Foreigners like it here because they do not have high expectations

If you had to describe 30 years of Slovakia in one aphorism, what would it be?

I have the feeling that the best aphorist in Slovakia is Tomáš Janovic. I would use one of his aphorisms, which is particularly close to my heart. And that is: “If only they stole while creating something, but they steal while stealing.” I don’t think I could describe it better than Janovic.

Slovakia was created by the dissolution of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic in January 1993, based on a political agreement between the then prime ministers, Vladimír Mečiar and Václav Klaus. According to polls, the majority of Czechs and Slovaks were against the dissolution, even though this is no longer the case today. At that time, how did people express their disagreement with the fact that politicians had ignored their opinions?

The sociologists who dealt with this created a beautiful formulation: an independent republic was born not from the will of the nation, nor against its will, but outside its will. When people were asked whether the federation should remain, most people said yes. The next question was whether they thought the federation would eventually split. Most people said yes. In Slovakia, it is as if we live in the knowledge that we have a majority opinion, but our opinion does not matter much because those who decide will decide without us, for us, about us. And that is a typical learned Slovak attitude: that although we imagine things one way, we know that they will turn out differently because we are not the ones who decide on them.

Why is that so?

I feel that the learned helplessness, as sociologist Martin Bútora defines it for example, is a strong constitutive characteristic of Slovaks. But to say something positive, Slovaks have experienced ups and downs. One of the biggest upswings we were capable of as a nation was the parliamentary elections in 1998 [which ended Mečiar’s semi-authoritarian rule]. I call it the Slovak November, because November 1989 [the Velvet Revolution] took place in Prague, Bratislava and several big cities and was completed in a few weeks, but the 1998 elections were our work. Nobody brought them to us from outside. We ourselves mobilised as voters, as citizens, because we knew that we did not want to let it go where it was going. Then, 84.24 percent of the people cast their vote in the elections. I consider it to be the absolute pinnacle of civic engagement in Slovakia because it has never been repeated, that 84.24 percent of people would come to vote and decide on something that depends only on them. And most of those people gave the country a chance. So, even though we tend to succumb so easily to a state in which we think we cannot influence many things, there are stellar moments in Slovak history where, fortunately, this was not confirmed.

In an op-ed column in September 1992 published by The New York Times, Czech-British correspondent Henry Brandon wrote: “Mr. Klaus got what he wanted [Czech independence] while Mr. Mečiar’s only way out was to capitulate – to accept the division of the state.” Does this mean that Mečiar is not the father of the Slovak nation?

Had the Czechs not wanted division, I am not saying that we would not have split, but we certainly would not have split so quickly. Klaus was a rather rigid economist. He understood a federation in the sense that he had two healthy [corporate] divisions, Bohemia and Moravia, and one division that was lagging behind and he did not see it as too promising. His motivation was to hand this division over to its management. Mečiar was not someone who saw the creation of an independent Slovak Republic as his life’s goal. He was and is a political opportunist. While he was prime minister, he was a federalist. Then in 1991 his government fell, he changed his rhetoric, and offered people a referendum on changing the system of government, which was total stupidity, just to win the next election. In the end, he was elected by people who were in favour of the federation, a unitary state, or even a confederation. And he won the election, but then he ran into Klaus, from whom he wanted more resources for Slovakia. But Klaus had a condition and said: either a functional federation or two separate countries. Even though Mečiar complained that the Czechs were pushing the Slovaks into a unitary state, he saw that he really had no choice but to accept the idea of ​​the unitary state in order to stay in the game. In 1993, he raised the flag of an independent country and described himself as the father of Slovakia, but basically it was not his initiative. He just adapted.

Is Klaus then the father of the Slovak nation?

I believe that the search for the father of the nation in the 20th century is already, I would say, out of season. We are adults now. We have gone through some development. We do not need a father so much any more.

How did politicians elsewhere in the world view the division of Czechoslovakia?

Above all, they were very afraid, because they saw what was happening in Yugoslavia. They were afraid that the same thing would have happened between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. And when they saw that nothing like that was happening, that we broke up based on an agreement, that there were no soldiers on the border, that people were not attacking each other, they were terribly relieved. And since then, if the world has had a higher opinion of Czechs and Slovaks, it was precisely because we were able to part ways in peace and in a civilised manner. The relief that there was not going to be another war in central Europe was felt in Germany, France and the United States. Everyone was very happy. And when they had the opportunity, they helped us, the new states.

