#and call ourselves Českoslovanská jednota

[minetteskvareninova]

As someone who had to study Czechoslovak relations before World War I in excrutiating detail (elective course, for the sweet, sweet credits), you can't even imagine my endless frustration with foreign history enthusiasts and their wonder at the whole idea of czechoslovakism.

Like. In the 19th century the idea that Czechs and Slovaks are one nation was THE NORM in Czech circles. Even within Slovak national movement, there were plenty of proponents of this idea - Kollár and Šafárik, for one. Slovak nation had no prior history of independence, zero nobility and very little in terms of elites (mostly minor clergy and urban intelligentsia, classes which prior to 18th century had almost no political power). Add to this the fact that since the Reformation, Slovak protestants (who were a minority, but still had a respectable literary culture post-emancipation by Joseph II.) used Biblical Czech, which was closer to Slovak than modern Czech, for religious purposes, and that at first there actually wasn't any commonly-accepted literary Slovak, only a cluster of dialects... And you can see that the idea that Slovaks are a distinct nations from Czechs was hardly obvious to a 19th century observer.

This is not to diminish the hard work of Slovak catholics and later Štúr's group (which included both catholics and younger protestants) at establishing a unified Slovak language and culture - especially since the victory of Štúr's Slovak was very much a result of organic growth untethered to any government mandate. The belief in an independent Slovak nation was very much just that popular within Slovak intelligentsia and was spread among the lower classes trough hard work; many modern leftists could marvel at the wide scope of activism that these 19th century nationalists engaged in. The idea of Slovak nation persisted despite extreme pressure from the Hungarian government to hungarize, which in and of itself is truly admirable. And yes it was incredibly ignorant of the Czech elites to dismiss Štúr's reform as "separatism". But. That doesn't change the fact that among Czechs, the idea of Slovaks as separate from them was only adopted very slowly. Heck, you had Czech people in the late 19th century being like "uhm, that's a nice language you have over there, very useful for common speech and literature and stuff, but can you please use Czech in your scientific works at least, because this new tongue honestly isn't well-developed enough for that..."

And yes czechoslovakism was very useful politically, which Masaryk, ahead of his time as he was, realized, and yes Masaryk's roots among Moravian Slovaks probably gave him a good view of the grey area between the two nations. But like. Can we just stop pretending it was some kind of novel idea, when a united Czechoslovak nation was in parts of both national movements the default from which the autonomous existence of Slovaks had to be established?!

Especially the whole "it was just a cynical ploy to outnumber Germans" thing. Yes, that's what partly motivated Czech politicians at that specific moment, but it's kinda unreal to reduce the idea of czechoslovak unity to that, when in the 1880's you literally had some Czech writers wax poetically how Slovaks are their brothers, how beautiful Slovakia is and how unfairly they are treated by Hungarians in the least cynical way possible.