Slovakia on the Road to Independence: An American Diplomat’s Eyewitness Account (review)

Paul Hacker, who was trained in political science at Columbia University by Zbigniew Brzezinski, found a career at the U.S. Department of State. One of his more interesting postings was as consul, then as consul-general, and finally as chargé d’affaires in the Slovak capital of Bratislava from October 1990 to July 1993. This book consists of his reminiscences of those heady days, when Slovakia moved from its former subjugation by the Communist regime to a capitalist and democratic society and, ultimately, to full independence.

The book offers no overall theme. Instead, we get glimpses of Hacker’s difficulties in reopening the U.S. consulate in Bratislava in 1990 (it had been closed since 1950), including his initial need to rely on the U.S. embassy in Vienna to send his dispatches first to Prague and then to Washington; the bugging of the embassy by persons unknown in the fall of 1992; his problems with Shirley Temple Black, the U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia; his meetings with Vladimír Mečiar, who dominated Slovak politics during Hacker’s tenure and beyond; and his interpretation of various other aspects of Slovak political life, such as Slovak-Czech relations, Slovak-Magyar relations, and Slovak-Jewish relations. He ends on a pessimistic note with a postscript on the sixteen years following Slovak independence in 1993. Had Hacker written his book after the June 2010 victory of the center-right coalition led by Iveta Radičová over the leftist-nationalist coalition led by Robert Fico, he might have concluded on a happier note. The book also contains photographs of some of his activities and meetings with various personalities in Slovakia, as well as an appendix of Slovak leaders, tables of election results, transcripts of cables sent to Washington, a short bibliography, and index.

Because Hacker is not a historian, the book contains both obvious and not-so-obvious errors. Among the obvious ones are the wrong dates for the Pittsburgh Agreement (18 May instead of 31 May 1918) and 28 October instead of 18 October for Tomáš Masaryk’s declaration of Czechoslovak independence in Philadelphia in the same year (the latter error is found in the foreword by the late Senator Claiborne Pell; p. ix). On two occasions Hacker mistakenly locates the south-central Slovak city of Lučenec in eastern Slovakia (pp. 80 and 146). He also refers to Ján Cardinal Korec as “the primate of Slovakia” (p. 95) when that honor belonged to Archbishop Ján Sokol of Trnava. The caption of the lower photograph on p. 82, featuring Senator Pell and Daniel Tanzone, the president of the Slovak League of America, is botched. The not-so-obvious errors pertain to both his and Pell’s references to the administration of the first Slovak Republic (1939–1945) as that of President Jozef Tiso, when it was actually that of Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka (pp. ix, 107). In these days of “nuanced” history, one should be able to distinguish between the ceremonial head of state and the de facto head of government.

Although this is an interesting book, it by no means captures the complexity of Slovak politics and society in the last two decades (or even earlier). Fortunately, such a work will soon be published: Juraj Hocman’s Slovakia from the Downfall of Communism to Its Accession into the European Union, 1989–2004: The Re-Emergence of Political Parties and Democratic Institutions (Bern: Peter Lang, forthcoming).