You called your 1993 book “Slovak Tango from Year One”. How was Slovakia’s first year?

That year was terribly difficult economically and socially because we reached the bottom, economically, at that time. First, the planned economy collapsed, prices were deregulated, privatisation began. After the collapse of the federation, inflation was 25 percent, currency devaluation was terrifying, there was terrible insecurity, unemployment was high. People were really worried about basic existential things, and that was perhaps our salvation because at that time we all knew it was bad, but we focused on the fact that we had to do everything to prevent it from getting worse. Unlike today, in 1993 no one saw the point in protesting in the street, because everyone realised that it would not have helped and would only have complicated things. The fact that we survived 1993 as a society is proof of Slovakia’s viability. Back then it was the basis, to survive that time, to stabilise the situation and to begin to rise slowly, but it took a very long time. We did not reach the 1989 level of income until 2007. These were really not easy times and the fact that we survived them is a great achievement given the politicians we had then.

Portraits of Slovak PMs (from left to right): Vladimír Mečiar, Jozef Moravčík, Mikuláš Dzurinda, Iveta Radičová, Robert Fico, Peter Pellegrini, Igor Matovič and Eduard Heger. (source: TASR - Martin Baumann)

When I talk to foreigners living in Slovakia, most say that they like it here, that Slovaks should be proud of their progress in 30 years. Why do most of us still not see it that way?

We are all too aware of the possibilities we have not used. Those people who come here from outside, who do not know it here, do not have high expectations, and when they come, they are pleasantly surprised. But we have already lived in this country, and we know that we can do better, that if we paid more attention to joint success, we could be somewhere else. A case in point: privatisation began in the mid-nineties. This was really a necessary process if the economy and society were to be put in order, but that privatisation could have been done in a civilised manner and in the public interest. Instead, Mečiar gave state enterprises to privatisers, the privatisers sold them, and the money remained with them, not the state. We used privatisation to create a class of oligarchs, who were and are so rich that they believe they have the right to say what the country should look like and who should rule in Slovakia. Actually, we made a whip for ourselves because we created a class that, through political speculation, through Mečiar, got the idea that they are the masters of the world. Privatisation could have brought great good to Slovakia as a country, but it brought great evil because it brought oligarchs and people who did not value and do not value what they got from this society.

Each government has faced scandals, many of which remain unresolved. Perhaps this is also the reason why some Slovaks do not think of Slovakia as a success story. What were the biggest scandals of individual governments?

The biggest crime of Mečiar’s government was party privatisation. Of course, we remember his political mis-steps, but privatisation remains his biggest transgression against this country, these citizens, because he gave away SKK 120 billion from the common property to his own people. In addition, he made it possible for the banks, which were supposedly state-owned, to lend money to those people, knowing in advance that the people to whom they were lending money would never return it to the bank. And that was another SKK 120 billion. Mečiar and his government cost this republic a huge amount of money.

When Mikuláš Dzurinda came, I will put it this way, if he only had done what he did well, he would deserve a big statue because he got us into the EU, NATO, OECD. He did a lot for the world to perceive Slovakia as a normal state. But he certainly did things that ultimately broke his political neck because whoever reads the [2011 leaked political corruption] Gorilla case file knows what Dzurinda’s government was up to. Mečiar was extreme in how organised corruption harmed the state, but Dzurinda also created a system of organised corruption that was nowhere near on Mečiar’s scale, but it did exist.

Robert Fico created his own system of organised corruption when he essentially let the oligarchs, shareholders of the Smer party, people who supported him, do everything to profit from the fact that he was in power and could decide for the state.

And to be complete, we have now come to a government that may not have created any organised system of corruption – because it could not properly organise anything, not even corruption. It is a government that was totally unprepared to rule and that has not understood what its role is, and sticks only to improvisations, mis-steps and the amateur exercise of power. And the main credit for this goes to Igor Matovič [leader of the OĽaNO party]. He has actually organised the confusion that they call governance in his own way.

It is a miracle that we got to where we are with such governments.

Do you think there is a chance that at least some of the corruption cases will be resolved?

