Balázs Kovács is an international relations researcher and an associate at the Roundtable of Hungarians in Slovakia, a minority rights advocacy group.
The ghost of history continues to haunt the societies of Central Europe.
While Ukraine is fully engaged in a war of national liberation against an imperial power hell-bent on denying the country’s right to determine its own destiny, Poland’s ruling party, now at the start of a reelection campaign, has once again revived its demand for reparations from Germany for the damages inflicted during World War II.
And then, there is the generally overlooked case of Slovakia.
Here, historically rooted injustices continue to rob citizens of their human rights, as recently demonstrated by the national land agency’s decision to deprive individuals of their private property based on their ethnic origin.
Over the last few years, the country has resumed a post-World War II legal process, the so-called Beneš Decrees, originally designed to confiscate all assets belonging to anyone who, at the time, identified as ethnic German or Hungarian — the two nationalities bearing the collective guilt for the ravages of war.
What’s even more appalling, however, is that the practice is currently being pursued amid the indifference of the European Union, which should be safeguarding citizens against such abuses.
Named after the wartime Czechoslovak president, the Beneš Decrees have remained part of both the Czech and Slovak legal order, even after these countries were admitted into the EU in 2004 — though officials at the time were adamant they carried no contemporary relevance.
But now, under the same pretext, the state is retroactively taking possession of hundreds of acres of privately owned land from its own citizens — entirely uncompensated.
Consider, for example, the case of descendants of a Hungarian smallholder with heritage located near the capital city of Bratislava. Due to a bureaucratic bungle, the land in question wasn’t confiscated back in the post-war years, and so continued in the family’s ownership. But when it was discovered that the land is located directly under the planned route of a new EU-funded highway, the state promptly set out to correct the “procedural omission,” the justification being that it had already been seized in principle, albeit not in practice.
Let there be no mistake: This is a gross assault on the principle of equal treatment under the law. And it exposes how the EU’s selective application of universal values undermines its credibility as a champion for human rights.
Let’s consider why the decrees were issued in the first place. At the end of the war — a time marked by unprecedented ethnic cleansing and population transfer — Germany’s defeat and the restoration of pre-war boundaries went hand in hand with the mass expulsion of now unwanted minorities and the arbitrary appropriation of their properties.
In Czechoslovakia, the largest affected group was that of the Sudeten Germans, 3 million of whom were all but expelled, a fate shared by some 76,000 Hungarians who soon found themselves removed to Hungary. The Beneš Decrees were adopted to establish the framework under which these individuals would be stripped of their citizenship, lands, homes, shops and businesses.
Meanwhile, minorities fortunate enough to avoid the fate of their brethren and remain were reduced to vulnerable groups, their long-term existence threatened by assimilation. One of the most notable among these groups is the community of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, which accounts for about 8 percent of the country’s population.
Today, post-war anti-minority politics continue to manifest in how governments across the political spectrum treat Slovakia’s minority populations. And though there have been genuine improvements, primarily through the adoption of European minority rights regimes, these foundations remain untouched, as the state continues to define itself along ethnonationalist lines that exclude other ethnic groups.
Rather than guaranteeing minority language rights and empowering these communities to remain culturally distinct, successive Slovak governments have long sought to sweep these issues under the rug. Over the course of the last decade, mainstream parties and media alike have created a narrative to alter perceptions, presenting the inequality of minority groups as a natural and, indeed, unalterable state of affairs. Meanwhile, minority political parties — which are supposed to represent groups whose voices aren’t otherwise heard in the political process — have all been portrayed as historically superseded.
Consequently, this persistent denial of equality to Hungarians and others, such as the Roma, has become the kind of question civilized people do not mention at the dinner table. But even by these standards, the recent cases of ethnically based retroactive land grabs are startling.
The lion’s share of the blame obviously falls on the government of Slovakia and on its unwillingness to face the dark chapters of its history. But it’s also true that these confiscations are enabled by the EU’s negligence, as it turns a blind eye to breaching of its rules.
Under the principles of the EU, present-day populations cannot be discriminated against based on an impression of their predecessors’ failings. And if the bloc tolerates the creation of second-class citizenships by its member countries, its virtues of inclusion and human rights will be exposed as hollow, at a time when the entire rules-based international order hangs in the balance.
If the EU is to retain the allegiance of its citizens, it needs to start taking its own founding principles seriously.
