History
Slavic tribes wandered west into what would become Slovakia around the 5th century; by the 9th, the territory was part of the short-lived Great Moravian Empire. Subsequently the Magyars (Hungarians) moved in next door and laid claim to the whole territory for the next 800 or so years.
In the 19th century Slovak intellectuals cultivated ties with the Czechs, and after WWI took the nation into the united Czechoslovakia. The day before Hitler’s troops invaded Czech territory in March 1939, a fascist puppet state set up the first independent Slovakia as a German ally. It was not a populist move, however, and in August 1944 Slovak partisans instigated the ill-fated Slovak National Uprising (Slovenské Národné Povstanie, or SNP), inspiring countless future street names.
After the communist takeover in 1948, power was again centralised in Prague until the 1989 Velvet Revolution brought down the curtains on communism. The 1992 elections saw Vladimír Mečiar and the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) come to power, bringing with them antidemocratic laws, discrimination and nationalism. By July 1992 the parliament had voted to declare sovereignty and the Czechoslovak federation dissolved peacefully on 1 January 1993. In 1998 a new right-leaning prime minister, Mikuláš Dzurinda, launched a policy of economic and social reforms that got Slovakia into NATO and the EU by May 2004.
Elections in 2006 brought to power parties that have at times been antireform. The coalition is headed by Prime Minister Robert Fico of Smer, a left-wing party, but also includes Mečiar’s isolationist HZDS. For now, Fico is promising to keep Slovakia on track to Euro conversion in 2009. Time will tell which direction the government decides to go.
