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212 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
The union of the Slovaks with the Czechs, as units of a single state, was based upon certain assumptions. First, the two were believed to be so closely akin as to be one people, and that the Slovaks were only a branch of Czechoslovaks. Second, the two spoke a single ‘Czechoslovak’ language. Third, there was no separate Slovak national consciousness. Nobody examined these assumptions at the time, because the Slovaks themselves desired this union, expressing their wish in 1918 by formal declaration of their representatives at the Peace Conference. This was a superficial and hasty view of the matter. As Prof. Macartney* points out.
“. . . . ‘the central political fact which emerges from the consideration of this history (of the relations between the Czechs and Slovaks) for the purposes of the present age is the final crystallization of a Slovak national consciousness. . . . .’ The genuine and uncompromising believers in a single indivisible Czechoslovak language and people were certainly never so large, at least in Slovakia, as they were made to appear. Today they have dwindled to a mere handful, under the influence of actual experience of the considerable differences which exist between the Czechs and the Slovaks. At present Slovak is in practice recognized by the Czechs themselves as the official language of Solvakia. The political and national resistance has been no less tenacious, and to-day the name of ‘Czechoslovakia’ is practically confined to official documents and to literature issued for the benefit of foreigners. During many weeks in the country I only remember hearing one person use the term for herself; this was a half-German, half-Hungarian girl, who used it in a purely political sense, meaning that she thought irridentism futile. No Czech and no Slovak feels or calls himself, when speaking naturally, anything but a Czech or a Slovak as the case may be.”
This national consciousness of the Slovaks, which was always alive, began to burst forth on seeing that the Sudeten Germans had made certain demands on Czechoslovakia for autonomy. The Germans sought to achieve their objective by the application of gangster morality to international politics, saying “ Give us what we ask or we shall burst up your shop.” The Slovaks followed suit by making their demands for autonomy but with a different face. They did not resort to gangster methods but modulated their demands to autonomy only. They had eschwed all idea of
- C. A. Macartney— Hungary and Her Successors (Oxford), 1937, p. 136.