Throughout the 1990s several observers of the post-communist transformation in East Central
Europe viewed the Slovaks as a non-historic nation hastily modernized during the communist era.
Following the fall of the communist regime and the creation of the independent Slovak Republic
the country's image was associated with radical nationalism and an unstable domestic political
scene. This study examines Slovakia's evolution from the downfall of Communism to the accession
of the independent Slovak Republic into the European Union from a broader historical
perspective. It challenges the assumptions of political immaturity and passivity of Slovak
society as major hindrances in the more recent phase of its evolution. The author argues that
the building of the Slovak political nation had started in Austria-Hungary and continued in
Czechoslovakia under all its regimes. As a result Slovak political parties and institutions as
the main carriers of democratic transformation did not emerge in the early 1990s in a political
and institutional vacuum and Slovakia's road to democracy can be better understood in
continuity with the processes that had begun in the 1960s.
