T homas L orman . The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

A week after the Munich Agreement, leaders of the Slovak People’s Party seized control of the semi-autonomous government in Slovakia. Months later, on March 14, 1939, as Nazi troops prepared to invade the mostly Czech-inhabited regions of rump Czecho-Slovakia, the party’s leaders declared Slovak independence to the sound of ringing church bells across the country. Thomas Lorman’s impressive book begins and concludes with this moment, asking not about the compromises and horrors that followed but rather how the Slovak People’s Party came to be and how it eventually found itself in a position to wield such enormous power. The book is also, importantly, about the party’s surprisingly consistent ideology, which combined politicized Catholicism with autonomist nationalism. Lorman traces these stories back to the nineteenth century, when the Slovak highlands sat within the Hungarian half of the Habsburg dual monarchy. This long durée approach to the history of the Slovak People’s...

Czech · Economic history · Ideology · Independence (probability theory) · Monarchy · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Slovak · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies