Thomas Lorman is a historian, lecturer at the SSEES at UCL, and an expert on Hungarian politics. His most recent study about the Slovak People's Party (SĽS) is the result of ten years’ research in Hungarian and Slovak archives. His knowledge of both Hungarian and Slovak allowed him to take an intellectually concentrated, theoretically convincing, and detailed look at the complicated history of Slovakia's most successful political party, outlawed from 1945 and infamous for its anti-democratic, clerical-fascist stance beginning in the 1920s.

First, Lorman's analysis is a tour de force and elegantly written at that. The six chapters are well structured. The first chapter, entitled “The Liberal Onslaught” (9–50), sets the frame of reference: Catholic Slovaks found themselves in an intensifying culture war (Kulturkampf) against the governing Liberal Party in Budapest in the last decades of the nineteenth century; they felt threatened by Magyarization, industrialization, modernization of society, urbanization, emigration, the undermining of the power of the Church through civil marriage and a liberal tolerance towards Jewish citizens. “Classical liberalism was led by the middle classes, extolled the value of meritocracy, and was wedded (at least theoretically) to the principle of free speech. Hungarian liberalism was none of these things. As elsewhere in Central Europe, liberalism in Hungary before 1918 was grounded in a distinct historical tradition: it was enacted by a narrow social elite and driven by a larger nation-building project” (13).

The concept of “culture war” explains superbly the nineteenth-century conservatism of the Slovak Catholics, who fought modernization and progress. Kulturkampf thus also meant the war of political cultures: those who adhered to progress and modernity aimed at abolishing the power of the conservative clergy, which, in turn, defended its privileges and moral power over the faithful.

Second: Chapters 1, 5, and 6 convincingly explain how the SĽS established itself as a mass party, although it had neither a clear program nor the organization that a modern mass party required. The leading SĽS politicians, such as Andrej Hlinka and František Jehlička at first welcomed the common state with the Czechs, but feelings soon soured on the Slovak side since Prague allegedly destroyed their hopes of “autonomy,” which they thought was a point in the Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918 (184). The Pittsburgh Agreement did not foresee Slovak autonomy, which would have made Czechoslovakia a federation, but Slovakia had her own schools, parliament, government and administration operating in Slovak. “Autonomy” became the slogan, goal, and principal movement among the Slovak Catholics, who increasingly considered themselves in a similar situation to that prevailing in pre-1918 Hungary: the atheist Czechs not only occupied all the professional positions in Slovak state institutions, but furthermore undermined Slovak Catholic morality (181). Owing to the activities of members such as Vojtéch Tuka, Alexander Mach, and Jozef Tiso, the party radicalized its fascist rhetoric and look. After the Munich Agreement of September 1938 it was ready to declare autonomy, and by March 1939, the “sovereign” Slovak state was at Hitler's beck and call.

Third: I take issue with the concept of “consociationalism” (225). Czechoslovakia was no consociational democracy, and did not strive to be one, as “consociational democracy” was a concept of post-WWII twentieth century political science, hence unknown in the 1920s. Czechoslovakia was a parliamentary democracy based on party competition. Consociationalism is a model for deeply divided societies (cleavages), and means “government by elite cartel”; it integrates the opposition into the government and requires the political will of the elites of the cleavage groups to accommodate their differences and to cooperate in favor of the state's existence (Arendt Lijphard, “Consociational Democracy,” World Politics XXI, October 1968–July 1969, 216). President Tomas Masaryk's pětka that saved the state during the political crisis of 1920–21 was such a consociational body, governing as elite cartel of the five most successful parties.

Thomas Lorman has written an interdisciplinary study that superbly explains the political thought of the Slovak Catholics and their politics from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, beginning with their fight against Hungarian and Czech liberalism and ending with the clerical-fascist regime that, without pressure from Germany, sent 60,000 Slovak Jews to what they believed were labor camps in Poland, paying Berlin 500 Reichsmark for each person deported.