Slovakisation

Slovakization or Slovakisation is a form of either forced or voluntary cultural assimilation, during which non-Slovak nationals give up their culture and language in favor of the Slovak one. This process has relied most heavily on intimidation and harassment by state authorities. In the past the process has been greatly aided by deprivation of collective rights for minorities and ethnic cleansing, but in the last decades its promotion has been limited to the adoption of anti-minority policies and anti-minority hate speech.

The process itself is limited mostly to Slovakia, where Slovaks constitute the absolute majority by means of population and legislation power as well. Slovakization is most often used in relation to Hungarians, who constitute the most prominent minority of Slovakia, but it also affects Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Rusyns (Ruthenians), and Jews.

Hungarians

After World War I

The process of slovakization was present in the Kingdom of Hungary presumably ever since the appearance of the Slovak nation itself, but up until the foundation of Czechoslovakia the process was entirely voluntary. This early form of slovakization can be observed in detail in noble families' personal correspondence. Another example of pre-World War I Slovakization is the assimilation of the Habans, a Hutterite group settled in the Nagylévárd (today's Veľké Leváre) area in the 16th century, into the Slovak majority.

The accelerated, forced nature of slovakization began with the defeat of the remaining Hungarian armies in 1919, which laid foundations to the creation of Czechoslovakia, a state in which the Slovaks have gained a ''de facto'' political power for the first time in the nation's history. The Paris Peace Conference concluded by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 set the southern border of Czechoslovakia for strategic and economic reasons much further south than the Slovak-Hungarian language border. Consequently, fully Hungarian-populated areas were annexed to the newly created state.1

Czechoslovakia provided a large education network for the Hungarian minority. Hungarians, for example, had 31 kindergartens, 806 elementary schools, 46 secondary schools, 576 Hungarian libraries at schools in the 1930s and a Department of Hungarian literature was created at the Charles University of Prague. The number of Hungarian elementary schools increased from 720 in 1923/1924 to the above number 806. The Hungarian University in Bratislava/Pozsony was immediately closed after formation of Czechoslovakia

According to the 1910 census conducted by the Central Statistical Office of Hungary, there were 884,309 people with Hungarian as a mother tongue, constituting 30.2% of the population, in what is now Slovakia compared to the 9.7% number recorded in the 2001 census, amounting to a 3 fold decrease in the percentage of Hungarians. The first Slovak census in 1919 in what is now Slovakia recorded 689,565 Hungarians constituting 23.59% of the population. According to the first Czechoslovak census in 1921 there were 650,597 Hungarians in Slovakia, constituting 21.68% of the population. The Czechoslovak census of 1930 recorded 571,952 Hungarians. All censuses from the period are disputed, and some give conflicting data for example in Kosice according to the Czechoslovak censuses 15–20% of the population was Hungarian. However, during the parliamentary elections the Ethnic Hungarian parties got 35–45% of the total votes (excluding those Hungarians who voted for the Communists or the Social democrats). The whole matter is complicated by the fact that there was a high percentage of bilingual and similarly "Slovak-Hungarian" persons who could claim being both Slovak and Hungarian.

Slovak sources usually do not deny that many Hungarian teachers (replaced in Slovak schools by Slovak and Czech teachers), railwaymen (on strike against new Czechoslovak republic in February 1919), postmen, policemen, soldiers and civil clerks (replaced by Czech and Slovak soldiers, policemen and clerks) were forced to leave or left for Hungary voluntarily, the numbers however are unclear but census do show a rapid decline in the number of people with Hungarian as a mother tongue. Some teachers and civil servants were expelled from Czechoslovakia while some left due to the harsh circumstances. There are many examples of Hungarians who were forced to leave their homes from this territory (two famous ones are the families of Béla Hamvas, and of Albert Szent-Györgyi). The high number of refugees (and even more from Romania) necessitated entire new housing projects in Budapest (Mária-Valéria telep, Pongrácz-telep), which gave shelter to refugees numbering at least in the ten-thousands.

De-Magyarization

Under the Austro-Hungarian Empire there was strong anti-Hungarian sentiment among certain sections of the Czech and Slovak population and this persisted to some extent in Czechoslovakia once it was formed. It seemed to hit the city of Pressburg (soon to be renamed Bratislava) most intensely. One of the first measures brought by Samuel Zoch, the newly appointed župan of the city was the forced disbandment of the only Hungarian university in Czechoslovakia (Elisabeth Science University), and the intimidation of its professors by the police in 1919, immediately after the formation of the new country.
Most of the professors and former students then left Pressburg for Budapest (with the university later being re-established in Pécs). Zoch had previously stated "...but the question of minorities will be fully solved only after our public perception of morality will condemn ethnic oppression just as much as the oppression of religion".

According to Varsik, the university was not closed by the župan because local politicians did not have such powers. Elisabeth University was founded in 1912 and began teaching only in 1914. The university was not the only Hungarian graduate school in the territory of contemporary Slovakia, but it had to serve to also all students from Upper Hungary inhabited by Slovak majority. However, in compliance with the education policy of the Hungarian government, which did not allow Slovak high schools, the university did not even have a Slovak language department. In 1919, a new Czechoslovak university was founded in parallel and adopted space and limited inventory of unfinished faculty of medicine. Hungarian professors refused to promise loyalty to the new state, as was necessary for teachers and state employees, and were retired after being provided financial compensation. Thereafter, the university was closed by official government decree and replaced by Comenius University which remained the only the university in mid-war Slovakia for the majority population.

On 3 February 1919, the day before the moving of Vavro Šrobár's government to Bratislava, a strike began which affected key infrastructure and sectors of industry. The strike had initially social character. Thereafter, it was politicized and joined with national demands of Hungarian and German workers. On 12 February 1919, Hungarian nationalistic circles exploited a demonstration organized by the Council of Workers. The demonstration went out of control and after a physical attack on the Italian commander Riccardo Barreca