Thomas Lorman,The Making of the Slovak People’s Party: Religion,Nationalism and the Culture War in Early 20th-Century Europe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Miloslav Szabó, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia

The historiography of the Slovak People’s Party (SPP) was for decades concerned with the role that nationalism had played in its rise to power on the eve of World War II. Much less attention has been paid to the second ideological pillar of the Slovak ‘populists’: political Catholicism. Thomas Lorman aims to fill this research lacuna by focusing in particular on the beginnings of the SPP in the context of the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary around 1900, dedicating four of the six chapters of his monograph to this early history. Lorman uncovers the roots of Slovak ‘populism’ in the obsession of Hungarian Catholics with ‘liberalism’ and its alleged or real threat to the centuries-old privileges of the Catholic Church. The Hungarian version of this ‘culture war’ waged between proponents of conservative Catholicism and the liberal Enlightenment or Emancipation appears to have been weak and rather symbolic, but, as Lorman puts it, ‘symbolism mattered’ (11). Given the specific nature of Hungarian liberalism, which merged notions of a noble medieval Hungarian Nation with modern ethnic ‘Magyar’ exclusiveness and eventually ‘degenerated into crude chauvinism and blatant self-interest’ (13), it is not surprising that Slovak nationalists within the ranks of the pan-Hungarian Catholic People’s Party (CPP) finally broke with it and established the SPP in 1905.

Nevertheless, Slovak ‘populists’, we are told, were eager to cultivate the heritage of the Hungarian culture wars. According to Lorman, the SPP ‘over the forty years of its existence remained, in essence, an anti-liberal party driven by the same anger … at centralization, magyarization, industrialization, urbanization, mass emigration, a supposed moral collapse and the growth and success of the Jewish community’ (13 and 49). When Upper Hungary with the majority of the Slovak-speaking population became part of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, the SPP renewed its propaganda against – now Czech – anti-clericalism, liberalism, ‘Prague-centralism’ and what usually was distorted as Czechification and Czech-Jewish or ‘Judeo-Bolshevist’ symbiosis and even ‘oppression’. In the late 1930s, then, this inherent ‘populist’ radicalism more or less easily overlapped with fascist tendencies in Slovakia and abroad. Still, Lorman considers neither the SPP as such nor the regime of the Slovak State, a Nazi satellite between 1939 and 1945, to be genuinely fascist. With regard to the SPP:

the chief characteristic of its radicalism, its anti-Semitism, its authoritarianism, its disdain for democracy, and even its cult of youth were already evident prior to 1918. [The] radicalization of the party, which accelerated in the 1930s, placed it on a path to fascism even though it never reached that destination. (187–8)

Such an insistence on continuities between the fin-de-siècle culture wars in the Kingdom of Hungary and the fascist temptations of Slovak ‘populists’ in Nazi Europe notwithstanding, Lorman’s book has the merit of stressing the essential role played by Catholic activism in the development of Slovak ‘populism’. Lorman believes that Slovak Catholic banks, clubs, cooperatives, and – last but not least – sodalities were ‘a core reason why the SL'S [SPP] transformed itself into a genuine mass party with the introduction of universal suffrage’ after 1918 (101). What he seems not to take into account, however, is the ambiguity of populism, which Ernesto Laclau views primarily as emancipatory endeavours in favour of marginalized plebs – in contrast to the ‘ethno-populist’s’ search for the ‘other’ outside of the community of ‘people’. In view of this, it would have been interesting to reflect on the changing significance of anti-Semitism and clericalism in the continued ‘populist’ culture wars.

Particularly during the genuinely populist phase between 1905 and 1907, when the SPP succeeded in uniting all factions of the Slovak national movement – that is Catholic, Protestant and secular – anti-Semitic and clerical propaganda had to take a back seat to claims, however vague, to national and social justice for the ‘Slovak people’. Even the ‘purged’ SPP immediately before and during World War I was far less anti-Semitic than the CPP, its predecessor and later competitor. Considering that the ideology of Christian (albeit not only Catholic) Nationalism prevailed in Hungary after 1914, the alleged continuity of the Slovak culture wars until 1939 appears a much less unique phenomenon. In light of this and given the weakness of the SPP prior to 1918, the rebirth of the Slovak culture wars in interwar and fascist Europe may owe a decisive part of its origins to the legacy of the pan-Hungarian (Hungarus) politicization of Catholicism around 1900, which should not be confused with any vague notions of ‘populism’.

Even the first promoter of fascism within the ranks of the SPP, Vojtech Tuka, was an heir to this general politicization of Catholicism. As Anton Hruboň persuasively argues, Tuka’s indoctrination of the Rodobrana, a paramilitary unit on the margins of the SPP, must be regarded as a sort of ‘clerical fascism’ due to his efforts to merge Catholic symbols and rituals of blood with the fascist myth of martyrdom and national rebirth. Tuka’s rival, the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, who also entered the SPP only after World War I, identified himself later, after he had become president and official Slovak Leader, as a ‘Christian-National Socialist’. This mere juxtaposition of Christian and National Socialism may be seen as an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, but it cannot mask the fact that both Tuka and Tiso tended towards ‘clerical fascism’, understood here as the ‘“fascistisation” of a conservative-authoritarian-religious platform from within/above’ (Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism [2009], 245). The legacy of the fin-de-siècle culture wars constituted this ‘platform’. Its ‘fascistisation’, however, was difficult to see prior to 1918.