HLINKA, ANDREJ (1864–1938)

Roman Catholic priest and nationalist politician, journalist, and orator in interwar Slovakia.

Andrej Hlinka was the leader of the largest and most complex nationalist political movement in interwar Slovakia and an instigator of a unique brand of political Catholicism. He oversaw and directed the conversion of the Slovak People's Party (Slovenská l'udová Strana, or SL'S) from a confessional movement into a mass-based, modern national clerical party. Hlinka was a leading defender of Catholicism as an indispensable component of statehood and Slovak national identity. He was one of the few Czechoslovak politicians that achieved cultlike status in his lifetime—an opposition leader unafraid of political isolation, whose populist and conservative character informed his politics and shaped his party's appeal. He remained convinced that the solution to the "Slovak question" was to be found within the borders of Czechoslovakia, and that only political autonomy (albeit the precise nature of decentralization was not always clearly and consistently defined) would improve Czech-Slovak relations and strengthen the foundations of the state. He remains one of the most controversial figures of modern Slovak history.

Hlinka was born into a poor farming family in the Slovak village of Č ernová in Upper Hungary and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest on 19 June 1889. Hlinka's political outlook was firmly rooted in the Christian socialism of the 1890s. In August 1895 he joined the Slovak National Party (SNS) and Ferdinand Zichy's (Hungarian) Catholic People's Party. Hlinka was unsuccessful as a candidate of Zichy's party in the elections to the Hungarian Diet in 1898 and left the party in 1901.

Hlinka became parish priest in Ružomberok in March 1905 and nine months later helped to establish a Slovak People's Party, the Catholic wing of the SNS. In May 1906 he was suspended from performing priestly duties for his support of a fellow SNS candidate in the run-up to the Hungarian parliamentary elections. On 6 December 1906 Hlinka was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for "political agitation." (This sentence was extended by eighteen months in a new legal case beginning in May 1908.) The shooting dead of locals by gendarmes in Č ernová on 27 October 1907 brought Hlinka's name to the attention of the European public for the first time. Before commencing his prison sentence at the end of November, he toured Bohemia and Moravia, lecturing about the cultural plight of the Slovaks in Upper Hungary. Following the intervention of the Vatican, Hlinka's suspension was lifted on 8 April 1909. His last day in prison was 22 February 1910.

Hlinka initiated the creation of an independent Slovak (Catholic) People's Party (SL'S) in Ž ilina on 29 July 1913. During World War I he remained in his parish. In August 1917 he embraced the "Czecho-Slovak" idea as a political concept. At a meeting of Slovak politicians in Turčiansky Sv. Martin in May 1918 Hlinka called for the severance of ties with the Hungarians and the creation of a common state of Czechs and Slovaks. On 30 October 1918 he joined other delegates in officially endorsing the existence of the new state (Martin Declaration). Hlinka assembled the first meeting of the Council of Slovak Priests on 10 November 1918. The council was the springboard for the re-formation of the SL'S on 19 December 1918, at which Hlinka was elected chairman of the party (a position he retained until his death). In November 1918 he became chairman of the Ružomberok National Council. A few months later he declined the position of head official for ecclesiastical matters in Slovakia. Hlinka's demand for Slovak political (legislative) autonomy dates from the spring of 1919 and was based on the so-called Pittsburgh Agreement (signed 30 May 1918). Eager to secure international recognition of the agreement, Hlinka traveled to the Paris Peace Conference in August 1919 under an assumed name. The trip was a failure and raised suspicion about his political intentions. He was arrested on 11 October and interned in Moravia. In April 1920 Hlinka was granted amnesty by Czechoslovak president T. G. Masaryk following his election to the National Assembly in Prague. (Hlinka retained his mandate at all successive parliamentary elections, 1925, 1929, and 1935). Following the elections Hlinka entered into a short-lived parliamentary bloc with the Czechoslovak People's Party. During the summer of 1921 he encouraged SL'S members to draw up plans for Slovak political autonomy (later declared an official party aim at a meeting of the SL'S in Ž ilina in August 1922). At the end of the summer Hlinka visited the Vatican and was received by Pope Benedict XV. The SL'S was renamed as Hlinka's Slovak People's Party (Hlinkova slovenská Pudová strana) on 17 October 1925.

