Nemzetállam-építés a gazdaságban. Etnikai homogenizálás, vagyonátrendezés és intézményi kapacitásvesztés Csehszlovákiában (1945–1948)
Nation-State Building Through the Economy: Ethnic Homogenization, Property Redistribution, and Institutional Capacity Loss in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1948

Summary/Abstract: This study examines how the economy became a key arena of nation-state building in post-war Czechoslovakia, focusing on the Hungarian minority in Slovakia between 1945 and 1948. While the analysis concentrates on the immediate post-war period, it also traces the institutional origins of these developments to the interwar years, when minority communities established extensive networks of cooperatives, banks, and self-help organizations. The article argues that economic nationalism should be understood not merely as an ideology but also as a mode of governance that shaped access to property, credit, resources, and institutional power.The study analyses the interaction between national committees, systems of national trusteeship, confiscatory policies, financial controls, and population transfers. Together, these mechanisms produced a far-reaching redistribution of property and economic resources while simultaneously weakening the institutional capacities of the Hungarian minority. The article therefore interprets minority “erosion” not primarily as a demographic process but as a form of institutional and economic capacity loss, reflected in the dismantling of cooperative networks, the liquidation of minority-owned financial institutions, restrictions on property rights, and the disruption of trust-based organizational structures.Drawing on recent English- and German-language scholarship on forced migration, property confiscation, trusteeship, and post-war state-building, the article situates the Southern Slovakian case within a broader Central European context. It demonstrates that ethnic homogenization was closely intertwined with economic governance and the redistribution of resources. The study concludes that these policies generated not only the dispossession of minority communities but also administrative inefficiencies, organizational disruption, and long-term social costs. In this sense, the post-war experience of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia illustrates the broader phenomenon of “costly nationalism”.

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