Czechoslovak domestic politics, including the long-standing policy dilemmas stemming from the so-called Slovak question, are usually approached from a historical standpoint. Here Carol Leff views the subject from a fresh analytic perspective. The Slovaks' dissatisfaction with their status in the constitutional order has dogged Czechoslovakia from the country's inception after World War I, and the substantial Slovak minority (now about one-third of the population) has recurrently complicated the state's struggle for self-definition, stability, and even survival. Professor Leff establishes a systematic analytic framework for the discussion of the Czech-Slovak relationship and how it has affected and been affected by state power and the political system.
Czechoslovakia's history is virtually a museum for the major European political alternatives of the twentieth century, and this book is an experiment in applying the comparative methodology of political science not to cross-national studies but to the analysis of a single country over time. The author organizes consideration of policy making on the Slovak national question around three component elements and their impact on effective problem solving: the institutional structure of the pre-Munich republic and the postwar socialist state, leadership values and premises relevant to the disposition of the national question, and patterns of Czech and Slovak leadership interaction.
Originally published in 1988.
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$35. pol sci This scholarly study uses comparative methods of political science to analyze the Slovak question in the bourgeois republic (1918-38) and in the socialist state since 1948. Leff emphasizes how the national issue has helped mold political institutions and party interaction, and how political structures have channeled national discontent. Both Czechoslovak states tried to defuse the Slovak problem, rather than settle it, and even the federalization plan of 1969 remains uncertain of long-range success. Based on a sound culling of primary Czechoslovak sources and secondary English, German, and French literature, this lengthy work is a difficult, specialized study appropriate for academic libraries with an Eastern European interest. James B. Street, Santa Cruz P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
