slovak Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar were verbally harassed as “bad” Slovaks. Most of them were public intellectuals, as Martin Milan Šimečka or Peter Zajac and others. The paper traces and analyses intellectual confrontation with Mečiarism. It examines the attitude of Slovak public intellectuals to (Slovak) nationalism and democracy during the Mečiar era in Slovakia. The critical arguments which were used by them when criticizing these developments in Slovakia in the 1990’s are confronted with the historical reality of this period and classified in terms of the history of ideas.