It is unlikely. I remember that the only person in Slovak politics who considered privatisation a crime and wanted it to be dealt with as a crime was President Michal Kováč [1994-98], but his initiative was not heard. Even as an ex-president, he appealed to politicians to do something about it, but he got the answer that it would do more harm than good. We all know what stage the Gorilla case is at [charges have recently been laid, more than ten years after the file first leaked and more than fifteen years after the alleged events it describes – Ed.]. As for Fico, we know that the investigation is slowly closing in on him and his oligarchic system, but because he is getting big and significant help from places specifically designed for this, he probably will escape justice. And the government of today will soon hear the verdict on itself in the next elections.

When we look at the political parties that have ruled Slovakia, what can we say about their relationship to democracy?

In 1998, when the parliamentary elections were coming up, Mečiar was looking for every opportunity to stay in power. He passed a number of speculative, manipulative laws. And although they did not help him, because the resistance against him among the public was too great, one change remained after him to this day – Slovakia’s single electoral district. This is such a “gift” to Slovak democracy that it could not be worse. Previously, elections were held in four regions. Political parties had to have their own people, whom the voters would know, in these regions in order to succeed. After 1998, everything changed and everything is in Bratislava, from where each party leader makes their decisions. As a result, the parties, which should be an example of the application of democratic principles in their own environment, are not democratically organised and managed, but compete for power in a democratic state. We simply live in an environment that suits the leader very much, his deputies, members of the board. The parties turned into associations to support the leader. They are not living organisms and their only goal is to please the leader. The whole thing is built on bad foundations, and if Slovakia does not do anything about it, then those parties certainly will not do anything about it, because all the leaders of the political parties like it that way. That is, those who are currently in parliament.

How is Slovakia supposed to change it?

There must be pressure from below, pressure from the public. In the past, lawmakers and public officials enjoyed criminal and misdemeanour immunity. This ended [in 2012] because there was pressure from below. People did not like it.

As for the visions of political parties for Slovakia, we do not hear about them. Why?

The parties that would be the bearers of some comprehensive idea of ​​where Slovakia should go are not currently in parliament. All the ones that got there got there on the basis of a few, more or less sincere, slogans. But we have a really serious problem with being stuck in the middle income trap. We can either stagnate or try to get closer to the most successful economies and societies, but since 2006 we have basically not taken a step forward, and it is already beginning to be seen in the fact that if previously we were, according to some indicators, among the best among the new EU members, we are now at the bottom in all such indicators. We really lack a comprehensive idea of ​​where we should go as a country. Instead, we participate in cultural-ethical arguments and conflicts that are generated only for people to join them and stand up for some leader. The whole of public life is going in the wrong direction and is not moving forward.

Who threatens democracy in Slovakia today?

Of course, the biggest threat to democracy are people who use democratic rules, democratic values, democratic benefits to destroy democracy, who would prefer to use elections to cancel elections, or at least to stop elections from changing anything (Republika, Život, ĽSNS). In my opinion, democracy is also threatened by people who objectively committed grave sins and wrongdoings from the time of their rule and are now doing everything so that they do not have to bear responsibility for it (Smer, Hlas). They are interested in ensuring that democratic institutions do not function as they should. And of course, democracy is also threatened by people who, instead of ruling conceptually and rationally, by appealing to the best qualities of citizens, rule by provoking resentment, hatred, and provoking conflicts. If this cannot be said of all parties that are now in the government, it can be said about their leading representatives. From my point of view, those parties (OĽaNO, Sme Rodina) do not appeal to the best in citizens, but rather to the worst in them.

Film director Juraj Jakubisko (left) and Slovakia's first president Michal Kováč, as portrayed in February 2005. (source: TASR - Pavel Neubauer)

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called Slovakia the black hole of Europe. That was in the nineties. After the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak in 2018, then Slovak President Andrej Kiska claimed that Slovakia was a mafia state. Did it surprise you?

Of course, we, who have been dealing with politics for many years, were not shocked by the president’s statement. That expression has been circulating among commentators for several years, especially since 2006, but I must say that even I was surprised by the extent to which the decision-making structures of the state were affected by it. I thought that it was a more or less ad hoc system, that if Smer leader [Robert Fico] cared about something, he organised some group that ensured it for him. But it turns out that it was a system where state power regularly accommodated people who wanted to use state power for their own purposes, and politicians accepted it. So, if we understand the mafia in the sense that an organised group is put together to do illegal things at the expense of the state, at the expense of the public interest, then Slovakia was a mafia state. It is not a claim, but a mere fact.

