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Writing Off Slovakia to “The East”? Examining Charges of Bias in British Press Reporting of Slovakia, 1993–1994

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Adam Burgess
Adam Burgess*
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury, England
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Extract

Along with her better known Czech neighbour, Slovakia is one of Europe's newest states. Born over the new year of 1993, it is the latest product of the unravelling of the post-communist order. A small nation—although at 5,269,000, it has a larger population than Norway, Denmark or Finland—Slovakia has yet to make a significant impact on European consciousness. This is illustrated by the repeated reply of a Slovak woman, living in London, to the question of the whereabouts of the strange land of her origin. Honolulu was the capital of this island she told Londoners in jest. To her amazement, rarely did anyone question her geography. When it comes to Britain, it would appear the sense of Slovakia can be aptly summarized by the infamous phrase with which interwar Czechoslovakia was dismissed by P.M. Neville Chamberlin—as a “faraway country of which we know nothing …” It still comes as a surprise, even to those who consider themselves familiar with the contours of contemporary Europe, that Bratislava, the new capital of this “faraway country's” eastern half (Slovakia), is only 60 kilometres from Vienna.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1997 , pp. 659 - 682
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

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