Between June and September 1926 Hlinka attended the World Eucharist Congress in Chicago and lectured throughout Central America. In 1927 he was appointed apostolic protonotary by the Holy See. He negotiated his party's entry into government starting on 4 February of that year but never occupied a ministerial position himself. Hlinka remained above politics, which enabled him to unify radical, moderate, and clerical wings of the party. His support of the party ideologue and Magyarone Vojtech Tuka brought him into conflict with members of his own party and T. G. Masaryk, which resulted in the departure of the SLS from government. In the spring of 1929 and again in January 1930 Hlinka called, albeit with little success, for the cooperation of all Catholic parties in Czechoslovakia. He sporadically cooperated with the Czech radical Right between 1929 and 1934 but remained fiercely opposed to any form of Slovak-Hungarian alliance.

Hlinka and the SNS leader Martin Rázus created the short-lived "autonomist bloc" on 16 October 1932 (Zvolen Manifesto). In December 1932 at a joint SL'S–SNS congress in Trenčín, Hlinka made the most controversial speech of his political career, in which he placed the demands of the Slovak nation above the interests of the state. He publicly rejected Czechoslovak nationalism and demanded political autonomy in the Nitra Declaration speech delivered on 13 August 1933 at the Pribina celebrations (SLS demonstration). On 16 April 1935 Hlinka announced the formation of a new autonomist bloc composed of the SLS, SNS, and representatives of national minority parties (Ruthenians and Poles), and in December 1935 his backing proved crucial in securing the election of Edvard Beneš as Czechoslovak president.

On 19 September 1936 at the SLS congress in Piešťany, Hlinka insisted that active cooperation with the Prague government was conditional upon its honoring its promise of Slovak autonomy, and the following day he delivered the controversial "Piešťany Manifesto" drafted by party radicals. On 27 September 1937 the Polish government honored Hlinka with the order of Polonia Restituta. Representatives of the Sudeten German Party visited Hlinka in February 1938 to begin negotiations about the creation of a unitary opposition front of national minorities in the Republic. On 5 June 1938 Hlinka spoke for the last time in public at the jubilee celebrations of the signing of the Pittsburgh Agreement in Bratislava. He died on 16 August in Ružomberok.

See alsoMasaryk, Tomáš Garrigue; Slovakia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartlová, Alena. Andrej Hlinka. Bratislava, 1991.

Felak, James Ramon. "At the Price of the Republic: Hlinka's Slovak People's Party, 1929–1938. Pittsburgh, Pa., 1994.

Jelinek, Yeshayahu. "Storm Troopers in Slovakia: The Rodobrana and the Hlinka Guard." Journal of Contemporary History, no. 6 (July 1971): 97–119.

——. "The Slovak Right: Conservative or Radical? A Reappraisal." East Central Europe 4, no. 1 (1977): 20–34.

Kamenec, Ivan. "Metamorfózy výkladu Hlinkovej politickej osobnosti." In his Hladanie a blúdenie v dejinách, 48–55 . Bratislava, 2000.

Kováč, Dušan. "Andrej Hlinka—bojovník za slovenský štát?" In Mýty naše slovenské, edited by Eduard Krekovič, Elena Mannová, and Eva Krekovičová, 174–180. Bratislava, 2005.

Krajčovičová, Natália. "Andrej Hlinka v slovenskej politike." Historická revue 15, no. 1 (2004): 22–24.

Lipták, Lubomír. "Andrej Hlinka." In Muži deklarácie, edited by Dušan Kováč et al., 56–75. Bratislava, 2000.

Katya A. M. Kocourek