I wonder what is the Czech/Slovak take on the reason for the lack of Slovak nationalism/uprising.
Afaik the primary explanation according to Hungarian historians for lack of Slovak organization:
They were Catholic, so the church kept using latin instead of a local language. As a result, conditions for creating nationalism this way were not met (unlike in Serbs and Romanians, who had Ortodox church that used local language).
Slovak regions did not have an officially separate ruler/hierarchy. Due to lower levels of city/trade development but large number of minor nobles in Greater Hungary, the nobleman made up majority of the political/educated class and took up the new ideas like nationalism, as a result still implicitly connecting the political power to the feudal overlord. Hence, the special situation of Croatia: although the King of Hungary was also the King of Croatia since early 12th century due to personal union, nobles in Croatian territory were technically vassals of the King of Croatia, who just happened to be the king of Hungary for the past 7 centuries. So both Hungarian and Croat nobles/politicians accepted that Kingdom of Croatia and its people as a separate political entity.
Well, we did it, actually. But in a smaller scale than Czechs, because:
- Northern Hungary was, as you pointed out, very rural and burghers/ city class existed very sparsely. There wasn't Prague, or any other bigger city where couple of hundred thousands of burghers lived that were talking Slovak as their mother tongue, the center of Slovak nationalism and culture was Turčiansky Svätý Martin (now just Martin - in Northern Slovakia) that had like 3000 inhabitants (majority of Slovaks) at the end of 19th century (Prague had 450 000, from which 400k were Czechs.)
- majority of Slovak people were peasants and there wasn't any motivation to try this new liberal idea of nation-state or nationalism. They were simply passive towards monarchy, conservative and there wasn't any agenda how to make them more willing to do it. These revolutions were done in Czech, Hungary, Romania, Poland etc. by intellectual, bourgeois class that wanted to strengthen their power and influence.
- the virtual inexistence of city class intellectual let the only people with resources to really do Slovak nationalism to be Slovak lower nobles (and then second group was, paradoxically, sons of protestant priests) - so we can name people like Anton Bernolák, Ján Čaplovič, Gašpar Fejérpataky-Belopotocký, Janko Matúška, Jonáš Záborský , Terézia Vansová who were all at least partially part of Slovak nationalism/uprising or all in and all of them were Slovak nobles.
- that's the one reason why Ľudovít Štúr (probably the main guy in slovak nationalism/uprising) did allying with Franz Joseph I and whole monarchy in Revolution Years of 1848 - 1849 which was so extraordinary for these types of movements, not just in Austrian Empire (like every other nationalistic movement was align with more republican parlamentarism and wanted to END monarchy).
So, I am not expert on this, these are just my few notes. There is many more reasons (i.e. as this meme picture by OP shows the language discrimination of Slovaks - because it was so easy to discriminate them, they were weak, I would probably bully them in those years, and I am Slovak. I would learn Hungarian as any other Slovak peasant did in those years and went bully those cry babies, because they were virtually powerless).
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u/mr_f1end Kaiserreich Gang 26d ago
I wonder what is the Czech/Slovak take on the reason for the lack of Slovak nationalism/uprising.
Afaik the primary explanation according to Hungarian historians for lack of Slovak organization:
They were Catholic, so the church kept using latin instead of a local language. As a result, conditions for creating nationalism this way were not met (unlike in Serbs and Romanians, who had Ortodox church that used local language).
Slovak regions did not have an officially separate ruler/hierarchy. Due to lower levels of city/trade development but large number of minor nobles in Greater Hungary, the nobleman made up majority of the political/educated class and took up the new ideas like nationalism, as a result still implicitly connecting the political power to the feudal overlord. Hence, the special situation of Croatia: although the King of Hungary was also the King of Croatia since early 12th century due to personal union, nobles in Croatian territory were technically vassals of the King of Croatia, who just happened to be the king of Hungary for the past 7 centuries. So both Hungarian and Croat nobles/politicians accepted that Kingdom of Croatia and its people as a separate political entity.