According to polls, it looks like Hlas or Smer, despite being marked by scandals and corruption, will form the government after the next election. Unlike Mečiar or Dzurinda, it does not look like Fico is fading away. Why is the popularity of Fico and Smer growing again despite the murder of a journalist and direct charges of serious corruption?

Fico has been incredibly lucky as a politician since 2006, when he first came to power. The economic crisis in the late noughties did not significantly affect him. From 2012 to 2020, he ruled in good times. That is the fundamental thing that Fico could not influence, he only benefited from it. I really expected that Fico would have followed the same trajectory as Mečiar – i.e. up, then a continuous fall to insignificance. Fico went up, saw a sharp fall in 2018 and in 2019 and is now going up again because he is helped not only by difficult times but also by the current government, which is consumed by disputes and misunderstandings. Thanks to this government, he was able to mobilise a camp of dissatisfied people and get back into the game.

How do you perceive Dzurinda’s announced political comeback?

Humans, who are political animals so to speak, can never come to terms with the fact that their era is over, and they keep thinking how they can come back. Dzurinda is no different. He really is a homo politicus. And now he has returned because he has an idea – and it is not entirely unreasonable – that the situation of the 2020 election, when half a million votes of pro-democratic voters were lost, should not be repeated. This is a rational thought, a rational concept. Whether Dzurinda will be able to do something in this regard, and whether he will really manage to ensure that the loss is not so drastic, I do not dare to guess. If he manages to achieve it, I will say that Dzurinda’s comeback has a great, even historic significance.

In your opinion, who was or is a high-quality politician in Slovak politics? And why?

Those people who left something behind in politics were not very successful, but that was not their fault. I would not blame them for it, because they did not take the path that was expected of them and promised a quick political benefit. If I have to name one politician whom I deeply respect for what he achieved, I will say Ján Langoš. I was in the USA in 1995, where they told us about free access to information. I came from Mečiar’s Slovakia, where any spokesperson could kick us out at any moment and where information was not the property of the state, but of the party nominees who represented the state. As journalists, we could not find the normal information that citizens were entitled to. When I watched how it worked in the USA, that it is really something that is legally enforceable, I thought to myself how such legislation would help Slovakia too. And Langoš managed to have it passed in 2000. The law on free access to information is solely his merit. He forced politicians to do something that was against their corporate interest. And I think that is a big deal. If we had more politicians like Langoš, if there were more of them in Slovakia, that would be great.

Have we grown up as a society?

We are quite unpredictable in this regard because our ups and downs are, I would say, sometimes too frequent. As adults, we should be more balanced in some way. I am afraid that lately it has not been leading to anything good. When we look at what happened when vaccination was a topic, what happened when the defence treaty with the USA was debated, what is happening when the Russian aggression in Ukraine is a topic, it does not give much reason for optimism. We have some historical experience: what we were, what we went through, what regimes changed here, so in my opinion it is not rocket science to say who is the aggressor and who is the victim in the war between Russia and Ukraine. If, even in such an elementary matter, a large number of people in Slovakia are wrong and subject to myths, propaganda, hybrid war, I have a bad feeling about it, because what can we expect from those people when much more problematic topics come to the fore?

Ján Langoš at a music festival in Trenčín in summer 2005. (source: TASR - Radovan Stoklasa)

The negative attitude towards foreigners and minorities has not changed. Why?

Social development is not a straight line. There are waves as well. Sometimes one thinks that this is over and then the wave returns. But this is clearly cultivated with the aim of polarising people on some topics that do not have such a vital importance for the life of society, but instead allow people to organise on the basis of some negative feeling. And politicians who do not have a positive agenda but want to get elected are really great organisers of hatred and negative feelings, and they constantly bring these things back into play just to be supported, to have influence. So, it is also artificially cultivated by some political entities because they are interested in keeping society in tension and conflict.

That would mean that society is polarised all the time, but sometimes a little more.

