Carolina Seminar • Civilising the Village. Race, Progress and Genocide in Wartime Slovakia

This paper explores the tensions between the Slovak fascist regime’s ideals of progress and the underlying realities of ethnic cleansing and exploitation during World War II. By analysing the regime’s public messaging, particularly through the lens of harvest festivals and civilisational projects in rural eastern Slovakia, I show Slovak fascism as driven by Christian nationalism, a thin ideology built around a privileged Slovak Christian nation and racialised concepts of work and productivity. My analysis focuses on how Jews and Roma were depicted as obstacles to the nation’s progress, marginalised through forced labour and social exclusion, and ultimately exploited to fulfil the regime’s populist promises. Furthermore, I emphasise the agency of local actors in enforcing and sustaining the racial order, challenging the notion that it was merely a top-down initiative imposed by the central government in Bratislava onto the rural edges of the state.

Hana Kubátová studied political science, international relations, nationalism studies, and modern history at Charles University and Central European University. She held research positions at Tel Aviv University, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Heinrich Heine University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU. She has received numerous fellowships, including the Marie Curie Fellowship for Early Research Training, the Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship, the Felix Posen Fellowship, and the Junior Core Fellowship.