Exactly. In the years 1994-1998, we were extremely polarised, but it was a healthy polarisation, because if the anti-Mečiar movement had been conciliatory then, there would never have been a turnaround and Slovakia would not have returned to Central Europe. But some topics are really artificially cultivated just so that politicians can profit from them. This is the worst thing they can do in their country, and they do it for selfish, partisan reasons. And if I hate something from the bottom of my heart, it is that no matter how much it harms the country, they do it for their own benefit.

You once said that “no one is innocent in this society. Everyone somehow participates in the state we are in”. Are you not thereby disqualifying the efforts and work of those who try to help Slovakia, including yourself?

Yes, even myself. I am not saying that teachers, journalists, doctors or non-government organisations do bad things, but even if they try, they should ask themselves: Have I really done everything I could and should have to make this society a society of healthy thinking, rationally acting, decent people? If teachers taught students critical thinking, we would not have so many anti-vaccinationists and so many supporters of Vladimir Putin here. If we, journalists, wrote more persuasively, we would also convince more people. Non-governmental organisations also have to question whether they are doing everything right when there are so many people who do not trust them. We should all ask ourselves what more I can do to free this society from the grip of this dull, primitive perception of things, relationships and political life? Everyone can do something more. If this society does not look as we wish, I am sorry, but we all have our share of the blame. Even the person who really has no bad intentions.

Sometimes people solve it by packing up their things and moving out from Slovakia. Did you not have such plans in the past?

I did not. However, it is not wrong at all if someone decides to live outside of Slovakia. On the other hand, it would be a shame if people succumbed to the impression that nothing can be done here, that it is hopeless and that we are doomed to get worse and worse. I still have the impression that the potential of Slovakia is big enough for us to be better off than we are at the moment.

Slovakia has been a car manufacturer for years. Where should Slovakia move economically so that the standard of living does not fall, and young people do not leave?

It is easy to say, but hard to achieve. We are really at the stage where we are basically the assembly workshop of Europe. It is nice while it lasts, but on the other hand, we are a country that is extremely threatened by robotisation and automation. And if we do not make some kind of change within 10-15 years, in the sense that we will go through at least partially the same kind of development as Scandinavia, then we will be in a very bad situation, because we do not have the raw materials. We have only one chance, and that is to profit in some way from the productivity and ability of our people, and so far not much has happened in this direction in Slovakia. And this is the only way of salvation that I see as realistic.

Fedor Gál, former head of the VPN political movement, said this about the division of the federation 10 years ago: “It was wrong, but whatever.” Do you agree?

If we really lived in a country where politicians do not try to profit from conflicts, I would agree with that. But when I think about how many people were waiting to see how they would use possible Czechoslovak disputes for political profit, I will say that it was not so wrong, because people of ill will have always tried and will always try to profit from conflicts. Maybe it saved us from much worse things that we cannot even imagine today.

What do you consider to be the greatest success of Slovakia in 30 years?

Definitely the 1998 election. And of course, membership in NATO, membership in the European Union and the fact that a considerable number of people abroad have personal experience with Slovaks and can judge that we are no different from others, that we are people who, with a little goodwill and favourable circumstances, can be relied upon and that we can play a completely normal role in that family of civilised cultural nations. That was the thing we had to convince the world about, and I think we were quite successful, at least in certain periods.

On July 13, 1995, Slovak Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar (right) handed over the government memorandum and the Slovak Republic's application for joining the EU to the head of French diplomacy, Hervé de Charette, at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, France. (source: TASR - Vladimír Benko)

Will things get better or worse in Slovakia?

This is the topic that Czech President Miloš Zeman dealt with in 1987, when he wrote a forecast for the development of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for a technical magazine. And he said there that two basic scenarios are possible. The first scenario: is “better and better”, and the second scenario is “worse and worse”. The first scenario is based on the idea that if you can solve a serious problem of society, it creates a platform for the next problem to be solved, and so “better and better”. But the second scenario says that if we do not solve one problem, for example the quality of the country’s political leadership, we will not solve the next problem either, for example what the country will do with its human potential and whether that human potential will have a chance to lift Slovakia, so “worse and worse”. Simply put, both scenarios are equally likely. The nice thing about the future is that it is not written and that we create it. And I would very much like it to be the “better and better” scenario.